ICYMI: 170th Anniversary Edition (7/26)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Big kids, big problems

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

Gifted and Talented Education Issues

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

Boys Should Go to Music Camp

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

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

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

Why Is Claude for Teachers

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

Who Is Ed-Tech For?

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

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

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

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

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

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

By One Dishonest Measure

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

Why we can't have nice things

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

A Fairy Tale Reform

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

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

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

Put to the Test

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

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

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

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

Short, worthwhile read.

Your Cookware Got Worse On Purpose

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

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

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

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

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

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The Conversation We Aren't Having

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is the conversation we aren't having--

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

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

ICYMI: Under Water Edition (7/12)

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

I Asked My Students About AI Again

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

The Real Cost of Fifty Years of Policy:

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

What Schools Can’t Do

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

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

And also:

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

There's plenty more where that came from.

AI: The Trust-Breaker

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let AI Burn

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

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

Nancy Flanagan on the recycling of old education ideas.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AI Data Centers: Greed Rather Than Need.

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

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

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

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

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

Choice for the Right Families

The choice system and the public system have two fundamentally different missions, and sometimes the choice crowd forgets itself and makes the difference explicit.

Take this webinar. It came to me in an e-mail blurbed "Attract the right families," and promises to introduce a three-step framework that will help schools "define their value, identify the right families, and guide them toward increased student enrollment."

The webinar is about marketing and features two marketing executives-- Amanda Duitsman for FlexPoint education, a cyber curriculum company, and Ashley Reyes for Florida Virtual School. That makes sense in a country in which school is inextricably welded to free market dynamics. It's not an anomaly; there's a whole industry out there like Schola Inbound Marketing with its promise to help Christian schools recruit "mission-appropriate families" and avoid the "rotten apple syndrome."

The free market does an excellent job of sorting out winners and losers, not just among vendors, but among customers. A business makes choices about which customers it wants to serve, and which ones it doesn't. This makes sense for restaurants or automobile dealers. No restaurant thinks it has a mission to feed every person in its area; it picks and chooses which customers it will serve.

We see this philosophy in the modern choice sector. Charter schools (like Success Academy in NYC) use a variety of obstacles and tests to shoo away families they don't want to serve. Voucher states write the laws to preserve a private school's "right" to reject students for any reason (or none at all). 

Choice fans will try to counter this argument by claiming that public schools aren't open to everyone either. But that glides past a fundamental difference in approach. The public school system says that the government has an obligation to provide your child with an education. The free market choice system says that society at large has no obligation to provide you with anything; it's your job to go find some vendor willing to educate your child. 

In that world, the public schools become holding pens for the hot potatoes that no private or charter school wants, a struggling system starved for resources and without much of a constituency to speak up for those schools.

There's one other irony in the "but public schools don't admit everyone, either" argument. The argument is that families are sorted by housing costs, and that's not wrong, but it also means that free market forces in the housing sector create educational inequity. And the solution to that free market effect is... the free market? The free market in housing has, in some times and places, been warped by prejudice and discrimination-- most notably the practice of redlining. Yet some choice advocates insist that private schools should be able to indulge in an educational version of redlining.

Attaching free market forces to education incentivizes schools of choice to be careful and selective about which students they admit. A free market choice system rejects the principle that we have a shared responsibility to make sure that every child has a decent education and replaces it with the notion that the responsibility belongs solely to the family, and that family will have to hope that they are deemed a desirable family for a school of choice to enroll. For the "right" families, choice; for the rest, good luck, caveat emptor, and here's hoping your local public school is still open.

The Fundamental Challenge To Public Education and School Choice

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

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

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

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

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

There have been a variety of solutions on the table:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Poiner puts it this way:      

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ICYMI: 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. 

ICYMI: Spring Arrives Edition (4/12)

Spring does not officially arrive in Northwest Pennsylvania until we've had at least one snow after Easter, and this year that milestone arrived quickly. So now we're into the days of Spring, when one needs a coat in the morning and shorts in the afternoon and an umbrella and mud shoes all the time. Not my favorite season, but it has its charms. 

Here's some reading for the week. If you do not do so already, consider subscribing to some of these folks. 

Inside the Latest MAGA Attack on Undocumented Children in Public Schools

Josh Cowen takes a look at Stephen Miller and his targeting immigrant children as a way to punish them and their parents, because Stephen Miller just does not want those brown people around here. What a miserable man.

Old Dog, Old Tricks

Teacher Kate Roberts with a wonderfully eloquent argument for remembering and humanity.

If Astronauts Can Attend Public Schools. . .

Dear Bubbie reminds us about the connections between astronauts and our public schools, and the threats to those schools (particularly in Florida).

