The Truth About Davos, AI, and Firing All the Humans

This article ran last week, and it made my ICYMI list Sunday, but you really, really need to see this.

Kevin Roos went to Davos for the New York Times to see what the masters of the universe are up to, and his most striking discoveries was "The Hidden Automation Agenda of the Davos Elite."

The short version is simple. In public, they are going to talk about how much Artificial Intelligence will improve the workplace. In private, they talk about how AI will let them slash the human workforce to the bone. From the article:

All over the world, executives are spending billions of dollars to transform their businesses into lean, digitized, highly automated operations. They crave the fat profit margins automation can deliver, and they see A.I. as a golden ticket to savings, perhaps by letting them whittle departments with thousands of workers down to just a few dozen.

“People are looking to achieve very big numbers,” said Mohit Joshi, the president of Infosys, a technology and consulting firm that helps other businesses automate their operations. “Earlier they had incremental, 5 to 10 percent goals in reducing their work force. Now they’re saying, ‘Why can’t we do it with 1 percent of the people we have?’”

Is there any reason to think the advent of AI in education is different? Of course not-- education is a field where the single greatest expense is personnel. If your goal is to bust free some of that sweet sweet public education money, getting rid of live, trained teachers and replace them with a couple of cheap mentors.

Look at it this way. Since the beginning of the modern ed reform era, the dream has been to cut staff costs.

We were going to "teacher proof" classrooms with instruction in a box, complete with scripts, so that anybody could do it. We were going to staff schools with Teach for America temps who would never stay long enough to make more than starting salary or earn a pension. We were going to identify the super-teachers and give them classes of hundreds of students (after we fired everyone else). We were going to implement merit pay, meaning we'd lower the base pay into the base ment and give "bonuses" whenever we felt like it. We were going to get rid of tenure and FILO so that we could fire people who were too expensive. We were going to redefine success as high test scores keyed to a list of simplified standards so that no special expertise was needed to achieve success. We would break the teacher unions and strip them of negotiating power.

We tried all of these things to a greater or lesser success, and in theory and practice, they all have one thing in common-- they allow management to spend less money on trained professional teachers (which means that money can go elsewhere). They have tried to do to trained educators what McDonalds did to trained chefs.

Of course, notes Roos, corporate titans know that rubbing their hands and chortling about all the meat widgets they're going to fire is bad form. So, he says, they've come up with some less scary language. Raise your hand if you've heard this one:

Workers aren’t being replaced by machines, they’re being “released” from onerous, repetitive tasks.

Yup. Classroom AI will liberate teachers, freeing them fro boring clerical tasks so that they work on creative things. Like, say, freshening up their resumes.

Roos says to pay attention to Asia, where the executives pursuing this track are not shy about saying what they are really doing. True enough-- Squirrel Learning brags proudly about how its AI has taken over 70% of the teaching!

Is there any kind of conscience, humanity, or concern for fellow citizens holding back this tide?

“That’s the great dichotomy,” said Ben Pring, the director of the Center for the Future of Work at Cognizant, a technology services firm. “On one hand,” he said, profit-minded executives “absolutely want to automate as much as they can.”

“On the other hand,” he added, “they’re facing a backlash in civic society.”

So that's a no. Corporations pay attention to the optics and the backlash, but those are practical considerations, not moral or ethical ones. The corporate folks talk about how they have no choice, that they can't lose this race, that their stockholders demand profits right now, and firing humans gets those results. Nobody appears to be looking down the road at the human or societal cost, even as are starting to muse that the end of the middle class and stagnant wages for the lower class seems to be bad for business.

Meanwhile, I'm not sure that enough people understand which way this wind is blowing. Certainly some politicians find it useful to blame employment and economic issues on immigrants rather than software, but I'm not sure the techno-illiterate great-grampaws in DC understand what is happening either. And when I ran a post about the Oklahoman bozo who wants to fire and decertify every teacher who ever protests, I got plenty of response saying, "I hope all the teacher walk and they fire all of them. Then what will they do?" Well, one thing they might do is call Summit Learning, hire a bunch of uncertified mentors to sit in classrooms with the students and computers, and then call it a day.

There is ultimately a weakness to this approach-- at least when it comes to education, the AI can't deliver on much of anything that it promises. It's like hiring your sister's not-very-bright child Pat to rewire your house electrical system-- you'll save a ton of money, but the job won't get done. Of course, if the AI is in schools for Those People's Children, and the children of the wealthy and powerful are safely enrolled in a good, or at least exclusive, private school, it may take a while to do anything about getting rid of bad AI education-flavored products.

