Should We Pay More For The Best Teachers?

Matt Yglesias has touched off social media discussion of one of the great zombie ideas of education-- the idea we should pay more for the best teachers. So let me explain, again, why this is not a great idea. 

I will admit up front that I did not read the full post because A) it is behind a paywall and B) Matt Yglesias is kind of a tool. 

Problem #1: "Best"

Modern ed reform has been obsessed with the idea of identifying high-quality teachers and low-quality teachers with hopes of getting more of one and firing all of the others. So folks have been working on the problem for twenty-some years-- and they haven't come up with anything remotely useful. 

There was the travesty that was VAM/VAAS sauce, a system that promised to translate the low-quality data from the Big Standardized Tests into data about which teachers were awesome (or not). The idea was that magical maths would allow us to figure out what a student would have scored in some teacher-neutral parallel universe, and then whatever difference there was between the imaginary parallel universe student score and the actual this world score-- that difference was either to the credit or blame of the teacher. It was always a bizarre idea, and that was even before we got to the question of how to use that score--based on math and reading test results-- to evaluate teachers who didn't teach math or reading (or, in some cases, even that student).

Anyway, that was one of our brightest ideas about how to find the "best" teachers, and it was (and, unfortunately in some states today, is) a terrible idea. 

We can all agree there are good teachers and not-so-great ones. We just can't agree on who they are. Pick out the teacher at your school who you think is most obviously awesome; somewhere out there are students who think that teacher was awful. Pick out a teacher you think is obviously awful; somewhere out there are students who think that teacher was one of the best they ever had. 

Maybe we can agree that there can be broad agreement on the very best and the very worst doing the work. That still leaves the vast middle. When I was in the classroom, I would say I was pretty ok, but I don't imagine I was "best." How do the pretty ok teachers do in world where teachers are paid according to their best-ness, and how would we parse out the various gradations of pretty ok-ness?

Nor should we discuss a teacher's quality as if it's an immutable quality. A teacher's work varies over time, influenced by a variety of factors. Personal stuff. The students in the classroom. The acquired skills over time. The material given to teach. Did I teach every month of every year at the same level of pretty ok-ness? Absolutely not. Really, it's not as accurate to say I was a pretty ok teacher as it is to say I usually did pretty ok work. 

In short, figuring out which teachers are "best" is a huge challenge. It makes far more sense to talk about doing the best work, but even then, we're talking about measuring the almost-immeasurable (particularly since some of the outcomes we're talking about don't become visible for years after the work is done. 

Does this mean we shouldn't talk about how to do the best work? Absolutely not. But trying to tie large stakes to it will not help.

Problem #2: Schools are not businesses

"We should reward the good people and fire the bad ones-- just like in the business world," say fans of this model whose brains have conveniently failed to retain examples like Enron and Donald Trump and every mediocre business guy who kept falling upwards while hardworking high-quality working stiffs lost their jobs. 

But even if we accept the meritocratcic business world fairy tale, there's another important way in which public schools are not businesses.

Public schools do not make money.

Consider how merit pay works in the business world. "We collected an extra pile of money this year," says CEO Gotbux, "So to show our gratitude to those of you helped us make that extra money, we are going to share some of the extra money with you."                                            

But public school districts don't make money. There is no extra profit to share with the folks doing the actual work. 

So merit bonuses can't work. And for the same reason, merit pay is a problem. 

One of the reasons many school boards like the current pay system is that it makes the payroll costs for the coming year very predictable. That's helpful, because the revenues are also pretty predictable; school districts don't expect sudden windfalls of revenue. School districts are dealing with a finite pie, so it's helpful to know ahead of time exactly how many slices they have to cut that pie into.

Try to imagine a school board going to the taxpayers and saying, "Evaluations are done, and we have so many teachers with top-quality ratings this year that we will have to raise taxes to meet our payroll obligations." Yeah, that's not happening. 

What's much easier to imagine is a district saying, "Here's the budget. We can afford five Best Teachers this year." Which actually is a lot like business. And if the Best Teacher ratings are set by factors that the school can't control, like test scores? Then expect the district to say, "Congratulations to all 157 teachers rated Best this year. Your merit pay bump will be $2.98." 

With a finite pie, the end result must be competition among teachers for a slice. That means the very thing a school would hope for will not happen.

Principal: Mrs. Teachwell, you have been very successful teaching students about binomial fricatives, so I'd like you to share your techniques with the rest of the department.

Mrs. Teachwell: Not on your life. My kid is going to need braces next year. 

Maybe the board or the state will kick in extra money to sweeten the Best Teacher pot. But there is one other popular way to get the money for merit bumps-- take it from the base salary of everybody else. 

Look, Robert Pondiscio has a point when he observes that with 4 million teachers, most are going to be regular folks and not superstars, and trying to get 4 million superstars is not the path to better schools. Figure out how to help every teacher to do better and best work (pro tip: a system that punishes them for being less than superstars is not the way). Extra pay for the Best does not further that goal. It just turns schools into teacher Thunderdomes.

Problem #3: The Premise

Merit-related proposals too often assume that teachers already know the secret of how to be Best-- they're just waiting for someone to either threaten or bribe them. This is both insulting and nonsensical. 

And if the premise is that this approach will retain teachers, ask yourself how likely it is that teachers will be enticed by a system that rewards them for random "data" or for factors beyond their control (like which students they get to teach).

Some supporters on the dead bird app follow another old pattern-- they don't so much want to reward Best teachers as they want to punish bad ones. The parity can rankle, and believe me, you can find teachers in any school building in the country who say, either quietly or not-so-quietly some angry version of "I can't believe that person gets paid the same as I do." A teacher who isn't getting the work done is supremely irritating to the teacher who has to clean up after them.

But whenever someone talks about getting rid of all the Bad Teachers, I am reminded of an observation from W. Edwards Deming, to the effect that if there is dead wood in your organization, there are only two possible explanations-- either it was dead when you hired it or you killed it. Either way, you are looking at a management problem.       

I get it.             

There is something hugely enticing about the idea of a pay system that rewards excellent teachers (and doesn't reward less-than-excellent teachers). It is a great concept, but the devil is in the details-- and any such system is all details. And the critical details remain unsolved puzzles.                

For Retiring Teachers

I've been out here in the retiree pasture for a few years now (it's a lovely place upstate, with many frolicking dogs) and as some teachers are staring down the last few weeks of their teaching careers, let me offer them some advice. Here's what's waiting for you.

First, make some noise on your way out.

My regret is that I didn't throw a bigger party. Seriously. Some combination of not wanting to be That Hey Look At Me Guy and survivor's guilt (this hits hard for some folks, because when retiring from teaching is like leaping off a train barreling full speed down the tracks, and you are leaving behind others to continue work that you didn't finish--because teaching is never finished)-- anyway, I should have invited every other teacher in the building and every other person I could think of and made some noise, but I didn't want to be a bother. 

Have a project.

Everyone tells you this. Some of us go at it a bit more aggressively than others, but I don't think a teacher brain can shift easily to simply idling. The teacher brain is generally running 147 different threads all at once, and suddenly running 0 can cause the brain to just lock up. You may think you can handle a life of leisure because you went on vacation during the summer that one time, but be honest-- you were lying on the inflatable turtle in the middle of the pool and one little corner of your brain was still figuring out how to tweak that one unit for September and maybe you could rearrange the seating in your room and did you remember to order those posters yet? 

