Anti-Democracy In America

The through line for MAGA politics is simple enough. Some people are better than others, and everything wrong with this country can be traced to efforts to lift up people who do not deserve to be lifted up. 

Poor people are poor because they deserve to be poor, and policy efforts to lift them up are bad and wrong (so axe the social safety net). Some people have less power and status because they don't deserve to have more power and status, and policy efforts to give them more power and status are wrong (so wipe out DEI and deport all the people who don't deserve to be here). And if you find the policies of the Trump-Kennedy health department baffling--well, some people deserve to get sick and even die and it would be best for society if disease were allowed to get the weak and undeserving out of the herd.

And education? As we've noted before, the fact that current school choice policies will create multiple tiers in society, a multi-level system that sorts folks into their "rightful place"-- that's a feature, not a bug.  

Because some people are better, more important, more worthy of power and privilege than others.

In the new book Country of Lords, Kim Phillips-Fein takes us back through the history of the US to show that these anti-democratic ideas have always been with us. Even as Thomas Jefferson was penning the words 

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Plenty of our founding fathers were plenty afraid of the lower classes. Gouverneur Morris (a less-lauded founding father) wrote that if they gave votes to people without property "they will sell them to the rich who will be able to buy them." John Adams was worried that there would be civil unrest caused by people getting the poors all worked up about their alleged new rights; the rich, he argued, are people too, who should not suffer violent social upheaval. Adams wrote that the poor were "destined for labour" while "the rich, by advantage of education, independence and leisure are qualified for superior stations." He did not write suggestions for making those advantages available to all. 

In this Adams was in tune with the southern states, where colonists had come to establish a new sort of aristocracy, with the same social levels found back in Europe.

By the mid-19th century, of course, these ideas about who was or was not entitled to treatment as a human being (let alone an equal one) were well under way. We remember Stephen Douglasa as that guy Abraham Lincoln debated, but oh boy-- he had some thoughts. Phillips-Fein points out that, like many, Douglass was okay with a variety of laws because he did not believe different races were equal. It's a point worth remembering today-- the idea of the Rule of Law, that the same rules should apply to everyone, only makes sense if you believe that all people are equal, that nobody is any better than anyone else.

Phillips-Fein spends some time with William Graham Sumner, a popular Yale professor who pushed hard for the intellectual arguments for inequality.  His ideas were influential then and recognizable today.

Central to his principles was an absolute rejection of empathy, sympathy, and social obligation. For Sumner, the central fact of life was competition, and the winners deserved and in fact needed to have control over the economic resources of society.

The social Darwinists rejected any and all attempts to equalize society, labeling such efforts as "evil socialism" and an attempt to buy the votes of the undeserving. Wrote Sumner in 1883

[A] drunkard in the gutter is where he ought to be. Nature is working away at him to get him out of the way, just as she sets up her processes of dissolution to remove whatever is a failure in its line.

The fact that someone had great wealth was proof they deserved it. Folks like Sumner thought hierarchy was an essential part of liberty, just as modern anti-democrats argue that people are most free when they are allowed to remain in their proper place (see also: every argument saying women lost liberty when they entered the workplace instead of staying home). 

Not all of these folks rejected any social obligation. Phillips-Fein offers Andrew Carnegie as an example of someone who believed that the different classes had an obligation to each other-- but they still needed to stay in their proper place. Not a way of thinking that has disappeared; think Betsy DeVos and her belief that students should get the education that is a good fit for them, i.e. best suited for their class in life.

And religious folks were right there with these ideas. Phillips-Fein cites a sermon from Baptist preacher Russell Conwell, founder of Temple University, in which he points out that we should sympathize with "God's poor" but still remember that "there is not a poor person in the United States who was not made poor by his own shortcomings, or by the shortcomings of someone else."

The dawn of the 20th century saw the rise of what Phillips-Fein calls utilitarian racists. There was a tremendous fear of the country being "polluted" and "corrupted" by many immigrants of the wrong sort. "They were not only committed to segregation," she writes, "but obsessed with law and order and afraid of immigration, especially of Eastern European Jews and Italians." Journalist Theodore Lothrod Stoddard (whose mother had pulled him out of public school to keep him away from mill workers' children) wrote about the threat of the "Under-Men." 