DeSantis signs Florida law to label groups as terrorists and expel student supporters

You may remember when Florida tried to declare the Council on American-Islamic Relations and the Muslim Brotherhood as terrorist organizations. Then a federal judge told them to knock it off. So now DeSantis and company have passed as new law that lets them call anyone a terrorist supporter they want to, and throw students out of the state. The AP has the story.

When a teacher ditched screens, class got harder. That may be why it worked.

Bookmark this piece by Matt Barnum at Chalkbeat. A teacher got rid of his computer assistance, and it made his job harder--but it worked better. Almost like speed, efficiency and ease are not critical needs for educational achievement.

Schools across America are quietly admitting that screens in classrooms made students worse off and are reversing years of tech-first policies

Marco Quiroz-Gutierrez at Fortune with the story of ed tech regret.

It’s Not about Cheating

Nancy Flanagan explains-- it's not about the cheating, but about the learning.

Primavera Online Charter School avoids shutdown for abysmal grades after State Superintendent Tom Horne steps in for multi-millionaire owner

The fairy tale that free market forces will provide accountability and excellence in the school choice world takes yet another hit. Turns out if you are a billionaire donor in Arizona, you can get an official to run interference for your crappy cyber-charter. Craig Harris at 12News continues to do exceptional work.

The Federal Voucher Program Is a Costly Illusion

Denise Forte at EdTrust explains why the federal voucher program is a snare and a delusion. Share this with your friend who keeps asking about the free federal money.

Legislators Imagine that Teaching the “Success Sequence” in Schools Will Stamp Out Poverty

Some legislators just can't fall out of love with the Success Sequence (aka "if you're poor it's because you made bad choices") and in Ohio, they'd like to make it mandatory teaching in public schools. Jan Resseger explains why that's not such a great idea.

Earlier ADHD diagnosis linked to better education

Not sure there's a big surprise here, but this study from Finland is worth noting. Johnathan Kantrowitz explains what they found.

Robert Sweet’s Early Influence on The Science of Reading

Nancy Bailey with a valuable explainer of one of the early influencers on the "science of reading." Along with a whole bunch of other folks who weren't reading teachers, either.

The Mississippi Reading Reform Multiverse (And Lessons Ignored)

Paul Thomas responds to yet another attempt to lionize the Mississippi not-exactly-a-miracle.

And I Would Have Gotten Away With It Too If It Weren't For Those Pesky Kids

Audrey Watters looks at the Matt Barnum piece about Sal Khan and his failed revolution.

I Don’t Want to Be Teacher of the Year

Matt Brady on why some of the folks doing the best work are not going to be winning the awards.

Billionaire Thinking Has Harmed Public Schools

Thomas Ultican on science, edtech, rich amateurs, and the freedom to teach. 

Scientists invented a fake disease. AI told people it was real

A case study in how swiftly and easily AI can pollute the information ecosystem. Christ Stokel-Walker writing for Nature. 

This week at Forbes.com, I wrote about a Louisiana court case that ended up okaying a charter school's power to discriminate against students with special needs. 

I am not generally a fan of folks showing off their kids on youtube, but this classic is just so sweet, and the father so centered on the child. They had just watched fireworks, the story goes, which is why she keeps stopping, just in case. And this song was built for ukelele. 

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ICYMI: Easter 2026 Edition (4/5)

I remain a big fan of Easter for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that it has resisted commercialization. There's a message of redemption that is hard for our culture to absorb, not to mention the idea that death is not necessarily the scariest thing we face. This year I'm also inclined to fantasize-- what if all these right-wing pretend Christians were actual Christians and so worshipped something other than anger and death. That would be something.

So if you also celebrate the day, a Happy Easter to you. And if you don't, a happy day to you, too. In the meantime, here's a list for the week. 

A Day in Class With Plato, the Melania Trump–Mandated Robot Teacher

Alexandra Petri is a national treasure, and she came through with this excellent take on Melania Trump's invitation to imagine a future of robot teachers.

Plato had just downloaded another update and was refusing to teach us math until we upgraded to a Be Best Platinum subscription, so we were left to our own devices. This was how our class spent most of its time. With the Be Best Basic plan, which was all that our school district could afford, we didn’t get very much instruction, mostly ads. Plato had been trying to sell us razors for the past three weeks, possibly because it had heard someone ask about Occam’s razor, but more likely because it had access to our data and understood that as tenth graders, we were entering the razor market.

Sarasota County Schools to cut teachers as vouchers divert millions from district

The Florida plan to shut down public education is right on track. 

White Texans, students previously in private school or homeschool make up bulk of voucher applicants

Zero surprises in Texas, where the newly launched voucher program is mostly not saving poor kids in failing schools, but is instead subsidizing private schools and home schoolers. Jared Edison reports for the Texas Tribune.

The Right Has a Lofty Vision for Schools. Where’s Ours?

