ICYMI: Blue Wave Edition (11/8)

Honestly, I didn't believe it was going to happen, but here we are. Now let's see what it means for education. In the meantime, there's plenty to read this week.

EdChoice is Over

Stephen Dyer explains why Ohio's big fat voucher program, already ruled unconstitutional in lower courts, is likely to be in big trouble now.

Anger over GOP education agenda helped fuel Democratic sweeps in Texas, advocates say

NBC news notices one of the major issues in Texas was the GOP's education plans. Give a shout to Jennifer Berkshire, who has been saying this all along.

Supreme Court Leaning Yes on Publicly Financed Discrimination Against 4-Year-Olds

I've been covering this story over at Forbes.com and I suspect people aren't paying nearly enough attention to this case which could decide that not only should taxpayers fund religious schools, but those schools should be exempt from anti-discrimination laws. Madiba Dennie sums up the day of oral arguments, and it's not looking great.

The Catholic Church Has Taken “Do Unto Others” in the Wrong Direction

Education Adam Laats provides some historical perspective to the case. 

Dear American Parent: You’re Welcome!

Jen Jennings, in the New York Times, with a fairly awesome Alexandra Petri-esque take of life for parents under school voucher "freedom."

Should You Outsource Your Child’s Birthday Party to AI?

John Warner's take on that disastrously clueless Marissa Mayer interview. Should you use AI to do the hard, hard work of humaning? Maybe not?

In Conversation: Sold A Story Season 2 (Ep. 5)

You know how sometimes you don't really want to watch a movie, but you watch the "Everything Wrong With..." so you have an idea of what was going on (and why you are wise not to watch the actual thing)? That's kind of where I am with Sold A Story. Trevor Aleo and Nick Covington continue their conversations in response to the latest episode.

Lessons of Last Resort

You can also podcast your way to a better understanding of Direct Instruction with Jennifer Berkshire and Jack Schneider, who cover it over at Have You Heard.

One Problem With Sold a Story 2: Disregarding Discovery Learning and Child Development

Nancy Bailey takes a look at Direct Instruction and what it overlooks.

Parents Sue Google Over A.I. Safety Risks on School Chromebooks

Another lawsuit over an AI-linked suicide plan. Natasha Singer covers it for the New York Times.

A Letter to Governor Hinojosa: Fixing Texas School Finance

Bruce Baker continues to be on a tear. This time the school finance expert offers advice to the new Texas governor on what to fix about school financing.

The Blackboard Way of Knowledge

Audrey Watters shares a talk she recently delivered-- and it's not about AI, exactly:

Indeed, for all the handwringing about the cognitive dependencies that “AI” might elicit -- now or in the future -- I'd argue that education has already acquiesced an incredible amount of intellectual and pedagogical and operational and political ground to technologies that have cultivated precisely that: a dependency.

A quaint tale of the destruction of Florida’s public schools & what you can do about it

Maybe you don't think of turning to Bruce Baker for witty and whimsical Seussian fables of education, but here it is. "The Whittler" explains how Florida raced to the bottom.

What the Blue Blowout Means for Federal Education

Rick Hess shows what the blue wave might mean from the reformster side of education.

Washington Loves Baby Photo Ops, but Its Budget Tells Another Story

Bruce Lesley takes a look at how little money DC puts where its mouth noises about The Children issue forth.

Blue Wave and Education Reform: Texas Edition

The privatization crowd is sad that Texas "ambitious ed reform" laboratory could take a hit. Paul Thomas brings the data to show that Texas wasn't doing all that well. 

How Will Tuesday’s Midterm Election Shape Public Education Policy?

Jan Resseger takes us through some of the post-election commentary about whatever is going to happen next.

NYC Parent Accuses Son’s Elementary And Middle Schools Of Negligent Grade Inflation — But The Data Suggests Otherwise

Gary Rubinstein has been seeing that NY Post story about the mom complaining that her son can't do math despite his good grades. Gary has his doubts, so he looks at some numbers.

Questions to ask your principals and School Leadership Teams about privacy, AI, ed tech use and screens

This post from Class Size Matters may be intended for NYC families, but it fits anywhere. Great questions to ask your administration the next time they're launching the Next Big Tech Thing

3 Habits Students Can Develop to Find Credible Online Resources

You've probably heard these before, but they're worth revisiting with students. Or at least the students who are looking past the AI summary at the top of their results. Michael Yell at Edutopia.

EIGHTH REPORT: You Can’t See Everything at Alpha

Ben Riley is still cranking out reports on Alpha Schools; this one looks at the organization chart. Who's really in charge of what?

I’m Shocked, Shocked! A Reformed Lobbyist on Whisper Campaigns

Fascinating look at how our tech overlords manage campaigns against their critics (e.g. Jonathan Haidt)

At Forbes.com, I looked at that Supreme Court case threatening yet more bricks in the church state wall. 

I know this seems like it must be a joke, but trust me-- after a minute or two you are going to forget you're listening a bunch of harmonicas. And I do love Rhapsody in Blue.

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This Is Not How It Should Work

This is my politics rant. I promise-- once it's out of my system, I'll move on. 

It is great that Democrats swept the table this week. It's delightful that places like Texas now have Democratic leaders who actually support public education and might roll back some of the crap that Greg Abbott forced on Texans. It is beyond special that a Democratic Congress might care enough to undo the federal voucher program. And I welcome a batch of Democrats who don't try to make education the solution to every economic ill in the country (thereby giving themselves an excuse to do not-a-damn-thing). 

But damn-- this is not how it is supposed to work.

"Education is not a political issue" has been the motto of a couple decades worth of politicians trying to make it a political issue. From using political maneuvers to force states to impose a Big Standardized Test, to political maneuvers to twist school district arms with an unreachable deadline ("Everyone above average by 2014") to the use of that political leverage to force Common Core and RttT into schools to every state legislature that said, "Never mind what the public wants-- we are going to slide vouchers into law by whatever political trick we can get away with."

Education has been a political orphan for a long time, but that doesn't mean it can't be used as a political football, and while I'm happy that some Good Politicians have come to rescue education, I am also deeply pissed that Good Politicians have come to rescue education, because it just underlines our political football status, and the trouble with being a football is that you just get kicked back and forth and back and forth and back and forth.

Libertarian comedy writer P. J. O'Rourke describes politics as "the business of getting power and privilege without possessing merit." That's particularly apropos with education, which is repeatedly besieged by amateurs who consider themselves experts when they don't even have enough actual knowledge to tip a Dunning-Kruger scale. And yet, they are sure just what teachers ought to be forced to do, and for the past few decades, they have infiltrated legislatures across the country.

The infuriating examples of unearned political power are everywhere. Marcus Luther picked out a quote from Emily Hanford's newest podcast case for Make Teachers Do This:

I thought about being a teacher in my early 20s and I had a friend who was teaching in New Orleans, and a bunch of her third graders couldn't read, and she was supposed to design all of her own lessons. And I thought to myself, where would you even start? It was such a stressful job. It was basically impossible, and she eventually quit teaching, as a lot of people do, because we make this job too hard. 