It's not a pretty picture, which is why we need to pay attention. No AI company is going to come into your school district and announce "We'd like to fire a bunch of you staff and just sit all these kids in front of computers." They aren't worried about what's right, but they are worried about "backlash." If you pay attention, you can provide some, even if you aren't the kind of person who takes fancy trips to Switzerland.

TN: Legislator Says Bring On Fashion Police

Tennessee state representative Antonio Parkinson (D) considered all the issues facing education and decided that the one he wants to address is-- parent dress codes.

Schools may be figuring out-- slowly-- that body-shaming students and chasing them down for ripped knees might be counterproductive. But this Memphis lawmaker wants to crack down on the parents:

"People wearing next to nothing. People wearing shirts or tattoos with expletives. People coming onto a school campus and cursing the principal or the teacher out. These things happen regularly," Parkinson told TODAY Style.

“A principal I talked to told me a lady came into the office with her sleepwear on with some of her body parts hanging out. You got children coming down the hall in a line and they can possibly see this,” he said.

Parkinson does know how to dress

The bill does not lay out specifics, but lets each district set its own standards. Parkinson is apparently still "working on" the bill, so the details are not yet available.

I'm hoping that the bill allows for actual honest-to-God fashion police. Chris's mama shows up to drop off her child in nothing but pajama's-- have the school's fashion officer arrest her or fine her or throw a giant burlap sack over her. Will it matter if she stays in the car? How much of his naughty tattoo must dad cover up. Seriously-- how does anyone enforce a law like this. Any teacher who has to enforce a dress code knows all the stupid problems that come with it-- do I whip out my ruler and measure those shoulder straps? do male teachers admit they've been examining student cleavage to make sure there's not too much boobage showing? and there is nothing like a fingertip length rule to make you aware of how widely relative arm lengths vary from teen to teen. So who is going to deal with all this baloney when dress coding grown-ups? And why do I suspect that this will be mostly about policing women?

Yes, it would be nice if folks dressed appropriately and respectfully when they came to school, but that doesn't mean we need to pass a law. I hate it when people use quotation marks incorrectly, but I don't want offenders arrested by actual grammar and punctuation police.

Given Tennessee's educational system, it seems as if there are better things to spend time on.

MD: Failing Five Year Olds

Maryland joins the ranks of those states that have kindergarten exactly backwards. News overage of this Alarming Crisis starts with this sentence:

Less than half of Maryland’s children have the behavior and academic skills they need to be successful in kindergarten, according to a new state report.

Only 47% tested as "ready" (that's up 2% from last year). And I want to smack my head so hard that Maryland education policy makers all get a headache.

Look. If I go into business making pants, and it turns out that my pants don't fit the proportions of most living humans, the headlines do not read, "American men are built all wrong."

If I open a restaurant that serves food that most human beings can't digest, the headlines don't read, "American digestion systems are dysfunctional."

If I open an amusement park and all the ride have a "you must be this tall to ride" signs with "the tall" being set at 7 feet, 6 inches, headlines do not read, "Experts declare that the majority of Americans are too short."

And if I declare that five year olds must weigh at least 100 pounds to be considered ready for kindergarten, the headline doesn't say, "State's five year olds have alarming developmental lag."

Maryland has seen red flags about their test already; school districts "rebelled" because the test took too long to give. Now districts are allowed to do a "sampling." This is Bad Management 101-- make your people spend more time reporting on the work than actually doing the work. The final paragraph of the story hints at an actual use for a test like this--

A majority of kindergarten teachers indicated that the test, given in the beginning of the school year, helps them identify their students’ strengths and weaknesses, according to survey results released by the state.

-- but of course that can only work in districts that give the test to all students.

In the meantime, Maryland continues to push for earlier and earlier "education" rather than considering that this data might show them that their kindergarten is out of whack.

Yes, there's no question that some sort of intervention in earlier years can help close some of the gaps in later educational achievement. But it is not a five year old's job to be ready for kindergarten-- it is kindergarten's job to be ready for the five year olds. If a test shows that the majority of littles are not "ready" for your kindergarten program, then the littles are not the problem-- your kindergarten, or maybe your readiness test, is the problem. The solution is not to declare, "We had better lean on these  little slackers a little harder and get them away from their families a little sooner." Instead, try asking how your kindergarten program could be shifted to meet the needs that your students actually have. And if you still think that children raised in poor families have "too many" needs, then maybe start asking how you can ameliorate the problems of poverty that are getting in the way.