Nora De La Cour at Jacobin points out that the right has a vision for education, and somehow the Democrats are stuck saying we should go back to No Child Left Behind because maybe those test-and-punish policies won't fail this time around.

The Right Is Using AI Content Scanners to Try to Supercharge Book Banning

Turns out one of the things you can automate badly with AI is book banning. Claire Woodcock looks at the story for 404.

Meta and Google Found Liable for Addictive Content Delivery

Two tech giants lost a big case over trying to addict users. The indispensable Mercedes Schneider explains how the case unfolded and why they lost.

The Greatest Threat To Children And Teens Isn't Social Media. It's Adults

Anya Kamenetz takes a look past the court decisions against social media giants and looks at what needs to come next to protect children. It's not the act currently proposed by Congress.

Boy, 15, dead after shooting his teacher at Texas high school, cops say

A teenaged boy shot his teacher, then killed himself. And we now live in a country where this barely earns a tiny ripple of coverage. 

Ramaswamy: Let's close two essential Ohio public universities that Ohio GOP has starved for 30 years

What the hell, Ohio. How is this guy a serious contender for the governor's office. His latest clever observation-- public universities all teach basically the same stuff, so let's shut them down. Stephen Dyer explains.

The Next Time You Hear a School Leader Say "AI Is Not Going to Replace Teachers, It Will Replace Teachers Not Using AI" Think

John Robinson with a short but--well, not sweet exactly. But he unpacks the subtext of this comment, and it's not good.

Kids Need Rec Sports To Make a Comeback

Gail Cornwall, a mother and former teacher, explains why the evaporation of chances to play sports just for fun and recreation is bad news for young humans. Do we really need to tell ten year olds that they need to pick a sport and commit to it all year round so they can be champions?

Why You Should Become a Teacher

Matt Brady says, "You won’t love it at first. You might grow to. And it might matter more than you think" in a post that reminds us why teaching doesn't entirely suck.

“Meritocracy”

The concept, says Steve Nuzum, quickly begins to eat itself. Even when it is used to combat CRT, DEI, and whatever other culture panic is on the menu this week.

Leandro Thrown Out: A Generational Betrayal in North Carolina

North Carolina has decided that the way to deal with a decades-old court ruling that they are underfunding education is to install some new courts that will throw the decision out. Justin Parmenter explains just how bad this is.

The Invisible Child: How the Supreme Court Erased Children from a Case About Their Own Harm

Whether it's conversion therapy or birthright citizenship, Bruse Lesley argues that the Supremes are being remarkably callous about the actual human children at the heart of the case.

Trump Admin. Continues Demanding and Checking Affirmative Action Data from Universities

Jan Resseger looks at how the current regime is still dedicated to making sure that colleges don't discriminate against mediocre white guys. 

Every Minute Counts—Until It Doesn’t

Nobody captures the nuts and bolts of school district shenanigans like TC Weber. He's talking about Memphis, but many folks from around the country will recognize the steps in this accountability dance.

Miseducative Experiences

The line between the poetry of Mary Oliver and modern AI policy may not be easy to spot, but Audrey Watters lays it out clear as day. 

Superintendent of basketball finalist blasts PIAA: ‘Willful ignorance’

In Pennsylvania, we have a long-standing preview of what it does to school sports when you pretend that private schools who can recruit from anywhere compete on the same level as public schools that draw from their cachement area. One superintendent decided to call the state out on it.

This week at the Bucks County Beacon I offered some suggested questions for folks whose school district wants to get in the AI game. 

At Forbes.com, I looked at some research that shows--again--that grade point averages are better predictors of college success than the SAT or ACT. 

Today, I offer a favorite movement from a favorite symphony. From the Saint-Saens "organ" Symphony, here's the 4th movement. Turn it up, if you can.

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Behind Fad-Prone Education

Robert Pondiscio posted a question-- "Why Is Education So Damn Fad-Prone?"-- that everyone who has taught for more than two years has often asked. The fad-addiction of education is exactly why every announcement of The Next Miracle Cure is met by a bunch of teachers shaking their heads, rolling their eyes, and closing their doors. 

"But this time is different!" proclaim the progenitors of every new big idea, just before they start bitching about how "the education establishment" or "the blob" or "special interests" are too resistant to their brilliant transformational idea. Lordy, Arne Duncan is still out there trying to explain how his reformy ideas were awesome and totally should have worked but the establishment just didn't try hard enmough. Spoiler alert: This Time is never different. And Pondiscio notes that it is actually teachers who keep education somewhat fad-resistant:

Why is education so damn fad-prone?

The easy answer is also the most insulting—that educators are uniquely susceptible to trends, quick to abandon what works, and too eager to embrace whatever comes next. But that answer is wrong. Classroom teachers are typically the least enthusiastic participants in these cycles, having learned through experience how quickly today’s “transformational” idea becomes tomorrow’s abandoned initiative.