The friend was of course a Teach For America product, so I might suggest part of what made the job hard was that she only received five weeks of training, from other TFA people who also had no formal training for teaching. But twenty-something Hanford could look at this and confidently determine that the job was just too hard and has carried that forward to her campaign to fix teaching by getting legislatures to mandate proper techniques (just like she did with reading). 

There are going to be a gazillion thought pieces on the general theme of "What education can expect from Democrats" and I dream of a day when the answer is "Leave schools alone and let teachers do their jobs." Should there be guardrails, accountability and transparency? Absolutely (and for all schools getting taxpayer money). But I wish the age of micromanagement would end. 

You can tell me that it's privilege and naive to want education not to be in the thrall of politics, but I'm old enough to remember life before Americans became convinced that every damned thing should be subject to politics, that politics should carry more weight than humanity or just letting people live their lives (and so, politicians should get to carry deciding votes about everything).

Schools do not operate in a vacuum, and the schoolhouse will always be set up downhill from society. But school personnel should not have to wait to see the outcome of each election in order to find out how they're going to do their job. I'm glad this election went our way, but I am sorry that schools have to care so much about it. 

Let's Have Some Education Reform

It is past time for education reform.

The privatization crowd hasn't made a lot of noise about the "status quo" in a while, because currently much of the status quo is what they forced on education. The new status quo is loaded with bad, toxic ideas; some are now old enough that the Duncan and DFER crowd waste our time opining about the days when their bad ideas were shiny and new and not dusty and disproven.

American education has never been perfect, has (like the country) been on a long journey to try to live up to its own ideals-- and the journey doesn't always lead directly forward. So what reforms do we need right now to move education forward?

End Test-centric Schooling

It is time to end the tyranny of the Big Standardized Test, which warps and distorts the shape of education. We do test prep drill instead of full, deep, rich studies. We judge every school expenditure, every education program, every idea by one question-- will this raise scores on a mediocre multiple-choice math and reading test given once per year. 

We have convinced a generation of teachers and students that the only real job of schools is to get students to score well on the Big Standardized Test. What a cramped, meager vision of education. 

If we absolutely can't quit the test, then at the very barest minimum, we have to remove every last stake from it. That includes never again using it as a proxy for "student achievement," which is probably impossible because education journalists and education researchers are so addicted to that sloppy shorthand. 

How will we know how students are doing? That's a tough question, but my real answer is we don't know all that much now, because the sliver of data produced by the BS Test is tiny and certainly disproportionate to the amount of damage that focusing on the test does to education. Start by asking the big questions, like "what is education for" and then start trying to figure out how to measure that instead of asking "What can we measure and reduce to simple data, and how can we convince ourselves that that's what's really important."

Regulate Choice

Choicers have insisted every step of the way that charters and vouchers should operate free from government oversight and regulation because the magical free market will take care of it. We are far enough into the experiment that this assurance is bunk. Furthermore, children only get one shot at school-- it is unacceptable to have to tell a student "Sorry. Turns out we didn't know what we were doing and your last few years of school were a waste." Choicers are going to say, "But bad public schools do that, too" and maybe they do, but you don't accept it there, so why accept it for choice schools.

And that goes double for voucher schools. If you want to get voucher money, your doors will be open to all students, you won't discriminate, and you will meet the basic educational standards of the state. If you want to be free of government oversight and regulation, then don't take vouchers and remain a fully independent private school.

And education savings accounts should also have oversight. The kind of guardrails that Arizona voters wanted in order to prevent the kind of fraud and abuse that Arizaon's program typified. 

Taxpayers deserve accountability and transparency for how their education dollars are spent, not assurances that magical free market forces will make everything okay. 

Worried about parental choice? It is not necessary to unleash an unregulated free market to give them choice, and it is absolutely necessary to have oversight and regulation to protect the interests of the rest of society. Spoiler alert: parents are not by any stretch of the imagination the only stakeholders in education.

End Teacher Micro-management

The technoreformsters of the modern era have dreamed of a world in which classrooms are teacher-proof and teaching requires only slightly more qualifications than a fast food fry cook. The result is continued micro-management of teachers and a deprofessionalized profession. Teachers should work with support and guidance in a system that is built on trust. 

Do not try to legislate curriculum and instruction. Do not decide that whatever program a senator just heard on a podcast should be turned into a legislative mandate. By all means, advocate for better and better curriculum and instruction, but do it by making the case to teachers as if they were, in fact, education professionals, and don't just try to force them to follow the flavor of the month.

Let teachers teach. Yes, hold them accountable to professional standards. But let them do their damned jobs. Give them the tools and support they need. Make the profession attractive again with decent levels of pay and autonomy linked to power and responsibility. 

And in connection with this--

Fix the teacher pipeline

Look, the teacher training pipeline has never been great, but these days its even worse. It has always suffered from college professors whose familiarity with K-12 classrooms runs from limited to non-existent. Now add to that education departments that are teaching future teachers that their job is mainly test prep. 

I've talked about better approaches to teacher training many times. They programs should emphasize content knowledge, a big pedagogical toolbox, and lots of support in the early stages. 

Really fix the administrator pipeline

Show me a school with problems, and I will show you a school with a bad administrator. Administrative jobs are the least attractive in education-- all the responsibility and little power. So maybe they just attract a lot of the wrong people. But we don't talk about this issue nearly enough. 

Fix the research pipeline

So much education is junk-- or indistinguishable from junk. And working teachers don't have the time to sort through the mountain of stuff. I sure wish there was a way for meaningful, useful research to get to classroom teachers. 

Funding

Can we bring an end to the American desire to fund education on the cheap? A tough haul, but still a reform that is needed. Fund so that districts can compete for top teachers. Fund so that districts can lower class sizes and provide more supports for teachers and students. Fund so that outdated facilities can be brought up to speed. Fund so that some students aren't attending what everyone knows is the poor, run down school. 

Talk about what education is for

This is not a question we will ever answer definitively for all of the country. But our failure to talk about it all has allowed Certain Folks to plug in their own answer, which appears to be roughly "To generate a stream of data that will allow corporate overlords to better command and select meat widgets to generate profits." This is not a great answer, but we've never discussed it. Nor did we ever discuss "The purpose of school is to generate good scores on the BS Test," so we were just stuck with it.

One of the challenges of the classroom is that you face a hundred different expectations, most unspoken. We should have the conversation and not be afraid that it's a question that can't be settled, because the conversation really matters, and people who want education to suck for Lessers because "those people will just be digging ditches anyway" should have to say so out loud.

Rebuild the social commitment

Part of the conversation we haven't had and part of the effect of the free market choice movement has been to quietly torpedo the societal commitment to educating all children. We need to strengthen that commitment.

It's not a new issue. We can go all the way back to the days after Brown v. Board when a whole lot of folks complained, "What do you mean I have to pay taxes so Black kids can go to school??!!" Part of the free market education project as envisioned by Milton Friedman has always been taking education as a commitment for which society, through government, takes responsibility and turning it into a commodity for which individuals take responsibility. The underlying message of school choice is "If you want an education for your kid, that's a You problem." Vouchers, dressed up as choice and freedom, are a pint-sized payoff to soften the blow (given enough years, I predict they would slowly shrink away entirely).