This is one of the legacies of No Child Left Behind-- the upside down school, where students exist to meet the needs of the school, specifically the need for good test results. This backward approach continues to be most obviously out of whack with the littles, where all of the best goals of early childhood education have been systematically replaced with the goal of "get these kids ready to take the tests."

This is backwards. The school exists to meet the needs of the children; test results like this don't show a failure of children, but a failure of the school system.

ICYMI: Here Comes Another Arctic Blast Edition (1/27)

So it's going to get cold again. But in the meantime there are useful things to read about education. Here's the list for this week-- remember to share what you think needs to be shared.

Denver's Portfolio Model School District is a Failure

Thomas Ultican breaks down some of the details in the long-running reform experiment in Denver schools.

Automation at Davos

This is pretty stark stuff. The difference between what the movers and shakers say about AI publicly (It will be great for workers) and what they say privately (We'll be able to fire 99% of our human workforce).

Success Academy: The High School

One would expect Eva's attempt to expand her brand into high school to be ugly and messy, but this podcast with transcript shows just how ugly and messy (spoiler alert: really). Just brace yourself for the whiplash conclusion.

Floridians Choose Public Schools

Breaking down some survey data to see what Floridians would really like.

Under-discussed Stories of 2018

Have You Heard podcast looks at five six stories that didn't quite get the attention they deserved. (There's a transcript if you aren't a podcast person).

Houses for People

Teacher Tom provides his littles a lesson in activism.

MLK's Work Precedes Us And, With Resilience, Lives After

Jose Luis Vilson and a wake up call for what MLK's legacy is about beyond pretty memes.

How Do Charter Schools Affect Students With Special Needs?

From the LAUSD strike comes this set of word delivered to the board about some of the charter claims that just don't hold up.

The Battle For New Orleans Public Schools  

If you'd like one more article for the "NOLA Is Not A Huge Success" file.

Is Competency The Hot New Thing?

Tom Vander Ark thinks that competency is the up-and-coming next big thing in education. He just said so a few weeks ago at Forbes, but he's been saying so for several years now.  Vander Ark has been at the education reform biz longer than most, but his career also includes the launch of K-Mart's competitor to Sam's Club, point man for the Gates small schools initiative, and an attempt to launch some charter schools in NYC that left a bad taste in many mouths. He's not always right. How about this time?

When we talk about competency (as in competency-based education), we need to keep a couple of things in mind.

Everyone's probably at home working on badges

First of all, it's not remotely new. For most of its history, it has been called "mastery" or "learning for mastery," and it crops up as far back as almost a century ago, when programs like the Winnetka Plan started playing with the idea that instead of focusing on the hours spent in a program, we could focus on whether or not the students had mastered a particular piece of skill or content. Mastery Learning began to catch fire again in the sixties. Most of us who went to teacher school in the seventies learned about it and were encouraged to make it a factor in our work, though nobody had yet solved one of the central problems with mastery learning. The premise was that every student could learn the material as long as she was given enough time--but there were still only 180 days in the school year.

In the classroom, mastery learning often took the form of giving students multiple, even unlimited, attempts to show mastery of the material. On the ground, this looked like, "Students, you can keep taking the unit test until you pass it." Students sometimes took advantage of the reduced sense of urgency, and parents were not always supportive--as one parent asked me, "Why should my kid try when he gets a dozen shots and everybody passes?" While mastery learning became central in very few classrooms, by the eighties, many teachers had incorporated elements of mastery learning into their practice.

In the nineties, mastery learning made a comeback with the rise of Outcome Based Education. In OBE, each lesson would culminate in a student demonstration of some particular outcome--new terminology for showing mastery (immortalized in a million million lesson plans as "The Student Will Be Able To", aka "TSWBAT"). We would have authentic assessments, where the students would demonstrate mastery in some "real" way; multiple choice tests and their ilk would be banished. Each student would have a portfolio that would show the complex web of her mastered skills, not just some simple letter grade. And finally, the motto, drilled into teachers at countless professional development sessions, was that "all can learn all."

But OBE died a quick death. Part of the opposition came from conservative parents who resisted the "values" outcomes that required students to demonstrate mastery of the skill of being a good person. The other fatal attack on OBE came from the rising tide of accountability hawks, spurred to action by A Nation At Risk and demanding the kind of cold, hard numbers and measures that led us to No Child Left Behind, Common Core and accountability based on multiple-choice standardized tests.

Competency is a new branding of a century-long thread in education. Now mastery can be marked with digital badges, the progression of skills maintained, measured and recorded by computers, the badges earned and issued in and out of school.