He points to four structural reasons that contribute to recurring fad chasing, and they aren't a bad start to explaining the phenomenon.

Weak feedback loops. 

Pondiscio argues that "in most sectors, failure reveals itself quickly," and while I think there's room for debate there, I agree with him that in education the feedback signal is "low and noisy." There are so many variables-- student turnover and many factors outside the classroom mean that changes in outcomes are hard to attribute to any single factor. We should note that this limitation has not kept many reformsters from arguing that measuring outputs would allow us to identify teachers and methods that are effective. I would add to his list the lack of any good measure of outcomes (the Big Standardized Test is not such a measure). 

But mostly the feedback loop remains weak because it usually carefully and deliberately cuts actual classroom teachers out of the loop. Nobody is better positioned to see exactly how the hot new idea works on the ground than the people who are right there, and yet the teacher view is subject to benign neglect and at worst (as in the days of Common Core) treated as if teachers are the problem of education and not the expert ground troops. 

Publishers and other instructional materials manufacturers feed this dynamic because their target audience is usually not actual teachers, but administrators. Many instructional materials are bad because they were made to be sold, not to be used. And that means NEW! is better.

And when it comes to evidence-based choices, consider this rather grim finding from a recent meta-study which found that the rate at which education research precisely reproduces results of previous studies is-- zero.

In the absence of clear feedback loops, education is plagued with policy by assertion-- folks who just declare that Policy X or Instructional Strategy Z are excellent because it just feels true. And education has been plagued by decades of people insisting that American schools are failing, based on their insistence that it is so. Even when data is available, the loop can be disrupted by bias and political gamesmanship; just this week, Secretary Linda McMahon was one more Ed Secretary to misrepresent what "proficient" means on the NAEP.

Leadership legitimacy requires visible change.

Administrative churn is a blight. I have written before about resume bombs; a new administrator doesn't build a resume by keeping things running smoothly. No, if they want to call themselves "forward thinking change agents," they have to change something. Blow stuff up, start a new program, get that next job, then leave the district to pick up the pieces. "Implemented new widget education program" looks great on a resume, whether it actually works or not. 

Low barriers to new ideas.

"In fields like medicine or engineering, new approaches must pass through layers of validation before they reach widespread adoption. Education has far fewer guardrails." Ain't it the truth. In education, anybody with a few gazillion dollars in business success can decide that he's going to push a set of standards in an attempt to standardize the entire US education system to his preferences, and that won't even be the only time he tries to transform the system.  

And he's not the only one. So many Hot New Ideas have been pushed by folks whose education expertise is based on nothing except they went to school when they were young. Education is largely free of anyone to say, "You'll need to provide some evidence before we even let you in the door." If someone in education does try to resist, just cue more complaints about the establishment and the monopoly and putting adult concerns ahead of children's. It's not just that there are few barriers to faddish new ideas-- it's that many folks believe they have a right not to be met with any barriers to their ideas. 

Add forty-some years of politicizing of education, so that now political avenues are considered a legitimate way to pursue new instructional approaches. The reading wars have been going on for a long time, but No Child Left Behind sold the idea, now being pursued by Science of Reading fans, of using government to settle instructional debates. We're at a place where to be an education advocate or mover and shaker, it's more important to be good at politics than to be good at education.

Moral urgency.

The magical phrase "for the children" allows folks to wave away all objections to their cool new idea, along with its cousin "don't put adult concerns ahead of children's needs." Morla urgency is always part of education discussions, and rightly so. But it is suspicious that moral urgency is always used to ramp up speed rather than caution; it's always "the children can't wait another second" and not "we owe it to the children to make sure we get this right." Common Core had to be rammed through quickly because we couldn't wait a second to rescue children. These days, folks like to wave around the "terrible NAEP scores" as proof that schools had better buy the newest AI-powered edu-whizbang.

All four of these are real features of the education system. They render it vulnerable to fad-of-the-week ideas both on the macro and micro level, and these vulnerabilities have been exploited by everyone from corporate salespersons to well-meaning amateurs to reformsters of all stripes to privatizers who simply want to dismantle the whole thing. 

Pondiscio argues for slowing down and not throwing out functioning ideas to make room for this week's fad. "In short," he concludes, "we need to make competence visible."

That's a great thought. I'm just not sure how it happens. The folks who are looking to the edufad to bring them money and/or power are more invested in bolstering their own preferred fad than taking a look at whether it is successful or not. A whole wing of the reformster/privatizer world has worked hard to make incompetence visible, whether it exists or not (do not forget Chris Rufo telling his Hillsdale College audience, "To get universal school choice, you really need to operate from a place of universal public school distrust.") This is another way in which a free market approach to education is counter-productive. The free market does not foster superior quality; the free market fosters superior marketing. And marketing loves on asymmetric information in which the seller knows more about the product than the buyer.  