This is wrong at least two ways. First, it's a shitty, selfish stance, a declaration that I should never be in any way inconvenienced for the benefit of my fellow human. It's an odious ideology. Second, it's impractically short-sighted. Do you really imagine that you will suffer no ill effects if large sectors of society are under-educated? History says you are a dope. In fact, as Adam Laats points out in Mr Lancaster's System, part of the origin of our system is a societal concern about too many unschooled youths running about. 

This is one of the cheapest asks on my list. It just takes some people in leadership positions to talk about how we are all of us stakeholders in education and we all benefit from a well-educated citizenry. It just takes some leaders to talk about how we have a collective responsibility to make it possible for every child to unlock their potential to the benefit of not only them, but all of us. Lord, how long has it been since we had leaders talking like that? Instead we get noise about how education will fix inequity (so nobody else in government needs to work on the problem) and education will help individuals make more money and/or be more useful to future employers or talk about how schools must serve parents because the students are their parents' chattel. 

Screw all of that. We all pay for education because we all benefit from education. Because the most fundamental feature of a nation is that we take care of the other people in that nation. Because no nation ever ran into trouble because of too much education. Education is the work of helping young humans find and embrace their best and truest selves even as they achieve greater understanding of what it means to be fully human in the world. I want to hear leaders talk like that, and then I want them to craft education policy like they believe it.

Is this an exhaustive list?

Probably not. Feel free to add to it in the comments.

I’ve been starting and restarting this post for a couple of years now, because I believe we need education reform-- as long as we understand that “ed reform” doesn’t mean what it meant ten or twenty years ago. Something just possessed me to finally finish it off today. And I hope the message gets out there.

The Testing Barrier for Whole Books

There's been a growing amount of noise over the absence of complete books from high school education. That's a good thing, though like many educational issues, it's a cause that can be used in the service of not-particularly-swell goals. But let me tell you what we should be looking at.

The barrier to whole works in the classroom is not student laziness or social media or screens or our transformation into a post-literate society, though all of those factors deserve discussion.

The problem is testing. Not just the effects of the Big Standardized Tests, but the fact that really meaningful assessment a student's work with a whole book is nearly impervious to any sort of standardized test at all. And yet the past several decades has been marked by a push to reduce all assessment to simple standardized data points.

I have ranted about the effects of the BS Test on reading at length. The best way to prepare for a test is to run students through lessons that closely mimic the test. This is the flip side of the principle that you should design an assessment to closely fit what and how you have taught, which is why you design your test after you have designed your instructional unit-- but of course the BS Tests were meant to drive and control instruction, so they came first.

Anyway, the best way to prepare students for a test that is based on superficial multiple-choice questions in response to a context-free short excerpt is to subject them to batteries of multiple-choice questions attached to short context-free excerpts. Education "experts" have tried to argue that an excerpt is fine, that in many instances it's all that's necessary and we don't need to bother with complete works. These experts are full of it.

But the reliance on the BS Test is just a symptom of the trouble with reading whole books.

There's no easy, standardizable way to assess student's work with a whole book. How do we work our way into a whole book? Slowly, carefully. Plenty of support. Lots of discussion. Lots of mulling and reflecting. Maybe some reading of other opinions about the work. 

Studying a whole book is the epitome of work that cries out for slow schooling. The time to dig deep, to turn the pieces over and over. And the best results are not particularly easy to assess.

The cheap and ugly method is superficial and pointless (I still have bitter memories of a test question about Oliver Twist asking about the appearance of Bill Syke's dog). But it's easy to check, easy to score, produces a clear digital score. I was fond of assigning papers, with topics often growing organically out of classroom discussion. It gets even better when you start talking and writing about the connections between different works (Huck Finn and Heart of Darkness make an intriguing pair). And if you have thoroughly wormed your way into the piece, projects that allow students to build and repackage their understanding (and make jokes-- I have always maintained that the more education you have, the more jokes you get) in ways that are both illuminating. I still have fond memory of one group's sketch in which Hamlet went on The Dating Game and tried to choose between Ophelia, Edna Pontellier, and Lady Brett Ashley. My colleague regularly put Lady MacBeth on trial (redeemable or not) in her AP class and my 12th grade vocational students served as the jury. 

Point being, you can dig deep into the meanings and ideas of whole books, many of which defy any attempt to declare that there is Just One True Way to read them. They become rich sources of experience existing at the intersection of the work and the students and the teacher's own expert guidance, but you aren't going to measure that in a quick-to-take, easy-to-score assessment.

The SAT is supposed to measure college level reading, yet a new study shows that the test is getting, well, dumber. The passages are shorter, and mostly expository (aka the kind of thing that is more likely to have One True Reading).  Says Thomas Aquinas College Vice President John Goyette, “The makers of the SAT seem to believe that the ability to tackle long and complex literary works isn’t an important skill for college students anymore.”

The Classic Learning Test wants to pitch itself as a better, less woke, more classically awesome alternative to the SAT, but it has failed to make much of a mark, though Florida likes using it for a graduation test because more students pass it. 

But no standardized test of the SAT or ACT or CLT sort is ever going to provide a useful assessment of really reading whole books. The AP test's version of "pick a work from this list and write this essay" came closer to an ideal, but the AP folks have totally lost their way and are now looking for a director of AP English Language and Composition who will be "leveraging generative AI to author and/or review assessment content, improving and/or making more efficient assessment processes and outputs."

The challenge remains-- teaching whole books requires time and care and does not lend itself to the kind of speed and "efficiency" favored so much in education these days, nor can it be assessed in nice, neat simple numbers. That doesn't mean it can't be assessed at all, but that assessment is best if it's loose and flexible and takes into account the subjectivity involved in grappling with whole works. Teaching whole books takes time, and it requires a level of comfort with squishy imprecise assessments that involve a certain amount of flexibility and grace. If you can't get comfortable with those features, you will have a hard time putting whole books back in your classroom. 

Use Google's AI Or Else

Tired of tech companies trying to shove AI down your throat? Or worse, your children’s throats? Google says open wide, or else!

As covered by Dana Goldstein and Natasha Singer for the New York Times, Google has announced that starting next fall, schools will have the option of turning off AI in the Google toolbox offered to students. But--

If the school turns off AI, threatens the not-actual-mobsters that run the company, students will not have access to Google search. As Goldstein and Singer report:

“Search and A.I. are deeply integrated,” said Chris Phillips, vice president for education at Google. If a school has banned A.I., he added, students “will not have access to search, and they’ll see a message from their school that indicates it’s not available.”

And, you know, creating a version of Google for students that doesn't incorporate AI is just incompatible with their plans to recruit young customers too hard to do.

This from the same company that cannot produce a genAI product that doesn't easily facilitate cheating. Guided Learning is supposed to get students to Learn Stuff rather than just using a cheatbot (spoiler alert: it's still just a cheatbot).

But Google, the folks who previously declared internally that its school products were intended to create a pipeline of future users, really really really really REALLY want to put AI in front of the 70 million future users sitting in schools. They have just had a "negative cash flow quarter" thanks to massive AI spending. That is further exacerbated by the discovery that this AI-incorporated search that they want to force on students actually makes less money than the old approach.