Volunteer. Start working through your pile of unread books. Travel. Take a cooking class. Find something for your brain to chew on. It took me a while to get past the feeling that there was something I was supposed to be doing, but wasn't. Being a stay-at-home dad for a couple of small children helped with that, but I don't recommend it as a solution for everyone.

Time is different on the outside.

At some point in retirement, you will think, "How did I get all this done and work full-time, too?" The answer is that teacher time is different than retiree time.

Teacher: I have a two-minute break at 10:03, so I can get some copies made, get another fifty grades in the grade book, and go pee.

Retiree: I volunteered to sit in the booth from 10:00 to 10:30, so I guess my whole morning is filled up.

The rhythms of dealing with people

For decades you have been dealing with other humans on a large scale, working to deliberately engage with dozens (elementary) or hundreds (secondary) of students and family members. They become a major factor of how you go through your days, and then, after nine months or so, they leave. 

This is not a natural rhythm for human interactions. I hope your own social and emotional health was anchored outside the classroom, but even so, retirement is a whole new game. If you're an extrovert, you may find yourself craving new sources of human interaction. If you're an introvert, you may find that the part of you that engages with other humans is screaming for a major break. At the beginning of my career, I replaced a guy whose retirement plan was to sit on the porch, read books, drink beer, and talk to nobody. 

Weeks full of Fridays

Other retirees may joke about how every day is Saturday, but teachers know that special Friday afternoon feeling, like you've been dragging a loaded semi with a chain for five days, and you just got to set the chain down. For the first year or two, it felt like Friday afternoon a lot. 

Have your support system

Another one of my retirement secrets was to be married to an exceptionally excellent woman. So I had that going for me, as well as the many connections that come from being active in many small-town activities like theater and band. A church home can be nice, too.

But you may fine that maintaining your web of humans may take more deliberate work on your part. Being at work put you in natural connection with your web of workplace proximity associates, and you aren't going to have that. If you want to stay connected, you will have to reach out. As far as the school itself goes, you will be a ghost in 3-5 years. Your work friends will be busy in the dailiness of the work, and you will not, so maintaining those relationships will take deliberate effort.

Share

You have a wealth of knowledge and experience, both in terms of content knowledge and educational expertise. You know how to organize large groups of cat-like humans. You know how to manage an undersized budget. You know how to help people understand stuff. You know what life in a classroom is actually like. 

There are people and organizations out there that would benefit from what you know. Maybe you can be some sort of activist or communicator about education, or maybe your skills can be put to work in a non-education space. Maybe it is individual humans rather than organizations that can benefit from what you know. 

Whatever the case, you still have plenty to contribute to the world. Teachers are too often reluctant to get involved, to push themselves out into the world. The "just" in "I'm just a teacher" keeps a lot of smart, capable people from making as much noise as they could. And I get it-- when you're dealing with the dailiness of your classroom, it's hard to find the bandwidth for wading into other ponds. But you don't have to deal with the dailiness any more, and you are not "just a retired teacher." You are an experienced education professional with a wealth of experience and knowledge. Somebody can use that.

Finally

People still ask if I miss it, and the truth is that, in many ways, I do. The actual teaching parts were, mostly, great, though there is a tendency as a retiree to remember the best parts and not, say, the class that sat there like bumps on a log despite your best efforts. If you've taught more than six months, you have acquired a list of failures, moments when you just didn't get things to fall the way you wanted them to, and I can report that those haunt you a bit less in retirement.

Mostly I miss the actual teaching (when it goes well). I opposite-of-miss the bureaucracy, the stupid paperwork, the stultifying compliance culture, the bosses who were way more worried about stuff that didn't help me do my job, the time wasted on junk like the Big Standardized Test and BS Test prep, the-- well, it's not a short list. But the work itself? That was golden, and I'll never regret a second of it.

That question (do you miss it) is not always asked in good faith; sometimes it's asked in the same way that some people encourage a newly-married couple to smash the wedding cake into each others' faces. They just want to see someone else be miserable, so while the DYMI question is complicated and nuanced, I don't want to cater to anyone who just wants to hear me smash cake in the profession's face. I can tell them truthfully that it was the best job in the world, and if I had it to do over again, I would, and I'm still a tiny bit jealous of my former colleagues who are still in the classroom doing the work. 

Most Voucher Students Never Attended Public School. So What?

Here is one simple graphic from the folks at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, you can see the point that many folks have made over and over again-- taxpayer-funded school vouchers are going mostly to students who never actually left public school. But this leads to a big question--

So what?

This works fine for voucher advocates-- gives them a whole constituency that will fight hard to keep their free state subsidy. They will also argue that, of course, the vouchers are going to start out by supporting students who are already in private schools. So what?

How do you answer that question? Here's a couple of so what answers.

Vouchers are bait and switch.

Taxpayer-funded voucher programs are advertised as a way to rescue poor students from "failing public schools." Backers argue "Wouldn't you like some tax dollars to help rescue students in need?" which plays a whole lot better than "Wouldn't you like some tax dollars to help subsidize the tuition costs of private school students?" We know the answer to that second question-- the voters repeat that answer every time they are asked to vote for a taxpayer-funded voucher system and say, loudly, "No."

Imagine you gave money to Save The Children because of those pictures of sad poor kids and it turned out your money was buying ice cream for rich kids in the suburbs. That's taxpayer-funded school vouchers.

In fact, vouchers may actually make private schools less accessible. In Iowa, Princeton University researchers found that vouchers spurred a private school tuition increase. 

Vouchers increase state education costs.

"Let the money follow the child" is another standard voucher pitch. But when vouchers go to students already in private schools, that's not what happens. Instead, vouchers that go to students already in private schools adds on to the total cost for the state.

Say that in your state 100 students attend public school and 10 attend private school. The taxpayers are funding education for 100 students. The vouchers go in, and one kid leaves public school while 9 private school students sign up for vouchers. Now the taxpayers are funding education for 109 students. 

The effect is particularly striking in Iowa, where taxpayers now subsidize 99% of private school students. 

If the voters had decided they wanted to do this, that would be a choice. But nobody has pitched taxpayer-funded school vouchers as "Since we are paying for the education of students in public schools, we think taxpayers should also subsidize the tuition of students in public schools as well." 

Nor are vouchers simply giving private school parents their own tax dollars back to spend as they wish. Only the super-rich families contribute enough property tax dollars to fund their own children's vouchers (and not even those families if they have many children). Voucher funds require many taxpayers to chip in, not just the voucher-using families. 

Taxpayer-funded voucher programs end up being "budget busters." They represent an increase in education costs for the state that are neither discussed honestly ahead or time nor properly budgeted for. Every taxpayer-funded voucher that goes to a private or home-schooled student represents an increase in the total state cost for education. That money has to come from somewhere.

There are many reasons to oppose taxpayer-funded school vouchers, and lord knows I get into plenty of them elsewhere, but for purposes of responding to those folks who think it's no big deal that vouchers mostly go to students who were attending private school anyway, the above two points are the answer to "so what."

                                                       

ICYMI: Essay Contest Edition (5/3)

 Once a year, I'm the director of a local writing competition for high school students in the various school districts of the county. The competition is in honor of one of the giants of English teaching in our area; she graduated from here, worked in the original OSS, became a lady CEO, taught English, and left the classroom only because there was such a thing as a mandatory retirement age (you can read about her here). 

The contest has run for thirty-some years, and it is precisely the sort of thing that cheatbots make challenging, though historically our winners write way better than bots do, and I work hard to design a bot-resistant prompt. But it's a fun time for me-- part of my duties include being first reader and culling the hundreds of entries down to a manageable stack for table judges. 