We could, I think, damp down the faddishness of education. There is nothing that tamps down faddishness like a level-headed district administration that eschews fads in favor of long-term investment in unexciting things that work, leavened with investment of time and attention in new things that are taken on thoughtfully and given time to prove themselves (or not). How we grow more of those high quality administrators has puzzled me for forty-some years. But more of these people would in turn affect what companies thought they could get away with selling. 

And if everyone-- edu-corporations, legislators, bureaucrats, thinky tank folks-- listened more to teachers, the whole loop, the whole education process process would work so much better. I'm not pretending that getting teachers into the loop would be easy. Out of a group of four million, you are going to find A) a non-zero number of oddball perspectives and B) a distinct lack of unanimity. On top of that, the teachers who could probably provide the most useful perspective may well be too busy to talk to you. But the current practice of locking teachers out of education discussions (unless they have been pre-screened to make sure they have agreeable opinions) is not helping education in this country avoid the latest in education hula hoops.

UT: Taking Education Back To 1952

Utah is looking at HB 312 which seeks to "modify" school curriculum and standards. Having already interjected a version of the Ten Commandments into classrooms, legislators are seeing if they can't push some more religion in there, along with a hefty dose of right-wing politics and actual Mormonism. Coverage of bill has focused on the Christian nationalism aspect, but there are few other things going on in the bill that promise to lead Utah boldly into the past.

The bill ups the requirements for US history instruction, and it has some definite ideas about what that instruction should look like. It promises the development of some "open educational resources" that are both open and at the same time, the state is supposed to own all IP rights for the resources, including copyright.

The bill calls for materials that sell the idea "America good, communism bad." America's founding principles (individual liberty, limited government, natural rights) are set right beside supporting and preserving the family, the awesomeness of the Constitution, economic prosperity through free market capitalism, and the contributions that America has made to "human progress and flourishing." This is to be deliberately contrasted with the evils of communism and other autocratic government (while noting we have a republic that rejected the pure democracy of Greece). 

The course should note that communists tried to spread their ideology in the 20th century and tried to infiltrate institutions. It should list a whole bunch of communist atrocities including the Cultural Revolution in China, Khmer Rouge genocide, Cuba's commie naughtiness, and the systematic persecution of religious groups. That last one is a particularly bold choice for Utah, the state where the US Army was sent ion 1857 to take the Mormons down a peg or two.

Meanwhile, the course should teach the benefits of "constitutional republicanism." This is a quick capsule of the right-wing fable version of US history. Unlike many attempts to push this story into schools, this bill does not include any language requiring that teachers admit that yeah, there were some problems with slavery and racism in this country, but that's all in the past. 

The Christian nationalism part comes with the list of selected documents intended for inclusion:

the Bible, including the Hebrew Scriptures and New Testament, as literary and historical texts that have influenced American constitutional history, civic thought, and cultural development; 

This has been the standard smokescreen ever since the 1963 SCOTUS ruling that suggested that suggested teaching about the Bible was okay as long as it was purely objective consideration of historical and literary merit. It's an easy game to play. When my high school experimented with 9 weeks mini-courses, one was "The Bible as History and Literature." It was taught by a devout Baptist (famously, at the end of every class, his announcement for what was coming next started with "If we're here tomorrow..." by which he meant "If the Rapture doesn't come tonight...") and he taught the class like a literature class, but the only acceptable way to understand and interpret the text was the one reflected in his own religious beliefs. So, yeah, I've seen this game. Just think of any English teacher you had who taught that there was only one correct way to read the text, and imagine if that text were a sacred scripture.

Teaching the Bible as an important historical influence on the American Revolution is almost always proposed by people who believe that the historical influence was the attempt to found a Christian nation and not, say, the efforts of people who had deep personal knowledge of how badly things go when government and religion are closely linked and who were therefor determined to found a nation that was definitely NOT based on some religion. 

So, yes-- this bill is another attempt to forcibly sneak a particular brand of Christianity into classrooms.

Since we're talking Utah, there is one other interesting item in the bill--

when teaching Utah history, an LEA may include study of religious beliefs and texts that influenced the state's early founders and the state's history.

In Utah, that means The Book of Mormon (and I don't mean the Broadway musical). In fact, Utah provides a pretty rich contrast between a country not founded on a religion and a state absolutely founded as a colony for a definitely-not-mainstream religion where the church was the government.

Bill House sponsor Tiara Auxier is a parents' rights, make Utah great again conservative, former school board member and legislative newbie. It's not clear what her church affiliation is. Lead Senate sponsor is Todd Weiler. 