Look, if you are of a Certain Age, you might still harbor the quaint notion that Google's main business is running a search engine. It is not; the New Google's (the post "Don't Be Evil" Google) main business is advertising. But we tend to be sensitive about the idea of turning over young minds and eyeballs to advertisers, so it has been useful for Google to wear its Ed Tech mask when approaching schools.

Only the Ed Tech mask won't cover up AI, and educators and parents and even students have been pretty clear that they'd rather not give children unfettered access to AI products. 

This is a hell of a bold move for Google, considering that there are plenty of other search engines in the world.

I expect that many other tech companies will be whipping up a counter-Google education campaigns by end of business today.  I can only hope that this piece of evil thuggery will blow up in Google's piggy corporate faces, and I certainly intend to share with my own local school district how I think they should respond. 

In My County, Children Vote

I will vote today. I always vote; I am what political operatives call a super-voter, a person who has voted in every election he was ever eligible to vote in, and therefore can be counted on to vote next time, so aiming a megaphone of electioneering at him might not be a waste of time. Today, I only vote in three races, and none of them have any great significance because it would be a huge shock and surprise if they didn't go the way they are expected to go. Josh Shapiro seems hard to beat, and my state and US House members-- well, in my area, if Jesus registered as a Democrat and ran against a drowned rat registered as a Republican, I would not bet against the rat.

Anyway, I will still vote, because that's what good citizens do-- they vote. No matter what. No matter the outcome.

But I won't vote until after I pick up the Board of Directors from school, because they always vote with me. Not in the actual election. But in my county, someone decided years ago to start offering ballots to children.

The children vote on issues like favorite type of cookie or best pet or best way to spend vacation. They vote on a special ballot, hand it in, and in a week or so, the local newspaper/website will publish the results. 

One actual result of this is that the Board knows what an election is, how it the voting place is laid out, how one approaches it, waits one's turn, signs your name, marks a ballot-- the whole business. When the day comes that they can vote in the real election, it will be exciting, but it will also be familiar and unintimidating.

Yes, their teachers sometimes run election simulations. But this gives kids exposure to the real thing, the whole business of voting. No mystery. No fear.

And as a bonus, thanks to some of my former colleagues, some high school students are spending the day as volunteers at polling places.

The cost of this Young Voter Education Program is minimal. There's some non-zero number of man-hours used to tabulate. There's the copier paper used to make the ballots. That's about it. 

So my hat's off today to county officials who hit on a simple but effective method of educating the next generation of voters about how the process works and helping them prepare for the day when they can try to execute their obligations as US citizens. 

It's Not A Tutor

There's a new ten-week study from the UK looking at AI as--well, the study people writing about it (like Greg Toppo at The 74) insist on calling it AI tutoring. There's also a recent paper studying the use of Khanmigo which is also characterized as an "AI tutor." We'll look at the results in a moment, but first, I want to look at that term--

"AI Tutor" is yet another marketing term. "Tutor" tries to connect the software to the (somewhat dubious) data showing that tutoring does awesome things for learning! (Two sigma!!) But the use of "tutor" also evokes the idea of a human tutor, a knowledgeable human expert who sits down with the student to provide face-to-face individual support and assistance for learning. That's such a more charming image than, say, a solitary student hunched over a desk and working her way through a ten-inch stack of worksheets.

In fact, if we're thinking about a student ploughing through worksheets or simply buried in a book about the topic at hand, nobody says that students is being tutored. They're just studying. The worksheets are a study aid. The book is just a study aid. And any sort of software-- that's just a study aid being viewed through a computer screen. 

The advantage of actual tutoring (if any) is working with a human who can enter into dialogue about what the student does or does not understand, drilling down to find the mental error the student is tripping over. The tutor also has the advantage of the ability to put human-to-human pressure on the student to perform-- to actually try and keep at it, as opposed to just checking out and/or wandering off. 

GenAI promises that kind of interaction, or at least markets itself on that notion. But the Oreopoulus and Low Khanmigo study found, as did an earlier study this year, that students don't actual interact in that way. Students are supposed to be able to message Khanmigo to discuss issues, but only 17% followed up on a mistake. And many didn't do anything at all. As Khan himself told Matt Barnum of the program's tutoring efficacy for students, “They just didn’t use it much.”

The new study is a trial with ten weeks worth of lessons for 1,179 UK students with Eedi's product, built on Gemini, Google's fine-tuned for teaching genAI bot. Google Deepmind did the analysis and discovered that the AI didn't make much difference compared to "static content." There are differences between girls and boys when it came to AI vs. human tutors, but generally not much difference. Eedi proudly notes that the AI generated hardly any errors. But in terms of advantages, it offered just one-- it's probably cheaper than an actual human tutor. 

What about the 5% problem-- the finding that these programs work great for students who use the program as intended, but that's only about 5% of all students. And there's plenty of reason to think that the 5% students are the ones least in need of help or at the very least would have done just fine with any sort of study aid. Eedi's students engaged more regularly, however there is zero mystery to that finding-- the Eedi sessions were built into regular class time. And 1 in 5 students still ignored the software when a "do you need help" message popped up. Clippy can relate.

AI "tutors" still lack one other element of the human approach-- motivation. Bibi Groot, Eedi's chief impact officer, told Toppo that AI tutoring is “great to support students who are already motivated, but we need to figure out how to motivate students who aren’t motivated in the first place.”

Look, it's not a tutor. It just isn't. It's one more study tool, and for the right student in the right situation with the right material, it might even be a useful one. But a study tool is all it is, and the rush to make it a useful one could only be aided by dropping the charade that it is a replacement for a (costly) human tutor and instead focusing on how it could be a more useful study tool.

But the AI industry isn't going to do that, because it would involve going back to what AI "tutoring" really is-- an extension of the old ed tech Personalized Adaptive Learning model, which was mostly just an endless series of worksheets chosen by an algorithm and fired off at some beleaguered student until they were allowed to unclamp themselves from a screen. But an infinite pile of worksheets was never very compelling-- not even if you shout "But they're coming at you through a computer screen!" 

AI ramps up some of the tech capabilities ("Now, instead of selecting from a library of thousands of worksheets, we can create all new worksheet based on our library of thousands of worksheets!") and the ability to mimic human speech (but not the human thought or insight behind it-- being able to generate a question doesn't make you Socrates). But a study guide, however zippy, is not a tutor. 

ICYMI: Sugar Crash Edition (11/1)

Happy Day After. Now please, don't put up your Christmas decorations today. 

Here comes this week's list. 

Why Gov. Shapiro must say no to federal vouchers

A retired PA superintendent explains why the federal vouchers are a lousy idea.

Public Schools Are Prepping for Federal Choice Cash. They Still Might Not Get It

At EdWeek, Mark Lieberman addresses the continuing pipe dream that the federal vouchers will somehow infuse public schools with cash.

Empathy. Again.

Nancy Flanagan wonders why empathy is in the cross hairs again.

Commissioner Mack says competition is improving EVERYTHING. Show Us The Data.

Sue Kingery Woltanski looks at Florida's education honcho's delight in the privatization of education.

Was American education ever great? What Linda McMahon gets wrong about the past

Matt Barnum provides some historical perspective on Linda McMahon's ahistorical ranting.