So that has been my week. But I still have a reading list for you. 

The Atlantic Platforms Charter School Propaganda: Anti-Woke Edition

Paul Thomas responds to the Atlantic piece about how awesome charters are and how anti-racism is killing public schools. 

Oligarchs and Christian Nationalists Aim to Plunder Massachusetts Public Schools

Maurice Cunningham peels back the masks on another Massachusetts assault on public education, and reminds us that National Parents Union is none of those three things.

AI gives more praise, less criticism to Black students

Lots of implications to mull over in this finding, written up by Jill Barshay at Hechinger Report.

Most School Vouchers Go To Students Who Never Attended Public Schools

Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has a nifty bar chart that lays out in quick and simple manner where the taxpayer-funded vouchers are actually going.

Epic founders Harris, Chaney bound for criminal trial as 2-year preliminary hearing ends

One of the nation's major charter school scams might actually result in jail time for the scammers who pocketed $22 million of taxpayer dollars in their massive fraud.

Why We Are Suing the Department of Education

It's not just that the Office of Civil Rights in the Education Department has decided only the civil rights of white guys are being threatened-- it's that they're being anti-transparent about what they are and are not doing. ProPublica has sued, and here explains why.

What Will It Take To Get AI Out of Schools?

Don't know how I missed this last week, but this New Yorker piece from Jessica Winter is well worth the read (if you can get to it).

The Big Tech Backlash

Jennifer Berkshire looks at some of the pushback against ed tech, including some of the surprising places it's turning up.

We Created the Lotus Eaters

Matt Brady writes about the students who are comfortable non-starters, and how to get them back into work.

I Write the Songs

On songwriting, music teaching, and mistakes. From Nancy Flanagan.

Broken Record

Audrey Watters finds herself writing about the same stuff, again, again. And yet, it is stuff that needs to be said, again, again.

Seniors and Kids as Profit Centers: Medicare Advantage and School Vouchers Exploit Both

Bruce Lesley explains how Medicare Advantage and school vouchers are manifesting the same philosophy to harvest profits (and provide minimum service).

Ohioans: Please Do Not Sign Petition to Get Referendum to End Property Taxes on the November Ballot

Jan Resseger has an important message for folks in Ohio.

Standardized testing and scripted lessons are failing both teachers and students

Johnathan Kantrowitz is talking about Australia in this post, but some of the description sure sounds familiar (including panic over declining test scores).

The Testing Ritual and the Steakhouse Reality

Testing, staffing, and working lunches-- TC Weber looks at it all with one raised eyebrow and more than a few questions.

Problems with the DOE's AI Guidance

There has been a lot of noise and wrestling about with the New York City schools' attempt to craft AI guidance, and while I don't generally look to NYC for guidance on anything, these five objections from Leonie Haimson are an excellent guide to the sort of questions you should be asking about your local school district's attempt to cope with AI. If you want more, Chalkbeat covers the parent rebellion here.

Kent State President claps back at Vivek. It's about damn time.

A university leader actually calls out a politician's dumb ideas. More of this, please. Stephen Dyer has the details.

At Forbes.com this week, I wrote about some important characteristics of rural schools. 

I don't love the Black Eyed Peas, but I do like an unexpected team-up.

Here Comes Another Privatization Group

Meet Schools for America. Well, more to the point, watch out for Schools for America.

This group was launched just a month or so ago. And despite the echo in the name, it is not related to Teach for America. 

It's an "issue advocacy organization exclusively dedicated to rightsizing the regulatory barriers that prevent new schools from opening across the United States." Because if there's anything that education needs, it's a group that lobbies for less regulation of charter and private schools. The group is "laser-focused on a singular mission: unlocking new school supply." 

And not just by lobbying-- they "partner directly with state legislators, committee staff, and governor's offices to introduce and advance reform legislation." 

Before we draft a single bill, we conduct granular regulatory audits—identifying the specific zoning codes, fire marshal interpretations, and occupancy classifications that block new school formation in a given state. This isn't theoretical research. It's litigation-grade documentation designed to be dropped in a committee hearing.

In other words, a bill mill. Write the bill and hand it off to a cooperative legislator.

They target some particular sorts of legislation. Zoning blocks schools form being opened in some neighborhoods. Fire codes are too strict ("A 15-student co-op in a church hall isn't the same fire or occupancy risk as a 500-seat campus") Occupancy classifications are too hard on tiny schools ("a 15-student learning pod shouldn't require a $500,000 renovation").

You see the pattern here. Small "schools," like the microschool in your neighbor's rec room or the church basement, should be able to set up a "school" without having to follow school rules. At LinkedIn they declare, "Demand for new schools—microschools, homeschool cooperatives, private schools, and innovative learning models—has never been higher."

And if you have any doubt of where they want to head, there's a tab on their site-- The Florida Blueprint, honoring Florida's new law that makes it easier to set up your pop-up-and-cash-in school in the Sunshine State. She worked as a staff assistant for Representative Paul Ryan in 2011, then went to work for the Romney Presidential campaign. 

SfA's executive director is Jane McEnaney. According to her LinkedIn McNaney is a graduate of the College of the Holy Cross with degrees in Political Science, Latin America, and Latino Studies. Then she went to Illinois, where she worked for Illinois Policy Institute, then worked for Governor Bruce Rauner for three years. She served as midwest director for TechNet ("the voice of American innovation" aka advocacy group for our tech overlords). She helped found ReDirect Chicago, an organization that seems to have existed to promote "direct education funding" in Chicago and push privatizer and upward-failing Paul Vallas in the 2023 election. 

After that she went to work as Director of Education Policy Initiatives for the State Policy Network, that delightful network of right wing thinky tanks, dark money distributors, and advocacy groups. After that, she landed at Schools for America as ED.

LinkedIn does list her as a founder for SfA, but hers is the only name appearing anywhere on the site. A promotional launch video includes a glowing endorsement by Ryan Delk, a silicon valley start-up guy who currently is running Primer, a micro-school start-up outfit that pushes teaching through the "timeless foundations of American education" aka old elementary school primers. Delk lists himself as a member of the SfA board. 

Schools for America is still pretty new. Their page for founder Stories is still "coming soon." But the Wall Street Journal let McAnaney have space in their op-ed section to opine about Florida and plug her outfit. Jeanne "Backpacks full of cash" Allen at the Center for Education Reform has plugged them. Their tweeter account is still pretty sleepy (they aren't on Bluesky). Their Youtube page is not busy, either. 

But the privatization of schooling has always been partly driven by the real estate business, so advocacy to make the commandeering of real estate easier seems right on brand. On the dead bird app, privatization fans like Alpha School's MacKenzie Price bemoan how sad it is that public schools are so reluctant to transfer taxpayer-owned assets to edupreneurs.

So I'm guessing this outfit will be active, whether helping write and pass bills to replicate Florida's "Schools of Hope" program to help private operators take public school real estate, or clearing away all those regulations getting in the way of the latest pop-up school scam. Keep an eye peeled for them in your neighborhood.

John Oliver on Chatbots

Just in case you missed this one.

Oliver plays this one as close to straight as I've ever seen him do, I suspect because he seems seriously and deeply angry about the damage being done by chatbots. This is worth a watch, but there are two points well worth underlining-

One, these bots were rushed to market long before any guardrails or responsible oversight were worked out (and really, our tech overlords don't seem in any hurry to work on them).