He and others railed against the romantic fantasy of equality and egalitarianism, a fiction being used by evil conspirators who wanted to use it to seize power. Popular eugenicist Madison Grant wrote "The laws of nature require the obliteration of the unfit and human life is valuable only when it is of use to the community or race." Stoddard, in his hugely popular 1922 book The Revolt Against Civilization, explained that the reason race mattered was because it assigned people their proper place in the economic hierarchy. Democracy, he would later point out, was never intended for a nation "breeding freely" with the wrong sorts of people. In another piece of writing, he was still more blunt. 

Our Declaration of Independence says that all men are created equal; this is not true. It says this is self-evident; this is absurd.

None of these racist anti-democrats, she points out, were fringe thinkers. Stoddard was a best-selling author. Others were what we would now call "thought leaders." It may be that only the rise of Hitler and German Nazism tarnished their ideas enough to shut them up, for a while. 

In the post-war country, Phillips-Fein turns to corporate anti-democrats like the influential Frederick Winslow Taylor, the man who brought "efficiency" to the industrial world. Taylor's whole approach rested on inequality, on the idea that some people were to be the brains of a company, while others needed to take their place as meat widgets on the factory floor, supervised and micro-managed and surveilled so that the machinery of the factory could run smoothly. They were Lessers in the same way that Amazon warehouse workers are Lessers today, their humanity ignored so that they can give their sweat and blood to the company (cheaply).

Thus setting the stage for her chapter "Market and Meritocracy," in which we find that maybe we can find some Betters in unexpected places. Let's give students a Scholastic Aptitude Test so we can further sort the deserving from the undeserving. Once again, some folks decide the purpose of education is to sort the deserving meritorious from the undeserving chaff so we can get the deserving up into the higher classes where they belong. Wrote John Gardner, who headed up the Carnegie Corporation (Andrew's philanthropic outfit) and would later be Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare under Johnson, "Every educational system is, among other things, a device for sorting people out."

And of course here comes our old friend Milton Friedman, whose assertion is that the free market is an excellent mechanism for sorting the deserving winners from those who deserve to be on the bottom. I've discussed these ideas at length elsewhere.

Bringing us up to the technocrats, and we are all living through their ideas about equality. As Phillips-Fein explains it. "Society would--they argue--be less chaotic, more orderly, more just, were it governed by an all-powerful CEO, a businessman-king, in a manner similar to the revolutionary start-ups of Silicon Valley." 

It's a model reminiscent of the reformster wave of twenty-ish years ago, and it also fits MAGA and their devotion to Emperor Dear Leader.

There's a lot to absorb from Phillips-Fein's book, which is both comforting and alarming-- we are not living through something brand new, but by the same token, there's no future in which it is eradicated forever. We have been fighting for the most basic premise of our country for 250 years, and it has never gone away. It is one of the central ironies for a country chock full of ironies-- a major portion of our citizenry and leaders simply reject one of the premises on which the country was founded. 

Given this 250-year-old debate, it is no wonder that settling on and pursuing a clear mission for schools remains outside of our grasp. Are all of our students deserving of the same worth and regard, or are they best served by a system that fits them for a particular role that suits their future status. Do we need to provide the best possible education for every child, or do we need to provide the education that best sorts them out and prepares them for their proper place in life? Schools live down hill from the culture, and the culture can't decide what it believes, and all that contention flows right into schools. I know what I believe about the equal value of all humans, but this book is a reminder of the many ways my countrymen have--and continue to-- disagree with me. 

Milton Friedman's Ghost

We've discussed, many times (e.g. here and here) Milton Friendman's ideas for education, pretty simply described as "burn down public schools and replace them with a private free market for education." Nancy McLean summed it up like this in 2021:

He and his libertarian allies saw vouchers as a temporary first step on the path to school privatization. He didn’t intend for governments to subsidize private education forever. Rather, once the public schools were gone, Friedman envisioned parents eventually shouldering the full cost of private schooling without support from taxpayers. Only in some “charity” cases might governments still provide funding for tuition.

Friedman first articulated this outlook in his 1955 manifesto, but he clung to it for half a century, explaining in 2004, “In my ideal world, government would not be responsible for providing education any more than it is for providing food and clothing.” Four months before his death in 2006, when he spoke to a meeting of the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), he was especially frank. Addressing how to give parents control of their children’s education, Friedman said, “The ideal way would be to abolish the public school system and eliminate all the taxes that pay for it.”

Friedman liked the idea of vouchers, but mostly as a way to get the free market mainlined into the nation's education system. And to really understand what that means, we need to understand how Friedman saw the free market.