It’s Time to Teach Students to Be Drivers of AI, Not Passengers

At The 74, two Newark teachers describe how they manage AI in their classrooms, and it's not the worst framework I've seen.

University of Minnesota report warns student AI use poses 'severe' threat to learning

More research to fill the vast gap that these researchers decry. Some of the conclusions are blindingly obvious (AI use for primary students is a bad idea), but hey, now there's actual research to back it up.

There Is No Alabama Miracle (But There Is a Lesson)

Bruce Baker explains why Alabama's results are nothing to get excited about.

Why Students Hide Themselves from Us

Alfie Kohn, on why students don't always let teachers or parents see who they are. 

One to the Other

Adrian Neibauer shares a learning experience with his students based on "The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street."

Ed Reform is Dead — it’s Parent Choice or Public Schools

Ben Riley and Jame Shanahan offer a take on the history of modern ed reform. I'm not sure I entirely agree with it, but it's an interesting version of the history and though-provoking at that.

Ohio’s Center for Christian Virtue Plans National Network of Religious Private Schools Paid for by Federal Tuition-Tax Credit Vouchers

Jan Resseger looks at one of the groups hoping to cash in on federal vouchers.

Selling Stories

Audrey Watters has a lot this time, including AI marketing, Democratic education leadership, and a host of valuable links.

Who Gets To Tell The Stories About Our Schools?

Jose Luis Vilson looks at the people telling all the stories about schools, and what it takes to have your story listened to.

The Slop is Creeping In

Michelle Banks writes about the frustration of arts communities rejecting AI "art" but still using those execrable AI posters for publicity.

More Than Music

I play in a community band, and a couple of my musical colleagues play in a larger community band festival. The conductor of their last one, Jari Villaueva, wrote this lovely tribute to community bands.

This week at Forbes.com, I reviewed Jen Jennings' excellent new book and also looked at the growing crisis in forced downsizing for districts.

Donnie Iris passed away this week. He was a Western PA icon of sorts, a regional star who peeked around the edges of national fame. This song is the closest he came to a real national hit (though the album King Cool has much of his best work).

The Imaginary One Size Fits All Education

It is one of the most-repeated myths of public education critics. Here's Linda McMahon spouting it again last summer:

We reject the one size fits all education approach. Parents, states, and local leaders know what’s best for our students! The Trump Administration is returning education decisions to those closest to our children. https://t.co/ItvHS7JxvB

— Secretary Linda McMahon (@EDSecMcMahon) July 10, 2026

"We reject the one size fits all education approach." 

You and everyone else, ma'm. The American school system is not one size fits all. It is structured in a way that makes one size fits all functionally impossible. There are roughly 13,000 public school districts (plus private schools, plus charter schools) and each is controlled by its own local board, with each board making its own set of decisions that are then filtered down through individual building administrations. That's a whole lot of different sizes of education.

Which was, of course, the central complaint of the standards movement-- that there were too many districts and buildings and teachers doing all sorts of different things, and why don't we impose one size for all? Common Core was their best, biggest attempt to inflict OSFA on the nation, and it failed, a big clunky wave that shattered and fragmented on the individual rocks of a fragmented system. People with power tried, really hard, to make one size fit all in US education, and it didn't work, not even when the standards went into witness protection and took up residence in many states under an assumed name. 

One size fits all for education in this country??!! When I was still teaching, I wasn't even one size fits alling it for a single day. Each class needed its own fit. My vocational students didn't need to master MLA research format and my college bound students didn't need to wrestle (yet) with resumes and job reports. Certain students needed a different approach, and certain other students needed an even more different approach. And that's before we get to the occasional special class, like the class I once taught that was 75% teen moms. 

Nor was I one size fits all from year to year-- every year involved more fine tuning and editing and reframing what I had done before. 

One size fits all schooling is right up there with hasn't changed in a century schooling and factory training schooling-- they are all glib criticisms effortlessly deployed by people who don't actually know what goes on inside actual schools. These are also the same folks who think that one size fits all schooling is a great idea if they get to pick the size ("If all teachers did X, then all students would learn Y") and then get pissed off that they can't make the same t-shirt fit on every single teacher and student in the country. 

One size fits all education is, in fact, a terrible idea. Fortunately, it's an idea to which education is highly resistant. Unfortunately, it's an idea that amateur education reformsters never tire of A) leveling as an accusation or B) trying to impose. 

AI Not Paying Off Outside Tech Sector

Yeah, maybe not

The chief economist at a major "asset management" company says that AI is not paying off anywhere outside the tech sector. Nobody is benefiting from the damned botslop except the companies behind it.

Torsten Slok is Partner and Chief Economist for Apollo Global Management, an American asset management outfit that handles about $850 billion. In a post earlier this month, Slok makes a point of separating the Magnificent 7 tech companies (NVIDIA, Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Tesla, and Meta) and the S&P 493 (what you get when you remove the big tech companies from the S&P 500). 

Slok's statement is pretty blunt: 

Despite massive investments and widespread hype around artificial intelligence, the technology has delivered zero financial payoff to corporate America outside of tech.

 No revenue per worker increases, no profit margin increases, and no productivity boosts for the S&P 493-- only the for the Mag 7 (that is apparently what we're calling them in the investment world). 

Can American corporations turn cheap "intelligence" into revenue growth and increased profits? Slok has his doubts:

AI may be a great calculator, but in business, intelligence is mostly judgment. Judgment depends on context, and the answer varies with which human or which model you ask. Perhaps most importantly, AI does not understand accountability, trust, culture, unwritten rules, ethical trade-offs or fairness, all of which shape reputational risk and ultimately drive revenue growth and profit margins.

Emphasis his.

What a very human way to look at AI's utility (or lack thereof). The article comes with a series of charts that make his point with simple graphic clarity. 

Two points for the education world to consider. AI is failing to transform any sector outside of its own, which suggests that its ability to transform education is being grossly overstated. It also suggests that the inevitability argument-- that students must learn to work with AI or be left behind in the AI-centered future-- is being grossly overstated. For the zillionth time, education leaders would be wise to work a little harder at distinguishing between legitimate attempts to predict the future from disingenuous attempts to market a particular future into existence. 

Bad Writing Advice for Day of AI

If you are a high school teacher looking to incorporate genAI into your writing instruction, MIT has some really bad advice for you.

You may recall Hour of Code, the giant corporate-infested campaign to popularize coding (if not, I recommend Natasha Singer's Coding Kids). That has now become the Hour of AI, but apparently some folks want to extend that a bit. Powered by MIT RAISE and the "leading researchers in AI education," here comes the Day of AI, which comes equipped with a whole raft of units more appropriate for actually many several days of AI. Incidentally, RAISE stands for "Responsible AI for Social Empowerment and Education," so there's a sign of where this is headed.

The list of curricula is extensive and runs from pre-K through 12. For instance, there's a K unit "Machines All Around Us" that "introduces students to the foundational idea that machines are human-made tools designed to help people do work and solve problems." There are units about how to verify information and thinking critically about AI, and they are not at all terrible (not perfect, but not terrible). 

However, "The Writing Process in the Age of AI" for grades 9-12 is hugely problematic. 