Two, the chatbots number one job is to get you to keep using the chatbot. They need you to upgrade to a paid version, and then they need you to stay with that bot as long and as often as possible, because that's how they maximize revenue. Again, the main job of the chatbot is to keep you talking to the chatbot.

As always, there is language of which my mother would not approve. But some of this is shocking-- I knew most of these stories, but to see it laid out, and hear the quotes from the techbros-- it's all very alarming. And a reminder that these bots should be nowhere near children.

AI Is Not For Amateurs

Ben Riley has pulled a lot of attention lately for the story of his father, who turned to AI for advice on how to manage his cancer, and died because of it. Riley gets into the experience of being a New York Times story subject in a recent post, and looks into the reporters idea to show oncologists the advice the AI was providing. Riley shares their responses, and even for AI, it is shockingly, horribly wrong.

A trained cancer doctor would recognize that it was nonsense. An amateur might be fooled by how AI manages to mimic the look and feel of s real medical report.

This points to a recurring theme in AI use. The "human in the loop" principle is all about including a human being who can actually understand--and check-- the AI output. Or consider one of the more popular AI assignments for students-- have a LLM write about a topic you know well, and count up all the mistakes it makes. In other words, experts.

Large Language Models can perfectly mimic form and confidence. They have, literally, no shame, less than even the most shameless bullshit artist that ever sold you some Florida real estate or a White House super-duper ballroom. They are elegantly mechnized Dunning-Kruger machines. 

I recently sat and talked to someone who works in the computer tech and coding world and describes himself as a power user of AI. AI does save him and his team time, but there are caveats. AI doesn't remember what it has done. "It's like talking to a smart person with Alzheimer's." And it is not trustworthy. The project has to be broken down into chunks, and then each chunk has to be run through testing, designed by and/or involving a human coder in order to determine if the code actually does what it is supposed to do. The resulting process is still faster than the old all-human approach, but it still requires the involvement of humans with expertise to check the work, go back, re-do, check again, and on and on. It is most definitely not "Press a button and an hour later a fully-completed project is ready to go."

The conversation raised lots of questions for me. If the AI is doing all the entry-level grunt work under the watchful expert eye of human accountability sinks, then where will the future expert eyes come from? 

I'm also thinking of all those folks happily burbling "I use AI to write my journalism-flavored content" or "I use AI to write my lesson plans," and wondering if their process looks similar, if they are taking the bot through building up a lesson plan step by step, carefully examining each product every step of the way with their own expert eyes. Because I'm betting not. 

Because while coding involves a lot of time-intensive grunt work hours that can be collapsed by AI, writing things does not. Doing the thinking work (outlines, brainstorming, etc) is how you get ready for the writing work, and that includes writing a lesson plan. If you have the AI write the outline, you still have to do the thinking part. In short, if you use the bot to write your lesson plan in a responsible, professional manner, I don't see it saving you any amount of time.

In fact, if you really are an expert, I'm betting lesson plans or writing by bot, if done well, will actually take more time than just doing it yourself. The people who are finding it botting their way through the work are, just like the students using cheatbots, the folks least qualified to use the bot without producing junk. 

It is the central irony of AI is that it's really only safe to use if you are already an expert in your field. And that's a terrifying thought when you consider that AI has the potential to completely gut the pipeline that would ordinarily produce experts. 

Mind you, expertise is not a guarantee of well-used bots. AI repeatedly encourages users to trust its illusory expertise. Last week CNN reported that a top-ranked lawyer at "one of the most prestigious firms on the planet" became the latest in a long string of lawyers tripped up by AI error. He had to send a letter of apology to a judge after submitting a filing loaded with errors-- it took three pages to highlight and correct all of them. The mistakes were caught by opposing counsel. 

All of this underlines one clear idea-- of all the people who shouldnt be using AI, students shouldn't be using it the most. Jessica Winters, in her recent New Yorker article, cites a host of experts who point out the many ways that AI is not a useful, appropriate, or even safe tech to include in education. But it is already oushed heavily in all manner of K-12 education. 

The Chromebooks, which the students use in every class and for homework, came pre-installed with an all-ages version of Gemini, a suite of A.I. tools. When my daughter, who is in sixth grade, begins writing an essay, she gets a prompt: “Help me write.” If she is starting work on a slide-show presentation, the prompt is “Help me visualize.” She shoos away these interruptions, but they persist: “Help me edit.” “Beautify this slide.” The image generator is there, if she’d ever wish to pull the plug on her imagination.

There are so many reasons to keep AI away from students. At the very least, we should be replacing all the cute little "become an AI expert" lesson plans helpfully provided by AI corporations with lessons about what AI is not and can not do, and nwhy children should avoid it like they avoid strangers in vans offering them candy. 

Winters asks what it will take to push AI out of schools, and the answer, I think, is a whole hell of a lot because a lot of very powerful people have bet a very large amount of money that they can push AI everywhere, regardless of what harms it will do. It is as if the wealthiest corporations in the world have bought a vast supply of very powerful crack and they now are desperate to move it into any market they can think of.

AI is not for amateurs in any field, and I only grudgingly accept that in some forms, it may have some use for some experts. In education, I think it will be awesome for cranking out lesson plans that administrators demand but don't read and teachers generate but don't use. For anything else, educators had better be prepared to use it like grown-ass experts in their field and not like a 14-year-old trying to generate a term paper ten minutes before it is due. And if using it like an expert in your field turns out to create a process that is longer and less productive than the non-AI version, well, experts should know how to get the job done.

 

ICYMI: Soccer Edition (4/26)

The Board of Directors is trying soccer this spring and their first match was yesterday, in the rain. They have not yet revealed any special aptitude for the game, but it does involve a lot of running hard up and down a field, and that is their preferred sporty activity. It gets us all outside and moving around while breathing air and touching grass and just generally interacting with real things and other humans, and that seems like rather a huge win. 

We have been a low-screen household since they boys were born. They have no phone, no tablet, little tech at all, and watch only a tiny bit of tv. Most of their screen time happens, as you might guess, at school. I'm at peace with that, for now, because they do need some basic computer literacy to deal with the world, and confining it to school seems like an easy way to put guardrails around it. We'll see if my old district (where the board attends school) will get more restrictive about this stuff.

The hard part of a school's tech policy is parents, so I am hoping that we don't-give-my-kid-a-phone parents will be growing in numbers (because if you want your child's school to have a policy restricting smart phone use, you could help by not giving your kid a smart phone). 

Here's the reading list for the week. Enjoy it in good health.

School Vouchers Fail the Civil Rights Test. The Federal Program Is No Exception

The 74 invited some folks to write a response to a Derrell Bradford piece plugging the federal voucher program. Jenny Muniz, Nicole Fuller, Ashley Harrington, and Hal Smith replied with this piece that absolutely nails the point contained in this sentence--

“Choice” is a compelling slogan, but with private school vouchers, it’s the school’s choice, not the families.

The Blue State Voucher Express

Jennifer Berkshire notes that Arne Duncan and the usual gang of reform-loving nominally-Democrat privatizers have decided to shill for Donald Trump's federal voucher program. Shame on the lot of them. She writes, "Ten years later, they’re back, armed with another pig and plenty of lipstick."

Public Schools Form Democratic Citizens

Jan Resseger looks at a paper from education and law scholar Derek Black.

 

The America We Choose: Reclaiming the Promise of K–12 Public Education

Greg Wyman examines some of the classic pendulum swings and what the pendulum is doing to public education right now. 