If it's going to finally become the big thing in education, it will have to solve some of its old central problems. How long do you give students who progress to mastery slowly? How do you sequence competencies in a way that's fair and sensible? How do you break complex skills and knowledge into competencies that are measured in authentic and valid methods? If you let anyone, anywhere issue a "badge" for a competency that's been mastered, how do we keep accountability hawks happy? And a new problem--what happens when you let all of these educational decisions be made by tech companies?

Vander Ark's evidence that competency is going to finally bust through this time is essentially a list of tech companies that are working on various parts of the problem. Some companies are working out how to issue a digital badge for a variety of mastered skills that will be assessed... somehow. Financiers like XQ and New Schools Venture Fund are throwing money at groups that want to work on these problems. But even if all these groups successfully solve the problems of mastery learning, advocates like Vander Ark will still have one more question to answer-- can you get parents to sign up for a mastery learning system on a large scale for the first time in 100 years?

Originally posted at Forbes

OK Legislator To Teachers: Shut The Hell Up

Oklahoma has worked hard to get itself in the front of the pack of States Most Hostile To Public Education. Maybe not number one (relax, Florida), but right up there. Ultra-low teacher pay. Slack charter rules. The kind of state where the idea for improving education is to gear it more toward providing meat widgets for employers. The kind of state where a serious idea about improving teacher pay is to fire half the teachers and give their money to the remaining teachers, who will all teach twice as many students.

So it wasn't a huge surprise last year when teachers in the state walked out. While they didn't get everything they wanted, they were still confident that they has sent a message to the legislature.

Apparently some legislators misunderstood the message.

Oklahoma's political leaders could have looked at the walkout and said, "Damn , we need to spend more on education" or "Damn, if we don't get our act together, we'll never recruit enough teachers to help with our ongoing teacher shortage" or even, "Damn, we have got to find a way to suck less."

Nope. The conclusion some legislators reached was, "Damn, we let teachers talk too much."

This frickin' guy. 

Meet Rep. Todd Russ. He's a hard work and Godly values guy. He has two degrees in banking and a Doctor of Ministry from Berean School of the Bible, and online university. And his wife is a public school teacher. He's been a banker most of his life, but has apparently since founded Commercial Growers Incorporated, and I can't find anything about that organization. In 2004, he founded the Burns Flat- Dill City Education Foundation, which seems to be scholarship related. And he occasionally attracts cranky attention.

And he's the guy pushing HB 2214. It doesn't have a name, so let's just call it the Shut Oklahoma Teachers The Hell Up Act. SOTTHUA is an amendment to the previous act that was supposed to already have shut teachers up by making it illegal to strike. But it's only a strike if a teachers union takes action against its local school board; when all the teachers walk out because of the state legislature, that's just a walk out and it was previously completely legal. So Russ (did I mention that his wife is a public school teacher??) has plugged the holes with this language:

It shall be illegal for the board of education or school district employees, including all those defined in Section 1-116 of this title, to strike or threaten to strike or otherwise close schools or interfere with school operations as a means of resolving differences with the board of education, the State Department of Education, the State Board of Education, the Legislature or any other public official or public body. Any person engaging in a strike, shutdown or related activities shall be denied the full amount of his or her wages during the period of such violation, and if the person holds a certificate issued by the State Board of Education, such certificate shall be permanently revoked. 

Stage a walkout against the local board or the state legislature or, well, anybody, and lose your teacher certificate. If you can't be a quiet, submissive teacher, well, then, you can't be a teacher at all.

Note, also, that this applies to boards of education, because some of those sonsabitches supported the teacher walkout of 2018 both vocally and by closing schools. So they can also shut the hell up.

I haven't found any quote from Russ discussing how he thinks this will affect Oklahoma's teacher shortage. Nor does this staunch defender of the Second Amendment said anything about how he feels this law fits in with the First Amendment. I'm no Constitutional scholar, but this seems a bit iffy to me. Heck, the courts say a politician can't block critics on Twitter, so Russ would be powerless an Oklahoma tweetstorm.

At this point, it's hard to tell if any legislators are willing to support Russ's baloney bill. And it's not the only stupid unconstitutional bill being proposed; Senator Mark Allen wants to make any group over 100 that wants to protest on the capitol grounds post a $50K bond. Both parties have already indicated that bill won't fly; let's hope similar sense prevails regarding Russ's boneheaded bill.  At any rate, here are two more things I do know about Todd Russ.