Let's start with calling this the "Age of AI," as if AI is the dominant feature of our times. I'm willing to entertain an argument about that designation, but I'm not prepared to concede AI world domination as a fait accompli. I'm not able to see the educator guide or student resources (because I'm not going to give them my info), but I can see the slide deck that accompanies the week's worth of lessons. So let's take a look.

Lesson 1 is "Demystifying the Machine," and it does a nice job of making clear that LLMs do not use "thinking," but rather a process of predicting the next word. It sets up LLM prediction against human judgment, and that's fair. It also provides an age-appropriate but reasonably accurate explanation of what LLMs actually do. So we're actually off to a good start. It's not going to last.

Lesson 2 is "from ideas to argument." This section highlights where the first place the creators think AI fits in the writing process, and it begins with the dubious advice that "AI is a good tool for brainstorming, questioning, and organizing." It adds the caveat that AI can give you more ideas but can't decide which ideas matter. The slides suggest that you prompt the AI, then annotate the results, weed out the ones that are weak or with which you disagree. They do not add "get rid of ideas that are actually wrong," which strikes me as the most time-consuming part of this approach. The rewrite the one you pick. 

"Choosing, revising, and rejecting" are "where the thinking is" is the claim here, and while I agree that that's where some think could happen, I have seen this movie before in the classic shake and bake high school "research" paper. Student locates however many sources you required, looks for the one that's easiest to turn into the assignment, and tries to rewrite something so that it says the same thing in a non-plagiarizey way. No thinking is required for any of it (which is why I stopped making that assignment).

Could this AI version of brainstorming involve thinking? Sure. Will it? Probably not.

Lesson 3 is "from prompt to persuasion," and it continues our trip through the writing process, and now we are headed way, way out into the weeds. Ever get stuck getting an essay started? AI can write that draft for you, "especially if you give it a high quality prompt." By "high quality prompt" you should include the sections you want in the essay, the arguments you have developed, counterarguments (if you're doing that, I guess) and other aspects of the essay you want to specify. I am trying to imagine a universe in which a writer has thought through all of the content and organization of an essay and yet somehow the actual writing escapes them. I cannot. If you have developed all the elements of the "high quality prompt," the actual placement of words on the page is barely work at all. 

The creators of this slide show remind you that AI can give you a draft, but you have to revise and rewrite to "make it yours." But let me share this: in 39 years of teaching human high school students, I found that getting them to do meaningful rewrites and revisions on their own rough drafts was by far the hardest part of the writing process. But the creators of this show want students to revise the AI draft "so it is accurate, sounds like you, and says what you want it to say." But if you know what you want it to say, why wouldn't you just start by writing it yourself? 

There's another layer of bad here-- this is training students to be accountability sinks. Instead of being creators themselves, this approach trains them for a role in which they do not create, but accept the responsibility of fixing whatever the bot extruded. 

And of course the reality here is that students will have the AI do everything and make nominal attempts to pretend to "make it their own." This is a framework for formalized cheating.

Lesson 4 is "name the process" which is about documenting the many ways that you used a bot to do the work. The lesson works through the details required-- it's not enough just to say you used AI, but specify which brand bot, record your prompts, and "reflect on how the use of AI affected your writing--this is your chance to show your authorship." You're going to show how you an author by writing insights about the essay that the bot wrote for you. 

Lesson 5 is "deciding when to use AI." This lesson talks about cognitive effort and cognitive debt and encourages students to think about how using AI to avoid thinking is probably bad. It cites research that shows that students who wrote essays with genAI tools could not reproduce a version of those essays later on their own. "It was like their brains hadn't stored the information." No shit. 

The best way for a classroom teacher to use this unit would be to go straight to Lesson 5, maybe throw in a bit of Lesson 1, and explain, "And that is why we are not even going to bother with the rest of this unit."

What is the benefit of using a bot to do most of the work of a writing assignment? Who knows. This unit is a solution in search of a problem, or more to the point, a product in search of a use case.
 

College Readiness Panic for a New Decade

High school graduates aren't ready for college! The articles about this problem are popping up all over (here, here and here). Chad Aldeman, who I think of as a relatively level-headed member of the reformy crowd, just dropped a piece passing on UC's increasing number of math-failing froshies. 

It is entirely possible that something is really happening here. But this is not the first time that the issue of college readiness has been used for some education policy chicken littling. A dozen years ago I was writing responses to the same blaring alarm, only back then the lack of college readiness was being used to whip up support for the College Core. Here are some of the figures from back then looking at the amount of students who needed remediation:

The National Center for Education Statistics has a paper that looks at those numbers for 1999-2000, 2003-2004, and 2007-2008, and while it breaks them down a variety of ways, the overall conclusion is that 1999-2000 was worse than either of the other years sampled, and all of the numbers hovered around the twenties, low or high. But this article from Chicagoland says that over a third of students entering college need remedial help, based on 2008 stats from the government-- same as the previous report. A Harvard professor looking at a 2003 study comes up with one third as well. The Inside Higher Ed Bridge to Nowhere report throws around a 30% number. And I would swear that I recently heard 46% tossed into the remediation soup as well. Most of these sources do not compare the current figures to any from the alleged golden age of non-remediation. So can I at least suggest that the numbers are "controversial" or "contested" or maybe even "pulled out of a variety of different orifices"

Apparently today's freshmen were not saved by an entire educational career spent under the guidance (more or less) of Common Core. But before we start using the success rate of college freshmen as an indictment of high school quality, let me suggest a few more factors to also consider.

Admissions process: As the generations entering college get smaller and smaller, and more and more people decide college isn't worth the bother and/or expense, colleges are doing their best to fill up with students who possess a warm body and can write checks that don't bounce. Lowering the bar is going to result in students with less college ready capabilities. 

Measuring remediation needs: If we're talking about students who need remediation, we need to talk about how the college is identifying that need. Because sometimes it's a not-very-good assessment test.

Marketing: One of the big policy pushes, especially from neoliberals dems, has been to get everyone to go to college. "Get a college education, or you will be doomed to living in a van down by the river eating cat food on a hot plate!" has been a big message, and it has scared a lot of people into college who might have been better served by a trade school or another post-high school option. 

And perhaps most important is this last one, because if we're seeing an actual dip in educational attainment, I can think of one factor that distinguishes the education of the generation now entering college that is different from the generations that came before.

Test-centered education is not great: Today's college freshmen got thirteen years of more-or-lee (depending on their state) Common Core flavored education, which in practice has meant thirteen years of getting prepped for the Big Standardized Test. If we are questioning the quality of the K-12 system, it seems only sensible to look at the policy that has taken control of K-12 education in this country. Maybe centering education on passing a single mediocre math and reading multiple choice test is not a great idea.

There is an extraordinary irony here. Many of the folks now saying, "Boy, you public school teachers are really messing up your job" are the same folks who spent the last twenty years saying, "Here, public school teachers-- we are going to tell you how to do your job and you're going to listen to us or else." This is an old education story-- "accountability" never means "accountability for policy makers."

We could dig up a few other responses, like questioning why "just raise expectations" is a useful prescription for high schools, but not for colleges.

And there is always the possibility that this is one more faux crisis. But if there is an issue here, it would be useful to look at it more closely than simply declaring that Kids These Days are graduating from high school with underdeveloped thinky parts and it's probably the fault of Those Damned Teachers and their lousy public schools. 