Anti-Property Tax Issue Proponents are either extremely dumb or extremely deceitful

Well, Stephen Dyer is pretty sure they're dumb as rocks, and he uses some colorful language to explain why the guys trying to get rid of Ohio's property tax are absolutely and spectacularly in the wrong.

What’s Behind the Push to Make Schools Adopt the Science of Reading?

Rachael Gabriel is a professor of Literacy Education at U of Connecticut and co-editor-in-chief of The Reading Teacher, so it's likely that she knows what the heck she is talking about, which puts her ahead of so many people pushing the science of reading these days. So go ahead- read one more piece about SoR. This one's at The Progressive.

Privatizers Hijack Indianapolis Public Schools

I did cover this story, but let Shawgi Tell zero in on it from another angle.

Local entrepreneurs cashing in on state funds from homeschool parents

Oh so many ways to cash in on Florida's voucher program.

‘Schools of Hope’ charter operator is moving into 5 Miami-Dade high schools

Speaking of Floridian grift, don't forget Schools of Hope, the program that allows charters schools to just take buildings from the public school system. It was supposed to only affect the low-achieving public schools, but-- surprise!

If It's About Volcanoes, Teach Volcanoes

Lauren Brown offers ideas about favoring content over the vagueness of teaching "reading skills." Not sure I agree with every single word of this, but it's worth thinking about.

Bloodbath at Mark Zuckerberg-backed California school as tech titan and his wife strip funding

Well, there's no actual bloodbath, but this is the New York Post coverage of Episode #1,659,437 of Why Education Should Not Depend Upon The Kindness of Rich Guys.

Tennessee rolls back testing requirements in early voucher program

Look, no school should be held "accountable" via Big Standardized Testing. But Tennessee lawmakers decided that since tests weren't showing voucher schools to be doing better than, or even as well as, public schools, the solution was to just not make voucher schools take the test. So much for accountability via an informed free market.

A school program got millions in welfare linked dollars and now officials want answers

Hats off to Star Academy, a for-profit company run by John Alvendia. They figured out how to run an education scam and a welfare scam simultaneously!

No Need Rushing for AI in Education

Thomas Ultican talks about the need to avoid AI, and quotes some other folks, including Benjamin Riley, a "uniquely free thinker."

Pivoting Edtech Towards Humanity

Dan Meyer writes about the misalignment between humanity and edtech companies, as well as the misalignments between people who want to teach and people who want to learn.

Scott Alexander is Wrong About Lying

George Evans reached out to me to say that he had written something I might like to read and by damn he was right. This is a layered essay about the reach of teachers and the ways things come back to us later. I am always happy to find new writers that I hadn't previously found and wish more folks would send me recommendations, self- or otherwise. One thing about the interwebs and the people who write about education on them is that those writers tend to cycle through quickly. Of the people I was reading and sharing with umpty-ump years ago, only a handful are still at it. So I'm always excited to meet new folks.

The Silent Surrender of Moms for Liberty Anchorage

Mathew Beck reports that one more Moms for Liberty chapter has quietly expired, this time in Anchorage, Alaska. Thoughts and prayers.

Why Is Lower Merion School District Ignoring Its Own Technology Policy?

James Horn reports on the Pennsylvania school district that has decided that students may not opt out of screens-- even though they have an opt-out policy.

How to Manufacture Crisis with Line Charts: NAEP Reading Edition

Paul Thomas shows us how to make everyone freak out with a chart (even if the chart isn't really very freak outable). With pictures.

Why are we holding third graders back in school?

Steve Nuzum looks at the problems with third grade retention, a policy that won't go away no matter how many times the problems are demonstrated.

America’s Students Need Great Public Schools for Science!

Wasn't it cool when the astronauts did that astronaut stuff? Nancy Bailey reminds us that those astronauts didn't just fall of an astronaut tree.

Kids don’t use augmented reality like adults, raising concerns for classrooms

Jonathan Kantrowitz reminds us that having small humans use devices designed for grown humans opens the door to all sorts of problems. So maybe let's rethink using those AR headsets with third graders.

This Scammer Used an AI-Generated MAGA Girl to Grift ‘Super Dumb’ Men

Have you heard of Emily Hart, the nurse who loves God, guns, and making "illegals" go away? She's a darling of the MAGA crowd, with a huge online following. And she doesn't exist, but she is helping put through school the 22-year-old med student who created her. From EJ Dickson at Wired.

What I Learned About Millionaires At Jeff Bezos's Private Retreat

Noah Hawley writing for The Atlantic tells of his strange encounter with the very rich. And while it's all worth reading, there is this--

It’s not that the wealthy become evil; it’s that their environment stops teaching them the things that nonwealthy people are forced to learn simply by living in a world that pushes back. When you can buy your way out of any mistake, when you can fire anyone who disagrees with you, when your social circle consists entirely of people who need something from you, the basic mechanism by which humans learn that other people are real goes dark.

This week at Forbes.com I looked to Ohio, where one more school board wants folks to understand that hate does, in fact, have a home in their district. And they're getting sued for it.  

Trombones and Danny Elfman-- what else could a person need. 

Subscriptions are free now and forever. Well, probably not forever. But as long as I'm alive and doing this. 

Los Angeles Resolves To Reduce Student Screen Time

It took over a decade, but the Los Angeles Unified School District may finally be getting smart about computer tech in classrooms.

It was way back in 2014 that John Deasy worked up a cozy deal with Pearson and Apple to spend taxpayer dollars on iPads for LAUSD students. Only he got caught striking a sweetheart deal for products so awful, so lacking in promised software, that it lost him his job. Deasy was a graduate of Eli Broad's Fake Grad School of Ed Management, the ultimate "treat schools like a business" training backed by a guy who in 2016 decided to just take over the district and privatize the whole thing.

Then there was that time in 2017 when the district decided they'd drop $80 or $90 on a bunch of cool software, including a program (I am not making this up) recommended because it was a big hit in Uruguay. 

But this school year something happened. Maybe it was the tide shifting nationally, maybe parents had had enough. Maybe the fact that LAUSD followed the national trend and completely banned cell hones from classes. But parents started putting pressure on the district. 

Actually, I could believe it was the device ban. It took effect in February 2015, and it was one of the toughest ones in the country-- no personal devices, including not just smart phones but also smart watches. And that ban just made the presence of the iPads stick out. As NBC quoted one parent, who found their child was using the school-issued iPad to watch Youtube and play Fortnite--

“It makes no sense to me,” Byock said. “We’ve banned the cellphones, but it doesn’t matter, because the kids are using the school-issued devices in exactly the same way.”

Exactly (Also, if you haven't come across this one yet, students years ago figured out that you can "chat" via a shared Google document).  

The district doesn't have a policy in place yet, but they have passed a resolution to get it done. Minimize the screen time, eliminate it entirely for earliest grades, encourage the use of paper and pen assignments. It states in part:

While access to and developing skills in technology are critical in a digital world, excessive screen time can be associated with vision problems, increased anxiety and depression, addictive behavior, reduced attention span, difficulty managing emotions, lower academic achievement, and weaker cognition, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics. A growing body of research indicates that excessive and unstructured screen use can negatively impact student attention, mental health, and overall wellbeing and can be particularly harmful for younger students. Research indicates that children 8 to 11 years old who exceed screen time recommendations are at higher risk for obesity and depressive symptoms and have scored lower on cognitive assessments.