There's a story that some folks on the right like to tell. Once upon a time, a bunch of white Christian men got together and, with their Bibles open beside them, they copied out a Constitution that enshrined freedom, the nuclear family, and the free market, just the way God wanted them. Occasionally some bad individuals did bad things like enslaving Black folks, but we settled at that around 1964. In the 20th century, communists, for no reason other than they're just selfish and evil, snuck a bunch of their people into elite institutions (like schools and colleges) and started trying to indoctrinate children to join them in ruining the US just like they ruined the rest of the world. But we can take those institutions back and make them tell young people the one true story of our history (and everything else). 

Folks who believe this story also believe that if we could indoctrinate teach children this story-- and only this story-- then we'd get things back on track. 

I am a little curious how things would work if Utah passes this bill and conservative christianists discover that the Book of Mormon gets to enter the classroom on equal footing with the Bible. When you keep sliding that Overton Window around, you can never know what might slip through. It might even become a portal to an imaginary past.

Free Market Myths and School Choice

Why the reformster love affair with the free market?

Every version of school choice we've been pitched over the past few decades is wedded to some form of free market dynamics. And yet it doesn't have to be.

Educational choice can take place within the public school framework. School districts in my area all offer a choice between a traditional school path or a career-technology school, and that's in districts that are relatively small. A school district could offer different educational paths under one roof, which, as I've argued before, would be less expensive for taxpayers and more flexible for students, who would face far fewer switching costs if they changed their minds (as teens do). The taxpayers would retain ownership of the facilities and could exercise accountability through their elected school board.

School choice within the public system certainly comes with some challenges (New Hampshire is wrestling with some of them while contemplating open enrollment). But there's no particular reason to assume that school choice must be wedded to a free market system. In fact, Doug Harris, Professor and Department Chair of Economics at Tulane, who has done plenty of reformster-friendly work, has laid out why the free market is a poor match for education. 

And yet, reformsters stay deeply attached to the free market, to the point that some appear to be more committed to the "convert education to free market commodity" part than the "give families educational choices" part. Schools are called "government schools" with contempt because such a system is, to some folks, a self-evident afront to free marketry. Calling public education a "monopoly" misuses the term to push the assumption that education is already in a free market framework. 

So what drives this attachment to the idea of unleashing free market forces in education? What are the myths behind this tunnel vision?

The free market is a magical moral good.

There are folks who just believe that a free market is in and of itself good, that even if it doesn't produce better or more equitable results, the country is still better off with a free market system. As myths go, it's a pretty one. Honestly, these believers might have more intellectual integrity than followers of any of the rest of these myths.

Competition makes things better.

For some folks, it is a fundamental truth that competition increases excellence. If public schools just had some private competition, the reasoning goes, they would be motivated to new heights of excellence.

But this assumes that some schools know how to be more awesome-- they just don't bother unless sufficiently threatened. Which is both wrong and insulting. 

Nor does competition always foster excellence. History is littered with companies that won the free market competition by means other than excellence, from VHS players to a whole lot of cable channels. The free market does not foster superior products; it fosters superior marketing. Yes, excellence can be a marketing tool, but there are many other ways to compete for market share.

Free market competition is excellent at sorting both customers and businesses into tiers-- rich and poor, winners and losers. The market is good at carving itself into different sectors of more or less privilege. That's not what we want for education; the national goal is not supposed to be getting some folks an educational Lexus and others an educational 1996 Kia. 

Plus, after years of free market education, we have plenty of data to tell us that it is not making education more excellent, at all.

Money is the only motivator that matters.

Equally cynical is the assumption among marketeers that the only thing that really matters in getting people to work in the education space is then chance to make money. That's why we need to attract people to leadership roles who have a track record of making money, and then we have to free them of the rules and regulations that would frustrate their drive to make money. 

Choice schools need to be run like unhampered visionary CEOs, because only the model of a profitable business makes sense for-- well, anything at all. Education. Health care. You name it. You have to model it on a business.

Foot-based accountability.

Free marketeers believe in voting with your feet. If a school is terrible, customers will desert it and it will suffer a deserved death, to be replaced by some newer, better school. But voting with your feet is not going to exert any serious market pressure.

A charter or private school only needs a small sliver of the market to stay in business. Witness charters like Success Academy that actively chase away families that don't fit their mold, not so much customers voting with feet as it is schools voting with their boot. 

But free marketeers believe that the education market should be unregulated, and that operators should be free to do as they please, and foot-based accountability was all that was needed. This goes all the way back to Milton Friedman, who was sure that nobody needed to make laws about racial discrimination because the market would iron all that out. That turned out not to be true, at all, and it holds true for schools that teach everything from flat earth theory to creationism.

Individuals take responsibility, but not for Those People.

For many fans of the invisible hand, free markets means individual responsibility. If you need a commodity from the market, getting it is your problem. So is making sure it's not junk. 