Look At This AI Dystopia: The Tech Exec Who Doesn't Want To Human

It is rare that one single article can capture so much astonishing boneheaded inhuman technobaloney, but Alexandra Alter has done it with her profile of Marissa Mayer in the New York Times. I can't remember the last time my jaw hit the floor so many times in succession. And before we get into this, I want you to remember all the times you thought, "Surely, they can't expect AI to take over the very human parts of teaching students." Because the answer is these people think outsourcing your humanity is a desirable thing.

The headline is a tip-off that we're headed No Place Good-- "Maybe We All Need an A.I. Wife" was likely chosen by an editor, but still. The piece kicks off with this story--

Late last year, Marissa Mayer was struggling with what felt like an impossible task.

Her daughter Marielle was turning 10, and Marielle’s teacher wanted three bullet points summarizing what made her special. Mayer — the former chief executive of Yahoo and a pioneer at Google, where she was the first female engineer — likes cracking a hard problem. But she felt overwhelmed by the range and complexity of potential answers.

So Mayer asked her personal A.I. assistant, Dazzle. Within a few seconds, Dazzle delivered an answer.

“It came back and was like, your daughter is empathetic, creative and an animal lover,” Mayer said. She thought it was perfect.

How sad for her daughter. And how sad for a grown woman to be unable to complete a simple parenting task-- and then to be impressed by a bot that pulls off the very low-bar-iest of answers. But it just gets worse and worse.

Mayer has a start-up that is pushing an AI personal assistant, an AI tool "that can handle everyday hassles, like buying a pair of pants you took a photo of, or finding a birthday present for your picky spouse." Because God knows you don't want to be trying to pick out a present for your spouse on your own. The special twist for Dazzle (that's the product's name) is that it will root through your camera rolls to manage tasks that a barely conscious human should already be able to do.

What's the plus? Besides offloading all that pesky humanning? Mayer is excited that something that used to take hours or minutes can now get done in seconds. Perhaps you could use the newly freed-up time to go introduce yourself to your spouse and children.

Mayer thinks this will especially appeal to women, who she imagines are more visual. So the bot will look at all the pictures and then “It essentially understands your personality, your likes, your dislikes, because it knows what you think looks good.”

And maybe what overextended professional women need is an A.I. wife, an emotional labor bot that can plan a birthday party and knows when it’s Crazy Socks Day or Crazy Hat Day at the kids’ school, because it has photos of the fliers that came home crumpled in a backpack.

Yes, parenting is hard. So very hard. Mayer has noticed that AI (like every other aspect of modern tech) is mostly guy stuff, and she's not wrong to call out the ambient baked-in sexism. But is the solution really to draw women in with a chance to offload human behavior? 

This start-up has ten engineers presently, which suggests that, despite Mayer's history as a successful tech overlord, this piece might be a bit premature. 

But Dazzle's mission statement-- “To close the gap between what people want and what people can do with A.I.”-- is this stuff really what people want? Mayer rattles off her uses in what Alter calls her "be-Dazzled life." 

She’s used it to find a family activity during a vacation in Venice (Dazzle proposed a Venetian mask-making workshop that the whole family loved); to plan a play date for one of her twin daughters (Dazzle knows Marielle is into magic, and suggested visiting a magic shop in San Francisco); and to choose a theme for her son Macallister’s 14th birthday party (Dazzle recommended a glow-in-the-dark pool party, and found glowing pool toys and corn hole).

“He was like, ‘Mom, I don’t want to hit the theme that hard,’” she said. “I just can’t help myself.”

Well, yes. It appears that she literally cannot help herself and must instead get a bot to help her do exceptionally ordinary parent things. She has also asked it for advice on what to wear and Halloween costume ideas. It suggested dressing up like a cake, because it "knows" she loves baking and art. 

Mayer considers outsourcing mental load to machines an okay thing, though I'm wondering how she feels about outsourcing emotional and interact-with-human loads. Alter reports that Mayer at one point "mused enthusiastically about the potential efficiency gains of having her A.I. assistant talk directly to her husband’s A.I. assistant." Yes, by all means. It would be most efficient to have your bot talk to everyone else's bot and while the bots are simulating human life, the humans could go lie down in the basement and start decomposing early. Efficiency!!

And Alter, God bless her, asks the right question and captures the telling answer:

When I asked Mayer if it’s somewhat depressing to imagine a frictionless future when birthday celebrations, holiday gifts and family vacations are planned by A.I., she seemed caught off guard.

“I haven’t really thought that through,” she said.

Clearly she has not.

Well, Mayer is rich and has had plenty of success. She is also relatively sanguine about sexism in the industry, even though she took a lot of unearned grief for taking only a two week maternity leave. She agrees that women are underrepresented, but doesn't agree that gender is a barrier to success in techworld.

Her hopes for Dazzle lean in part on developing an app that doesn't require technical skill to use. And she cites promising early feedback, noting that some power users are "interacting more with Dazzle than their spouse." Good God, if that's success, then may we all be happy failures. I will note that Alter sits in on a meeting of Dazzle staff and developers, who do in fact meet in person and not by having their bots exchange data with each other.

So remember-- the next time you're arguing that surely nobody thinks that bots could be used to replace live human beings in the classroom, there are people out there who think it's possible-- and desirable-- to have a bot manage your relationships with every human you come in contact with. There is nothing remotely appealing about this vision, and I wish our rich tech overlords would knock it off right now.

ICYMI: Pumpkin Cutting Edition (10/25)

Better get on the stick-- it's time to start chopping those big orange gourds into something scary or at least amusing because the clock is ticking on the sugariest of holidays. The board of directors already has their costumes, and we'll be continuing to select the best in candy-distribution events in the area. There will be, of course, profit sharing arrangements with upper management. May you have fun in your neighborhood.

In the meantime, here's the reading from a week in which people really did write about something other than Alpha schools and the new season of Sold a Story.

Don’t Be Fooled by Claims That Tax-Credit Scholarships Can Help Public Education

At EdWeek, former Ed Secretary Miguel Cardona has an actual strong opinion about something (and Robert Kim of Education Law Center helps him write it up). Pretty good explanation of why the federal vouchers are a bad idea.

New Federal School Vouchers Are Likely to Exacerbate Inequity and Injustice

Jan Resseger has been reading up on the federal vouchers, and she is also unconvinced that they are going to lead to good things. 

5 ‘Good’ AI Use Cases That Are Actually Bad for Students

At EduTopia, Paige Tutt and Stephen Merrill talk us through five supposedly good uses for AI that are, in fact, damaging and just generally not a great idea. Just ask yourself which skill students were supposed to be developing before you handed the job to AI.

Experimenting With Our Children: Who Answers to the 18-Year-Old the Voucher Failed?

Bruce Baker has been on a tear lately, and this piece from the school finance expert asks an important question--where does an 18 year old whose education was sacrificed to vouchers turn for "accountability"?

These Parents are Taking on Big Tech (and Winning)

Jennifer Berkshire shares seven tales of parental victory over ed tech incursions into classrooms.