The ability to stand up to tech companies and computer-related FOMO is coming just in time, just as Silicon Valley is hell bent on trying to convince us that schools should be packed to the rafters with awesome AI crap. It's inevitable! You don't want your students to be left out! 

Well, yes. I kind of do. It is ironic that LAUSD, with its history of boneheaded tech moves, is the first major district to make a conscious attempt to dial back the screens for students. But it would be great if they were the leading edge of a new wave that minimized screen time for the next generation. 

TX: More Ten Commandments Baloney

Texas was one more state passing a law to mandate the display of the state-approved version of the Ten Commandments. That law was challenged, and U.S. District Judge Fred Biery blocked the law; Texas AG Ken Paxton asked the full 17 judges of the conservative 5th Circuit Court of Appeals to revisit the case and overturn the decision. This week they found in favor of the law. "It doesn't violate the First Amendment at all," declares the court in a ruling that depends heavily on some really special reasoning.

Paxton and the state used the tired old talking point that this isn't a religious thing-- they're just "honoring a core ethical foundation of our law" that's an important part of the nation's history and heritage and anyway there's no such thing as the "bogus" separation of church and state, which (you may have heard) is a phrase that does not appear in the Constitution (much like the Ten Commandments).

Anyway, the full court went by a slim majority for Paxton, the decision written by Judge Stuart Kyle Duncan.

First the court disposes of the Establishment Clause. And boy do they dispose of that.

If you've been following the dismantling of the wall between church and state, you may recall that Kennedy v. Bremerton, the case of the coach who wanted to lead prayers on the 50 yard line-- a case that SCOTUS decided by actively ignoring facts-- put a final stake through the heart of the Lemon Test, a three-pronged test for whether or not someone was violating the Establishment Clause (legal scholars have assured me that Lemon was not really used, anyway, but let's move on). This new decision makes it a point to dance on Lemon's grave and then announce the new test of the clause--

In place of Lemon, courts now ask a question rooted in the past: does the law at issue resemble a founding-era religious establishment?

In other words, is the state trying to "establish" a religion the same way that the King of England established the church of England. Colonies in the 1600s achieved religious uniformity through civil power. If we don't see "laws compelling attendance at the official church; laws controlling doctrine, worship, and governance; laws punishing dissenters; laws exacting religious taxes; and laws deploying churches for public functions," then there's no infringement of the Establishment Clause.

The Texas law doesn't "tell churches or synagogues or mosques what to believe or how to worship" and it doesn't punish anyone for rejecting the Ten Commandments. It rejects the plaintiffs' argument that putting the decalogue up in a classroom is inherently coercive. "Not so," says the glib-ass judges. The law doesn't require religious observance. So, no Establishment Clause violation, because this law doesn't all look like the Church of England in the late 1700s. 

The plaintiffs had a go at using the historical argument themselves, saying there's little evidence that schools had a "tradition" of posting the Ten Commandments. But that, says the court, is a whole other thing. The plaintiffs try to argue that "if a practice does not fit within some historical tradition, it violates the Establishment Clause," but "that does not follow." See (stay with me here) if something has a root in 18th century tradition, then it is okay, but just because it doesn't have a root in tradition, that doesn't mean it's not okay-- so argues the court.

Meanwhile, in states across the country today, simply allowing students to be exposed to a rainbow on a classroom poster is considered too intrusive and might offend some people's religious beliefs. 

Anyway, that's the new rule according to this court-- the state can endorse, publicize, support, pick religious winners and losers, and expose students to as much religion as it wants, as long as it doesn't start punishing anyone for disagreeing. 

What about the Free Exercise Clause?

The plaintiffs brought up Mahmoud v. Taylor, the SCOTUS case that involved parents who wanted to opt their children out of being exposed to books with gay stuff. The plaintiffs likely felt that Mahmoud's foundation of "parents should direct the religious upbringing of their own children" applied here, but the District Court gets around that, mostly by misrepresenting Mahmoud.

The case rested on the idea that being exposed to books with gay characters would disrupt the educational instruction of parents (the decision also rested on misrepresentation of those books as well). But the district court sees something far more sinister. "Those materials were deployed by teachers with lesson plans designed to subvert children’s religiously grounded views on marriage and gender."

But nobody is making the students recite, believe, or "affirm their divine origin" (a phrase that I think assumes a fact not in evidence), the court believes the plaintiffs didn't prove that the law "substantially burdens their right to religious exercise."

There's lots more (Duncan uses a footnote to take issue with Biery's "creative" opinion). I'm going to just pick a few moments.

In a concurrence, Oldham argues that maybe the plaintiffs don't even have standing because this is textbook "offended observer" stuff:

From top to bottom, the idea is that the plaintiffs (1) worry that they will one day see a poster; (2) worry that they might find that poster offensive; so (3) they invoke federal jurisdiction for protection from potential, hypothetical future offenses.

This is, I guess, totally different from being offended that somebody might some day ask you to make a cake for a gay wedding.

The dissent pushes back on some of the legal arguments. Kennedy did not throw out Stone or the Lemon test, and it was plenty clear that it “observed” the “heightened concerns with protecting freedom of conscience from subtle coercive pressure in the elementary and secondary public schools.” The case established a concern about exactly the kind of coercion that SB 10 represents. Put a poster of commandments in front of impressionable children (with the directive that the poster be visible from any place in the room) and you have coercion. And it is true that SCOTUS went out of its way (and far from reality) to argue that the praying coach was praying privately and personally and not exerting any coercion on his players, suggesting it would have been coercive otherwise.

Oh, there are pages and pages of legal argle bargle here, papering over a decision that joins some Texas leaders in saying, "We want to promote our brand of Christianity to be the dominant religion in this state." And as always, I will argue that this kind of stuff is bad for everyone, that religion is not improved when the state tries to edit sacred texts and commandeer and control expressions of faith. 

In that spirit, let's wrap this up with the opening of Judge Leslie Southwick's separate dissent. 

What is not part of my dissent is a rejection of the importance of searching for faith. Religion, though, is a matter of the mind and the heart. Faith cannot flourish when it is forced. A poem voices my concern and, I humbly offer, that of the First Amendment:

The livid lightnings flashed in the clouds;
The leaden thunders crashed. 

A worshipper raised his arm. 

“Hearken! hearken! The voice of God!” 

“Not so,” said a man. 

“The voice of God whispers in the heart 

So softly 

That the soul pauses, 

Making no noise, 

And strives for these melodies, 

Distant, sighing, like faintest breath, 

And all the being is still to hear.” 

Stephen Crane, The Black Riders and Other Lines, Lines xxxix (1895), reprinted in The Collected Poems of Stephen Crane 41, 41 (Wilson Follett ed., 1930). Like any effective poetry, these lines can give different meaning to different readers at different times. In this opinion, they capture for me that government promotion of religion in every classroom is simulated lightning and thunder, compulsorily seen and heard.

LA: Betsy DeVos Would Be Pleased

One of the ideas beloved by right-wing folks and pushed unsuccessfully by Betsy DeVos in her Ed Secretary days is the idea of block grants. 

Title I and all the rest of those federal Title Something funds go to states with strings attached. Spend this money to help English Language Learners. Spend this money to help rural schools. Spend this money to help poor kids. It's such a pain-- wouldn't it be better, the reasoning goes, to just hand the states a big pile of money and tell them to use it for whatever strikes their fancy. Code word: flexibility.