Here's the other accountability piece. It's not just that accountability is to the customer, but that there is no accountability to society at large. If a school is teaching racism or flat earth theory or The Flintstones were a documentary, that's the family's problem, as if releasing a bunch of mis-educated adults into society doesn't cause problems for everyone else.

For these marketeers, choice isn't really the issue at all. What is the issue is that the government is taking their tax dollars to help educate Those Peoples' Children, and that's gotta be some kind of socialism. If Those People want to send their kids to a decent school, then let Those People pay for it themselves. 

And if that means some people send their kids to a lousy school, well, that's fine. These marketeers don't think the market's tendency to pick winners and losers (they might say it "reveals" or "certifies" winners and losers) is a feature. not a bug, for putting people in their proper place. Public education is just one more commie social safety net that is working against the laws of nature. 

The kind of choice that should exist is an individual one, and the choices you have will depend on what you can afford. Which is, ironically, pretty much what we have already with real estate based school district funding.

What about culture warriors?

These folks muddy the waters because they are not interested in school choice at all. They would like to send taxpayer dollars to private Christian schools, and they would like to inject Christian Nationalism into whatever public schools they aren't able to dismantle. The rhetoric of school choice was just conveniently sitting there, and it provides some cover for their actual aims, but watch these folks oppose LGBTQ charters and Islamic voucher schools. They've teamed up with the marketeers, but like the previous alliance between Free Marketeers and those seeking educational equity solutions, this alliance between two groups that don't really have the same aims is probably eventually doomed.

Could there be myth-free school choice?

Absolutely. There's a whole other argument to had about the mythical nature of a free market, that all markets are created and maintained by government and unavoidably rigged in one direction or another. The mechanics of school choice do not require a free market system. It does not require schools to be run like a business. 

School choice doesn't have to be constructed on a framework of market dynamics. In fact, school choice could be done much better without those things-- provided we accept the notion that the goal is to get the best possible education to every student, regardless of zip code. We could do it, if the goal were actual educational choice and not the conversion of a public societal good into one more commodities market. And that remains a fundamental problem with the modern "school choice" movement. 

 

Zuck's Ed Tech Baby Goes With A Whimper

A new chapter in the long story of Summit Learning.

Summit Schools were an early entry (2003) into the world of charters, with founder Diane Tavenner trying to do personalized learning the low tech way. Tavenner was reportedly a former teacher, asst. principal and a graduate of the Broad Faux Academy of Superintendenty Stuff: she served as the board chair for the California Charter Schools Association, a board that includes Joe Williams, head of DFER as a member). 

Mark Zuckerberg, fresh off a disastrous attempt to finance an overhaul of New Jersey schools,  ran across the Bay area school in 2014 and decided that he would give it not just an infusion of cash, but an infusion of technology. Including engineering support to "make this better." Summit became one of Zuckerberg's pet projects, and it was also beloved by that other well-connected super-rich education amateur, Bill Gates, who has some of his Top People promoting hell out of it.

Summit handed off its "education. in a box" program to all sorts of schools (about 400 at its peak) and it was yet another experimennt in large scale education-via-screen. 

Many folks did not love it. . Take a look at some of the comments in this piece "The Inherent Racism of Summit 'Public' (Charter) School." And many schools have backed away from the Mass Customized Learning Program (a term that deserves a place on the oxymoron shelf right next to Jumbo Shrimp and Peacekeeper Missiles).

Indiana, Pennsylvania schools tried to quietly implement Summit programming, and parents began to squawk almost immediately. After just one month

parents began telling the school board that their kids were not adjusting to the new learning style, that they found questionable and objectionable material in the recommended online resources in their classes, and that their children were spending too much time in front of computer screens

NY Magazine just profiled Cheshire, Connecticut, another town that fought back when the mass customized learning program came to town (or rather, the town came to them, since the Summit model involves logging on to the Summit website). The Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative had paid for the 130 Chromebooks needed, but once again, reality got in the way of CZI dreams.

Students rarely met with teachers, but instead had lots of screen time with a computer program that was reportedly easy to trick (just skip the lessons and go straight to the tests). The program still has glitches, including questions that cannot be answered correctly (maybe some nerdy programmer decided Summit needed its own Kobayashi Maru?) And there's the problem of the open-sourced playlists themselves:

Nothing about the platform said Silicon Valley more than the open-source approach to the “playlists.” Teachers were encouraged to customize them, to add and subtract — and Cheshire’s teachers were working on this, Superintendent Jeff Solan said in an email — but the base material was often just a bunch of links, to sites ranging from Kids Encyclopedia to SparkNotes to the BBC. I interviewed several educators who were involved in developing the platform in 2014, and when I mentioned this to one, he agreed they were “shoddy.” “We knew it,” he said. They were in such a hurry, he said, “we were just throwing things in there, that, at least from a Google search, looked reputable.”