Many public school supporters (including me) have argued that Friedman's free market love is misplaced because of course a free market would choose winners and losers in a system with multiple tiers. Don't you get it, we have brayed lustily-- A free market education system would result in all sorts in inequality for students in school and society at large. 

The ghost of Milton Friedman replies, "Don't threaten me with a good time."

For Friedman, the free market was not a magical engine for equality and uplifting one and all. Instead, it was a system that perfectly suits a world that is-- and ideally ought to be-- filled with inequality between people.

Society is filed with winners and losers, and the free market is an excellent way to sort them out. Society is inevitably, and correctly, hierarchal and unequal. Friedman wrote in Free to Choose, "Life is not fair. It is tempting to believe that government can rectify what nature has spawned," without any sense that government might have had a hand in creating that unfairness. Nor could Friedman ever really grasp the notion that power imbalances were self-perpetuating by the system and not some sort of natural and just occurrences (Friedman never, ever came up with a convincing free market answer for racist elements of business and society). 

Friedman often expresses a remarkably simpleminded view of society and commerce. He liked the example of Marlena Dietrich's legs and Muhammed Ali's fighting skills, arguing that they were gifted and therefor entitled to get rich from these gifts. But as Kim Phillips-Fein points out in Country of Lords (we'll be talking about this book soon), Friedman doesn't say anything about Dietrich's agents or managers or the people who created her movies, nor does he discuss Ali's managers, or the fight promoters and networks that helped make him rich. 

As Jimmy Rising writes in "Inequality in and beyond Friedman." the capitalist ethic Friedman describes is 

“to each according to what he and the instruments he owns produces”. Property rights are absolute and complete. If the instrument is a factory, and he manages to convince workers to work for him for less than their work might otherwise be considered “worth”, the better for the factory owner, and the laborer gets exactly what he deserves.

Friedman's view of the free market is that it rewards those who deserve to be rewarded, and leaves behind those who deserve to be left behind, and that this dynamic is natural, normal, and desirable for society. To try to interfere would be "inefficient."

So despite the insistence of some choicers that the free market would unleash competitive energy that will lift all boats, Friedman didn't believe that's how the free market actually does or should work. Society should have hierarchies, and the free market is a mechanism to establish and maintain those hierarchies-- in the opinion of Friedman's ghost, a particularly efficient one. 

So when Friedman's ghost says that schools should operate under a free market, they are calling for tiers, for hierarchy, for a society that follows the principle that some people deserve a full, rich, what-we-used-to-call-good education, and some deserve basic vocational training so they can take their proper place as meat widgets serving their Betters. Friedman's ghost says we should let everyone buy the education they can afford, which, says the free market, is the education they deserve. They're free to try to make a million dollars, thereby proving they deserve more, but all in all, it will be better for everyone if they just accept the status, the tier, the class to which they rightfully belong.

And schools? Schools are just there to start the sorting process early on. Don't waste people's time trying to get schools to do anything else, and don't waste peoples' money trying to help Those Peoples' Children try to escape their proper place. That's the free market education that Friedman's ghost favors.

 

TN: Hiding Voucher Failure

Tennessee launched a taxpayer-funded school voucher program in 2019, with a proposal that barely squeaked through the House and narrowly passed the Senate. The idea was, as usual, that it would rescue students from ailing schools, and that voucher-receiving schools would receive autonomy in exchange for accountability. 

Well, forget all that.

This year's result for the state's Big Standardized Test (TCAP) are in and--whopoopsies!-- ESA voucher students failed hard, with their success percentage not even half of what the public schools scored. Just 17% of ESA students met or exceeded proficiency marks in math, and only 24% managed to meet or exceed proficiency for English. (It was 40% and 42% for public school students). In fact, the gap between public and private schools has been widening (as reported by Vivian Jones for the Knoxville News Sentinel).

So of course the legislature moved to find policy levers that could push private schools to do a better job with taxpayer money. Ha! Just kidding. Instead, Tennessee will no longer require voucher students to take the state test. Because what could be a quicker and easier way to eliminate those unfortunate signs of failure? Voucher students will still take the national standard test of their choice (look for that unimpressive-but-unwoke Classical Learning Test to pick up some market share). 

As voucher expert Josh Cowen pointed out to Jones:

“When they stop admin­is­ter­ing the state exam, then the lobby groups and the voucher sup­port­ers can just yell about how great it is for every­one and no one calls them out on it any­more,” Cowen said.