For some states this seems like a swell idea. They could spend the block grants on school vouchers. They could spend it on things other than Those Peoples' Children, which you may recall was kind of a problem in many Southern states for-basically-ever. The block grant approach would work nicely for anyone who believes A) I have no responsibility to take care of other people, particularly the poor ones and B) the only really oppressed group in this country is white guys. 

The current regime has tried in a couple of budgets to get at least some of these federal grant monies turned into block grants and/or dust. But there is another way.

Louisiana's Department of Education has asked for a waiver so that they can implement a "consolidated allocation plan." It would provide flexibility, by taking a bunch of federal programs, like money for English Language Learners, and rural schools, and schools that serve poor kids, and putting all those monies into a big pile that the state would dole out according to its own priorities. It would also pass some of that flexibility to local districts so that local officials could also decide which students not to serve to benefit from flexibility.

It would allow strategic alignment across programs! Fiscal efficiency! Enhanced innovation! Back to basics! And if those aren't enough magic words, the state also throws in improving student achievement in ELA and mat and early childhood leading to kindergarten readiness.

Oh, and expanding education freedom by "cultivating a more robust array of educational choices beyond high-quality traditional public schools, encompassing options like public charters, non-public institutions, and home-study programs." Also, this classic-- "Students should not be mandated to attend failing schools simply because of their zip code," a popular privatizer sentiment that is never ever followed by "And that's why we are committed to making sure that every zip code is served by an excellent school." It's kind of like "This building is on fire, but instead of trying to put the fire out, we're going to get a few people out of it."

There's a lot of argle bargle in this 34-page request, but the bottom line is the state saying, "Can you just give us our grant money in a big bucket and let us spend it on whatever strikes our fancy without any rules or regulations, and by the way, we like a lot of the same public ed dismantling policies that you guys in DC like these days."

Will Louisiana get its waiver to allow for this? I am not prepared to predict what DC will do, and right now the federal proposal for 2027's education budget has already been run through a pack of sharptoothed gators. Let's hope Louisiana doesn't get their way. 

Indianapolis Schools Have Been Privatized: What Cities Are Next

After over a decade of whittling away at opposition, the Mind Trust of Indianapolis has managed to privatize the entire public school system of Indianapolis. On March 4, the governor signed HB 1423, which creates the Indianapolis Public Education Corporation.

The Indianapolis Public Education Corporation is a nine-member board appointed by the mayor. The IPEC will be the super-boss-daddy of all Indianapolis schools, both public and charter. It looks a lot like the old portfolio model, which Mind Trust has been pushing and expanding in Indianapolis for years. The model is based on the idea of an investment portfolio, where you keep juggling investments in and out of the portfolio depending on how well they pay off. 

The portfolio model is about obliterating all the "old" bureaucracies, which includes all the rules and regulations and guardrails, replacing them with some central batch of unelected overlords to manage the portfolio, closing and opening schools, moving resources around as they see fit.  It also automatically elevates charter schools to equal footing with public schools, with access to the same pile of public taxpayer dollars as public schools, which is why you find the portfolio model pushed by charter folks. Another way to think of it is as a forced "merger" between public and charter schools. (Longer explanation here.) So that's Indianapolis now.

Mind Trust used a pretend hurricane to put IPEC over the finish line. I wrote about it at the time, and you can catch up by reading here. But the bottom line is that Indianapolis schools were just subjected to a hostile takeover. IPEC's nine board members are appointed by the mayor with statutes to determine the corporate board’s membership: three come from the Indianapolis Public Schools [IPS] board of commissioners–which still exists, three from the charter school industry, and three with administrative and financial expertise. But as Jeff Hagan notes at In The Public Interest, four members are from the charter industry. And the chairman is David Harris, who founded the Mind Trust-Indianapolis, the folks behind this whole thing.

 

Thing is, Indianapolis is not the end of it.

Mind Trust gets a big chunk of its money from the City Fund, an outfit that was established to funnel money to groups trying to push charter schools. It was founded by Neerav Kingsland, one of the guys who helped charterize New Orleans after Katrina. The group collected mountains of money and started using it to juice up privatizers. In 2018, Matt Barnum reported for Chalkbeat that the group planned to make the portfolio model "normal," by spreading it to 40 cities in 10 years. By 2020, Barnum was reporting that City Fund had handed out over $110 million.

In December of 2018, Barnum reported the cities that the fund had targeted, and the groups they were funding to do it.

That list included the Mind Trust in Indianapolis.

Also on the list:

RootED in Denver. RootED is now teamed up with Denver Families for Public Schools. On their board is Ethan Gray, a City Fund "partner" who was previously a vice-president of Mind Trust and a founder-CEO of Education Cities, another outfit pushing charters. DFPS, like virtually all of these groups, talks about its support for "public schools" but actually means "charter schools." The head of RootED in 2018 was Nate Easley 

City Education Partners in San Antonio. Their current board president is Chris Barbic, best remembered for his attempt to make Tennessee's disastrous Achievement School District work. He is currently a City Fund "partner." Their CEO Dalia Flores Contreras taught for a couple of years before launching a career in charter administration, from UNO to KIPP. At Pahara Institute she's listed as a fellow, a "visionary CEO."

RedefineED in Atlanta. Patrick Dobard is the City Fund partner on their board. 

The Opportunity Trust in St. Louis. The Newark Charter School Fund. In Nashville, they were just giving directly to charter schools. 

That was in 2018. If we take a look at other current "partners" on their staff, we find:

Dorsey Hopson, partner on the advisory board of the Memphis Education Fund, which also includes Holly Coleman of the Hyde Foundation and David Mansouri of SCORE. Their Board of directors is led by Darryl Cobb, president of Charter School Growth Fund.

Gary Borden, previous leader at California Charter Schools Association. Borden lives in Oakland, where he serves on the board of Black Pine Circle School.

Jessica Pena, previously with Education Cities. Now in Philadelphia.

Naeha Dean, previously with Camden City Schools. She founded the Camden Education Fund, where she is now the City Fund  partner on the board, as well as the board of Mind Trust. 

Kameelah Shaheed-Dialo, formerly with the Mind Trust and a leader in their privatization push.

Maura Marino, formerly CEO of Education Forward DC and a managing partner at New Schools Venture Fund. Former charter teacher. She's now on the DC Public Charter School Board.

There's more, but you get the idea. Meanwhile, their four person board includes former Teach for America CEO Elisa Villanueva Beard, Enron millionaire John Arnold, Walton Foundation education program director Romy Drucker, and Netflix gazillionair and school board hater Reed Hastings.

Indianapolis is just the tip of the reformy iceberg. Mind Trust is a reformy octopus with its tentacles in multiple cities and a willingness to squeeze slowly for years if necessary. IPEC is bad news for Indianapolis schools, but it's a model for what could be happening in other cities around the country. 

A Big False Assumption About AI In Schools

Over on the dead bird app, you can find the AI Being Dumb account, an invaluable source. It recently highlighted the Andon Labs experiment in letting AI run a store. Two items of note. One is that the AI hired humans to do some of the work (though it didn't tell them when to show up). The other is that folks started using Google Reviews to try to get the store to stock products, like $260,000 worth of paper clips, tungsten metal cubes, barrels of oil, or 413,793 KitKats. 

This highlights one of the assumptions of every discussion about AI tutors and AI paper graders and AIs in place of humans in education. The assumption is that once we replace the human actor with an AI agent, everyone else will keep interacting with the AI agent as if they were still dealing with the human. 