Yikes. It's almost as if the actual education piece is secondary to some other part of the operation. I wonder what that could be...

And there was the question of data. Summit is clear about the 18 partners it shares its data with, and subjects itself to its own strong privacy agreements in addition to the legal protections around student data already in place, but parents and other locals were nonetheless concerned. “The Chromebooks were free. Nothing’s free. There’s always a reason,” said Mary Burnham, a retired educator who was part of the campaign against Summit. “If somebody’s giving you something free, chances are, they want something back, or they’re already getting something from it. As best I can tell, with Summit, it’s data.

Like the equally tech-heavy and success-light Altschool, Summit seemed to be one part market research and one part experiment on human lab rats, with the goal of finding proof of concept for computer-managed education. But mostly Altschool lost truckloads of money, and it eventually faded away into various other products and companies (Altitude Learning was one piece, apparently part of Guidepost Learning, another edu-prenuer undertaking that has since gone bankrupt). 

Traction was not happening for Summit, either. Chalkbeat found that 1 in 4 schools dropped the program by the 2018-19 school year.

In 2018, Summit spun the digital program off into a non-profit entity whose initial four-person board included Diane Tavenner, Summit founder; Priscilla Chan; and Peggy Alford, the CFO for CZI.It seemed suspiciously like a subsidiary of the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative. The program was designed to follow what has now become the familiar model-- students getting their education from a compter-manab=ged algorithm while (low-cost) "coaches" provided some human oversight in the room. Maybe not so much oversight as "accountability sinks," because somebody has to be responsible when things go south. But Summit even went so far as to create its own special farm for training "facilitators."

The National Education Policy Center took a look at Summit's learning system, and found that it was a lot more hat than cowboy (and it was also extraordinarily reluctant to submit to any examination of their work or results). 

So in 2023, CZI (not really pretending it hadn't swallowed Summit whole) spun Summit off again, this time an outfit called Gradient, which the CZI blog said "we can help these important research-based resources more consistently reach students and educators, by focusing on coherence for educators." "Consistency" and "coherence" come up a lot in the history of Summit, because Zuck and his friends repeatedly concluded that the reason the computer-managed curriculum in a box wasn't working better and winning hearts and minds was that teachers were not implementing it faithfully enough. Damned mat widgets.

Gradient was yet another company whose promised whiz-bangery invokes the the "whole student" and a "unified learning platform," and while it can be hard to see through the smokey argle bargle, it sure looks like Trascend also wants to make computer-managed software-delivered education a thing. With a "dedicated coach." 

Gradient was going to have things chugging along by the 2024-2025 school year, but in Februarty 2026, Gradient announced its "next chapter,"

Expanding the scale and impact of this work is more important than ever. After much deliberation with our board, we are pleased to share that the future of the Gradient Learning program will move to a new home at Transcend, a nonprofit dedicated to supporting schools and systems to create extraordinary experiences and outcomes for all students. Transcend brings the expertise to take our program to the next level, as well as the ability to amplify a community of education innovators working for lasting change.

Transcend is about "model sharing" and "community innovation." They want to "reimagine educator roles" and their Leaps toward Extraordinary Learning for All is just the same old "school hasn't changed in a century" and educatyion should be relevant and a lot of nice words about what education should be like that nobody should disagree with, given that they offer nothing in the way of specific techniques that teachers should use. They jpin. a whole long line of edu-prenuers who offer pretty ideals about what education should be like without addressing any of the nuts and bolt specifics, which is where teachers live and do their work. Agency! High expectations! Rigor! Not one size fiots all! I have no evidence, but it is entirely possible that Transcend is actually headquarterd on a farm upstate, where tired old reform mcliches can run and play and are definitely not euthanized.

There is a certain symmetry to this story, however. I didn't follow up on the various team members of Transcend, so who knows-- maybe none of them were in Teach for America. The board is largely investment and business types. The CEO is Aylon Samouha, whose previous jobs include  Chief Schools Officer at Rocketship Education and several years as a Senior Vice President at Teach For America, and I feel compelled to note, lists jazz guitar as one of his pursuits, so God bless him for that.

But the kicker. The board has two lifetime members. One is Stacey Childress, former CEO of New Schools Venture Fund, and the other is Diane Tavenner, currently listed as CEO and Co-founder of her latest ventures, Futre.me.

These are the stories I think of every time some reformbro tries to argue that in the private sector, when you fail there are consequences-- not like in public education. Maybe. But it sure seems that in the private sector, the invisible hand doesn't cut failure loose so much as it just shuffles it around, to kick back and forth from one doomed enterprise to another. Will the ghost of Summit ever be laid to final rest? It may take decades to find out.