Her 6-year-old brought home an AI-generated photo from school. This mom isn’t having it

Speaking of parents and AI, this South Carolina mother was not happy that AI was used to tell her daughter what her future would look like.

Scripted Curriculum (Direct Instruction): Research Contradicts the Story Being Sold

Paul Thomas has noticed that Sold a Story 2 is continuing the revival of the myth of the bad teacher. He would rather talk about bad faux scholarly journalism.

Selling a story that’s lost the plot

Ben Riley is not listening to the new Sold a Story, but he is thinking about direct instruction and what it is and is not.

Updating My Grading Policy Because You're All Using AI All The Time

Dan Meyer takes a new approach to grading. Listen up, students.

AI Will Never Care About Me

Adrian Neibauer considers a scary question-- should you let AI observe your teaching and offer feedback?

In the age of AI, I'm teaching my students how much of writing is not writing

So much this. Johnathan Fitzgerald let AI handle the parts of writing that aren't writing-- and then decided those parts really are parts of writing and should be handled by humans. 

Are Florida’s Proposed Science Standards Another Step Toward Classical Education for All?

Sue Kingery Woltanski brings us up to date on the latest round of shenanigans in the Free-ish State of Florida.

State spends more than $35,000 of your tax dollars for each new Ohio private school student since 2018

Meanwhile, in the Florida of the Midwest, Stephen Dyer explains how voucher costs have gotten really out of control.

‘We should not have to choose’: Alaska Native education specialists say culture and academics go together

Arguing for both quality and culture in Alaska.

He Tried to Set Limits on His State’s School Vouchers. Billionaires Helped Bankroll a Campaign to Unseat Him.

Vernon Criss helped create the voucher program, and he wanted to put some basic guardrails on it. The West Virginia Republican soon found himself in a battle against his own party.

Bruce Springsteen makes surprise appearance at Steven Van Zandt’s inaugural Teachers Hall of Fame Gala, Pete Davidson emcees

Little Steven continues to be a huge teacher booster.

Ramaswamy’s ad exposes MAGA’s obsession with parental estrangement

This Amanda Marcotte piece has nothing to do with education. Except that this parental estrangement fear and anger among the olds of the GOP is the same fear and anger behind educational parental rights movement and the belief that schools are breaking the ties between children and parents (who should be able to control their children completely).

This week at Forbes.com I wrote about Jen Jennings' new book (you should read it).

The film adaptation of Sweet Charity yielded some great Bob Fosse moments, but it also included this number from Sammy Davis Jr complete with late-60s groove. 

Robot Lips, Kiss My Blues Away

Allison Stanger is objectively smarter and more successful than I. She's a distinguished professor who has published books and articles in major outlets, testified before Congress, and just generally done a lot of impressive stuff.

And yet, I find her recent article for The Chronicle of Higher Education just incomprehensibly terrible.

"Who Cares Whether Academics Use AI to Write?" is yet another one of those "I like AI just fine cause it's such a big help" articles that leaves me scratching my metaphorical head.

Stanger's basic point is that in the world of scholarly writing, an argument is "meant for readers to understand, contest, and/or deploy." And if the argument is solid and the point is worthwhile, then why should anyone care where it came from? So, scholarship without scholars? Stanger argues that writing can be judged by considering its ultimate purpose, but her implication is that the ultimate purpose of some writing does not require a human being on one end of the exchange. Which begs the question-- do we need a human on either end? If the AI extrudes an argument that logically makes a useful point, would it be enough if that scholarly insight was picked up by another AI to use in extruding the next piece of smartitude? Does the reader that understands, contests, and/or deploys the scholarly argument have to be a human reader? Can it just be another AI scanner? And if the argument is that it needs to be a human reader, why does it not have to be a human writer? If a gaggle of AIs crank out a series of scholarly arguments and no human ever sees or hear them, do they matter?

Stanger really wants to make an argument for collaboration. Exhibit A kicks off the article with the story of an article shed wrote for a professional journal which they wanted to have re-edited so it would include more of "her voice" and offered to do the work themselves, and she is correct to point out the bizarreness of having "strangers rewrite my sentences so that they would sound more like me."

But they weren't entirely her sentences. The article went through ten drafts that she worked on with Claude Fable 5.1 and "other large language models, as I now work on nearly everything." But she reviewed every line and rewrote most of them. "By draft 10," she writes, "I could not have said where the machine’s contribution stopped and mine began." Really? I find that assertion incomprehensible. And if you rewrote most of the lines, why have AI write them to begin with? But Stanger asserts that the editor liked the argument, evidence and structure just fine, without making a case for who or what provided those features. Maybe she doesn't remember, but how the hell do you write a piece if you haven't already worked all of those things out in your own head?

I don't get these sorts of pieces. What is the point of adding a janky plagiarism machine to your writing process. In the larger world, the pitch often provides a simple answer-- the work. "I wanted to write a book and it was just too hard but now ChatGPT can write my book for me and I can skip all the hard part." But for academics like Stanger, the answer is often hidden. And true to form, one thing that Stanger does not provide is some statement of "Now that I use AI, I am able to [fill in the blank] more effectively than I could working on my own."

I always want to ask these folks the same question-- what can you do now with the AI that you could never do before on your own?

Exhibit B is this very article, which she says she produced by the same process. Ten drafts? With "extended collaboration" with AI? The piece is just under 1300 words and zero academic features like cited sources. And it includes paragraphs like this one:

How we educate our students in this brave new world is a question unto itself. The student essay was designed to provide evidence of learning, which it no longer does; a novice writer cannot responsibly direct a tool whose output they cannot yet judge. Teaching therefore requires careful scaffolding, which can be constructed in myriad ways, including a ban on AI use.

I mean, that's not terrible, but it's not ten-drafts-with-a-gifted-collaborator either. 

There's one more point to note in this article-- the really bad news for students (I may have buried the lead here). Stanger says she now teaches with AI (whatever that means) "and that has meant replacing my old assignments with harder ones." After noting her devotion to some human activities like close reading, rigorous citation, and Socratic method, she drops this sentence:

Because AI speeds up the routine work, I can assign more of it, in more varied forms: research, outlines of arguments, revisions of their own prose, oral presentations, and slide decks.

In other words, she has designed a course so that an unaided human, a student who has chosen to avoid AI "assistance," faces an almost unmanageable workload. The answer to "What can I do as a teacher that I couldn't do before AI" appears to be "Bury them under a literally inhuman workload." This skips right past study of AI and digging into the implications of using it and jumps ahead to "use it or suffer the consequences." 

Stanger doesn't appear to have completely lost the plot. "For all forms of writing, readers are owed a human being who stands behind the work," she writes. "A byline has always signaled ethical and legal responsibility." But not unassisted composition.

It sure looks as if Stanger has wrestled with some of the above issues elsewhere- her next book is Who Elected Big Tech, and she is a founding member of the Digital Humanism Initiative. But I find articles like the one covered here just kind of sad and discouraging. Writing is, to me, a supremely human, almost sacred action, and I am no more convinced that genAI can enhance the experience than I am convinced that getting a robot to kiss my wife for me would improve our marriage. I am, however, convinced that if people keep telling themselves that they need a bot to help them write, they can make it so. And that makes me sad.