That's a silly assumption, particularly in a school setting. Students do not even treat humans like other humans. Part of September is the annual Testing Of The Classroom Boundaries as well as te annual Mapping Of The Expectations. Students conduct these activities, sometimes augmented by the Existing Reputations of the adult humans, and use the collected data to make their choices for the remainder of the year. All of this testing and mapping is conducted withing each student's personal rules for how one treats other human beings.

This is part of the rich web of human relationships that support and enrich education. The AI-in-education crowd seems to think that one can swap out any human node of that web and replace it with a bot and nothing important will change.

For the moment, I don't want to focus on the dehumanizing of a human activity and dynamic. I want to focus on this question-- how will young humans act when they find themselves educationally yoked to a robot instead of a human. Expect a couple of effects.

Erasing ethical boundaries. Most humans operate on the assumptions that we owe other humans a good-faith attempt to communicate honestly. Yes, lots of people violate that assumption, but the fact that te boundary exists is why we have a whole language about lies and dishonesty that describes the transgressive nature of not making that good-faith, honest effort. But what do we owe a bot? Is there any reason to make a good-faith honest human effort in responding to or interacting with a non-human bot?

This may seem like esoteric philosophical noodling that young humans would not waste a minute pondering, but I assure you they get it on some level. Why do schools spend so much time hooting and hollering at the onset of Big Standardized Test season, trying to connect the test to students' relationships with their teacher and schools? Because students on level understand that they don't owe any good-faith honest effort to whatever faceless unknown buraucrats are behind the BS Test, so schools figure they'd better activate student's connection to teachers and school. "I know you don't owe it to Pearson or education reformsters to give this an honest try, but how about doing it for Mrs. Swellclass and the East Egg Battling Chickens?"

Do you think a student will give the same size and shape of effort to a bot that they would give to their beloved human teacher, or even their sort-of-don't-mind human teacher? Some will decide to see how entertaining bad-faith efforts can be; what kind of baloney will the bot accept? All will figure out how to deal with the bot-generated pressure to create human-crafted AI slop. They may fight back, give in, try to outsmart the bot, but only a few will keep trying to do their best as if they were working for a human.

It is worst for any instruction or assessment that involves writing. Writing is impervious to objective evaluation; everyone who grades writing assignments does so with their own set of biases in place. Another AI falsehood applies here; decades of fiction and years of marketing have primed us to think of robot intelligence as perfectly objective, strictly factual and "true." It is not. It reflects whatever biases are progremmed into it (and it has some, deliberately or not). You can barely swap out human for human without changing the definition of "good" writing; you certainly can't swap out human for bot without blowing up the definition entirely. 

There are a hundred bad assumptions and built-in problems with AI in education. But we have to include the way proponents ignore the effect AI will have on how folks interact with the school. Parents will not treat your AI slop letter the same way they will treat a human note. Students will not complete assignments for the AI the same way they would for a human. Taking the human out of human interaction matters, and the people who don't admit it are just too busy trying to sell some education-flavored slop.

ICYMI: Sumter Edition (4/19)

This past week we sailed past the 165th anniversary of the bombardment of Fort Sumter, yet one more example of a piddly thing tipping a country over into major problems. By coincidence, I was reading Erik Larson's The Demon of Unrest, which covers the period between Lincoln's election and the attack on the fort. It's a good read, and like all of his books, does its history homework even as it reads like a novel. There were many striking things to note, not the least of which is once again the degree to which enslavers really thought they were the good guys, and weren't just angry about having their economic system threatened, but were really butthurt about being treated like they were in the wrong. They couldn't have been more upset if some Northerner had called them deplorables. It's also striking that the 19th century outrage machine, primitive though it was, performed the very modern trick of getting the South upset over their certainty that Lincoln, if elected, would outlaw slavery on day one. And of course, the belief that all men are not, in fact, created equal; some are more entitled to power and privilege than others and that's how a proper country should be run. That's a through line for many folks in American history, and the guiding principle of the current regime (along with the related idea that the Betters should not have to take care of the Lessers). 

Good book. Worth a read (particularly if you are someone who has to teach Mary Chestnut diary entries). 

Here's the week's list.

Ten Commandments law is ‘distortion,’ ‘appropriation’

Rabbi PJ Schwartz calls out Alabama's new Ten Commandments In The Classroom law as distortion, appropriation, and just not right. (Also, that whole "Judeo-Christian tradition" thing is baloney, too.)

Let’s Pay Teachers Overtime

Nancy Flanagan reflects on the timeless question recently asked-- again-- by EdWeek.

Missouri's Parental Rights Bills: Treating Children as Property

Bruce Lesley examines a Missouri version of the Parents Rights bill that strips children of rights and protections and instead views them as property like a toaster or a couch.

RIP Khanmigo & Edtech Industry Dreams of AI Tutors

Matt Barnum's piece about Sal Khan sure unlocked a lot of feelings. Dan Meyer here comes to bury Khanmigo, not to praise it. Really.

Sal Khan’s Coming for Higher Ed

Is it time to stop piling on Sal Khan. No, it is not, most especially because his newest bad idea is to replace higher education.

‘Whoa, What Are You Doing Here?’: Why This Professor Subs in K-12 Classrooms

EdWeek runs a piece from education professor Nathan Stevenson, who writes about doing what every single education professor ought to do-- get into an actual K-12 classroom.

Highlands County faces the harsh realities of public funding across the state being diverted to religious and private schools

Florida continues to gut its public schools to fund the private, and it is making real problems for the public system. Eileen Kelley reports for WGCU.

Sorry, Stephen Miller: Immigrant kids have a right to an education, too

Raul Reyes at The Hill argues that Miller is wrong and cruel for his crusade against educating immigrant children.

Doctors and education experts who studied AI’s impact on the young call for a 5-year moratorium in schools

A call to just hold our cyber-horses. Including friend of the institute Leonie Haimson.

EdChoice ESA voucher study does not back up its claims about misspending

12News has been digging deep into the Arizona taxpayer-funded voucher system, and choicers have been trying to defend the voucher scheme, but as Joe Dana points out, the EdChoice defense doesn't hold up.

'I feel like we were used': Some Moms for Liberty leaders resign, claiming group’s focus has shifted

Tampa Bay 28 has the completely unsurprising story of how many of the grass roots supporters of Moms for Liberty are feeling as if they were just used for props in a political game. 

Ohio taxpayers directly fund more private than public school districts

Ohio's GOP dreams of being the Florida of the Midwest. Stephen Dyer explains how the education funding system is completely upside down.

An illustrated guide to resisting "AI is inevitable" in education

Ben Riley offers this handy guide. With pictures! Just the thing for the next time some yahoo tells you that AI in schools is inevitable and "here to stay."

Trump Administration Persists in Multi-Pronged Attack on D.E. I. and Civil Rights

Jan Resseger tracks some of the many steps taken by the Trumpers to roll back civil rights protections for everyone except oppressed white males.

Reading the Tea Leaves

Jennifer Berkshire continues to collect the evidence that voters actually want to protect public education from the worst politicians.

AI-Powered Tractor Startup Burns Through a Quarter Billion Dollars, Fires All Employees in Epic Implosion

AI tractors were going to transform agriculture. Instead, they transformed a lot of money into dust. I don't suppose anyone is going to learn a lesson here.

Meanwhile, over at Forbes.com, I looked at a report about Wisconsin's trouble with teacher retention, and a Senate bill intended to undo federal vouchers. 

This song kicks hard, but I think it's extra impressive performed live.