First, this is apparently not his only education-related bill. Check out HB 2208. This bill would require every school district to have a secret ballot vote at least every five years to determine whether or not the union can keep representing teachers there or not.

Second, Todd Russ won his 2018 re-election bid over Dennis Dugger by about 500 votes-- 5,698 to 5,106. It seems as if Rep. Russ might be a tad vulnerable come next election cycle. That seems worth remembering.

P.S. He's one of three legislators to vote against an equal pay act for women in the state.

WV: Legislative Extortion

Last spring, West Virginia's teachers stood up and stood up loud, shutting down every single school in the state. They were out with five demands-- better wages, health insurance, defeating an expansion of charter schools, keeping seniority, and killing a "paycheck protection" bill. They won, the governor signed a pay raise, and teachers won the right to shout at the end, "Who made history? We made history!"

They should have forced the legislature to swear "No take backs."

Republicans in the West Virginia Senate have introduced a bill that aims to undo some of the results of the 2018 strike.

"This is a vision that’s been worked on with input from many,” said Senate Education Committee Chairwoman Patricia Rucker, R-Jefferson. She forgot to say many what, as the bill, wit versions clocking in at well over 100 pages (one draft version is online here), was put together with zero input from the teachers union.

That makes sense, since the goal here is to shaft West Virginia's teachers yet again.

A picturesque WV cliff off which the WV GOP would like to throw public ed

Teachers struck for a 5% wage hike; the bill has a 5% average wage hike. Teachers struck for improved health insurance. The bill sort of does that. The bill also adds incentive pay for math teachers. It even adds a teacher expense credit (a whopping $250) for teachers. But it doesn't end there.

Since the strike, teachers in West Virginia have been playing whack-a-mole with various reformster proposals, and each one of them has been shot down. Now they are all back, wrapped into this humongous bill the includes teacher wage increases and health care. The GOP message is clear-- give us what we want, or you can't have your raise.

What do they want? It includes a "paycheck protection" clause, requiring unions to get permission annually to deduct dues from teacher paychecks. It docks teacher pay during walkouts.

It gives West Virginia, for the first time, charter school law the establishes both brick and virtual charters. The charter law takes up 32 pages of the whole bill, and covers all the bases from a state charter commission stocked with political appointees all the way to rules allowing charter takeover of public facilities in whole or in part. It institutes open enrollment.

And it creates the super-voucher education savings account system. The system would give parents 75% of the state adjusted per pupil expense. The proposed voucher may be used for private school tuition, online learning programs, tutoring, extra services like activity fees, textbooks or any other instructional materials, computer hardware or software, school uniforms, testing fees, summer school tuition, CTE tuition, services and therapies like PT, transportation to/from school, and anything else the state treasurer approves. The ESA does not require the student to be enrolled in a private school-- in other words, you can use your voucher to home school.

The parent fills out an application and promises to get the student an education in "at least" reading, language, math, science and social studies (which is certainly a "least" education). The ESA program will itself be privatized by hiring someone to manage it. A parent review committee of seven ESA parents picked by the treasurer will determine if any expenses are questionable; they'll meet when the treasurer calls them, and he'll call them when...? Are we supposed to believe he'll be monitoring all those ESAs? Because that is a lot of work, but if you don't do it, Florida history tells us that a lot of the money wanders off.

Granted, I'm looking at a draft, of which there were apparently several, but this is a bad implementation of a bad idea.

So that, in broad strokes, is the deal. If the legislature wants teachers to get the raises they were promised, they have to let the GOP blow up public education. Senate President Mitch Carmichael projects just the right weasely passive-aggressive tone:

I'm certain that there are some teachers and some union leaders that would rather just have an enormous pay raise — which is a component of this bill — and not reform the system in any manner. But I am confident that really great teachers want to have the opportunity to do their job in the best possible manner. 

The actual bill was, possibly, going to show its face today. The lesson here is not a pleasant one-- any history that is made can be unmade, and the West Virginia GOP is apparently committed to undoing as much of last spring's strike as they can.

The really unfortunate thing here is the the GOP missed the point-- the strike was not simply about money and healthcare, but about dignity and respect and building a better future for West Virginia's public schools and the students they serve. The GOP is calculating that they have made WV teachers so poor that they'll jump at the money and let all the rest go. They are calculating that the teachers can be bought. That's too bad, because while this bill can-- and should be defeated-- the disrespect for teachers that it shows cannot be taken back.

Here's hoping this bill goes down in flames and the legislature goes back to provide the teachers what they were  promised and what public education in West Virginia desperately needs.