“If these res­ults showed good things, they’d be the first out there in the press con­fer­ence yelling ‘score­board!’ ” Cowen said. “The reason they aren’t test­ing is because they don’t want to see the answer.”

To be clear, the TCAP and other state BS Tests are lousy measures of school success. Those voucher-receiving schools might have some virtues not revealed by TCAP (ditto the public schools of Tennessee).

But this is the game reformsters wanted to play. They promised a future in which parents navigated an open free marketplace rich with information designed to inform the choices of the education "consumers," not a marketplace in which the preferred vendors-- the private ones-- were freed of any measures that might make them look bad. 

I respect folks who are pro-choice on principle, who believe that parents should have a choice whether that choice provides a better result or not. I disagree with them, but I appreciate their principled consistency.

But this kind of thing is just an attempt to give private schools an edge in the marketplace, one more sign that the goal here is not choice for parents, but public tax dollars for private (religious) schools. If Tennessee wants to play the BS Test game, let everyone play it equally. But if legislators just want to play a fixed game so that private (religious) schools can profit from public taxpayer dollars, go ahead and say that part out loud--and let the voters show if they support it. 

Cancelling the TCAP for the private schools that are failing it just reveals that the whole program is a grift. 

Suing To Eliminate All Public School

This lawsuit popped up on my radar a few days ago and I let it sit, thinking foolishly that maybe I was reading too much into it. But a Washington Post op-ed from Corey DeAngelis confirmed the worst-- privatizers are ready to try to eliminate public schools entirely. 

The New Civil Liberties Alliance has filed a lawsuit arguing that "Nebraska’s Educational Scheme Violates Parents’ Free Speech."  And by "scheme" they mean "public education system." Here's their argument for why public education is a violation of the First Amendment. 

Education is speech. The curriculum taught, the books assigned, and the values reinforced inside (and outside) of the classroom all convey a message. The Constitution has long recognized that parents—not the government—hold the paramount right to direct that message for their own children.

That's part of the argument. The rest is familiar as well.

Parents also have a legal duty to provide or arrange for educational speech.

In other words, I should not have to pay for a system that educates Other Peoples' Children. Their children are their problem.  

Nor is the suit merely about eliminating the public system. 

Nebraska’s scheme flips free speech on its head, mandating educational speech then penalizing viewpoints other than the government’s: parents who wish to exercise their right, whether by homeschooling or by choosing a private school, must forgo tens of thousands of dollars of educational benefits available to other families who acquiesce to the government’s viewpoints.

In other words, I should not have to pay for Other Peoples' Children to get an education, but taxpayers should absolutely help me subsidize the education of my own children.

I didn't read the DeAngelis op-ed because the presence of his op-ed in the Washington Post is precisely why I don't have a subscription to the Post any more. But I'm sure it's plenty incendiary and rage-baity. The very idea that public education violates the First Amendment is so destructive and counter-intelligent, but that appears to be where they want to go. The whole system is unconstitutional. 

Update: Okay, someone shared it with me. He used his big boy voice for the Post, but it's still an astonishing reach. "Universal school choice resolves the constitutional problem while preserving public support for education," he writes. Tear down public schools, end the promise to all students, and open up the unregulated free market. In many ways, I suppose this whole business is just the quiet part out loud-- this has always been the goal for some of these folks all the way back to Milton Friedman. 

The New Civil Liberties Alliance is one more dark money group from the usual gang of reactionary billionaires like Charles Koch and Leonard Leo. They are not bush league-- they helped take Chevron to court.

The libertarian Reason magazine is taking this seriously, which is not surprising. NCLA says that "Plaintiffs do not seek to end, defund, or influence public schools," and that's pretty clearly bullshit. What other effect can we expect from ruling the entire system unconstitutional? Maybe the idea is simple extortion-- give us a pile of money or we'll tear down your schools-- but the effect would be the same. Who knows how Nebraska's court will jump on this, and there's a whole counter-argument to be made that education (as folks on the right love to point out) is no business of the federal government; public education is a feature of state constitutions.

So it's easy to look at this suit and argue that it will likely fail. That's not really the point; folks on the far right have always been willing to play a long game and make legal and policy moves that slowly inch the Overton window over and move into courts until, voila! We get Dobbs.

So I'm watching this as the next front of the ongoing attack on public schools, the new argument that will be repeated ad nauseum. Pay attention, folks.

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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