Trump's Executive Order for 1776 Commission

Like many of you, I'm hoping that Trump's Executive Order establishing a 1776 Commission will be rendered moot sometime within the next 12-2,215 hours. But because, like many of you, I need something to distract me from doomscrolling (and the board of directors is napping), I'm going to go ahead and look at this damn fool executive order. The short form is that this is all empty political hooey, but I'm trying to kill time here.

First, it has to be said that somebody at the White House has a real gift for hamfisted baloney writing. Right of the bat we get the purpose of this EO-- "to better enable a rising generation to understand the history and principles of the founding of the United States in 1776, and, through this, form a more perfect Union." Because he's sure he heard that "more perfect union" thingy in some patriotic program once. 

Let's go.

Section 1. Purpose.

The American founding envisioned a political order in harmony with the design of “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God,” seeing the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as embodied in and sanctioned by natural law and its traditions.

I'm not sure a "founding" can "envision" anything. Nor am I sure about "natural law" and its traditions. So much about this EO sets off a long-time English teachers detector for "this student does not understand the words and phrases that he has copied from some other source." 

It goes on to note that the formation of a republic (notice-- not a democracy, but a republic, as all good right-leaning mansplainers will tell you) makes us really different, because it secures "through a form of government that derives its legitimate power from the consent of the governed." Which kind of gives away the game on not understanding natural laws, because those are laws that are built into nature itself. This phrase is like saying "We will be a new physics department because we will be the first to operate with gravity." Nope. The natural law--governments exist only by consent of the governed--is natural and has always been there in every single government, whether they knew it or not. What was new was enlightenment thinkers teasing out that the consent thing was a hardwired part of how governments work.

Throughout its national life, our Republic’s exploration of the full meaning of these principles has led it through the ratification of a Constitution, civil war, the abolition of slavery, Reconstruction, and a series of domestic crises and world conflicts.

A weird list. First, Reconstruction (aka "the South wins some non-military victories in Civil War overtime") is not really something to brag about. Second, why just skip over everything else? My guess- because this whole EO is still rooted in being pissed about the 1619 project and people who say we're a racist country. This is the standard comeback-- we are not, because we fought a war to free the slaves, and everything has been mostly super for Black folks ever since.

The EO says "those events establish a clear historical record of an exceptional Nation dedicated to the ideas and ideals of its founding." Because he wants to get American exceptionalism in here somewhere.

Now the angry paragraph explaining that students are being taught to hate their own country (a phrase that does a lot of heavy lifting, because, you know, maybe there were some other people who were pissed at the US too, but this isn't really their country). 

This radicalized view of American history lacks perspective, obscures virtues, twists motives, ignores or distorts facts, and magnifies flaws, resulting in the truth being concealed and history disfigured. Failing to identify, challenge, and correct this distorted perspective could fray and ultimately erase the bonds that knit our country and culture together.

Again, if we look at Trumpian history, we can note that "our country and culture" isn't meant to include everyone. Trump's "great uniter status" among his fans may be puzzling, unless you understand it to mean that Trump has been uniting Real Americans while pushing away all of Those People who Aren't Really Americans.

Now a couple of paragraphs of "we're not racist at all," featuring Abraham Lincoln and MLK. I take this as another hint that Trump didn't write this himself, because he's old enough and racist enough to have been one of the people vilifying MLK as a violent reactionary threatening our country and culture. 

Now, fasten your irony harness and sit down hard for this next part:

As these heroes demonstrated, the path to a renewed and confident national unity is through a rediscovery of a shared identity rooted in our founding principles. A loss of national confidence in these principles would place rising generations in jeopardy of a crippling self-doubt that could cause them to abandon faith in the common story that binds us to one another across our differences. Without our common faith in the equal right of every individual American to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, authoritarian visions of government and society could become increasingly alluring alternatives to self-government based on the consent of the people.

Yes, if the nation were ever to doubt some of its bedrock principles, a self-serving demagogue might use that. Such a leader might whip a core group into a frenzy by constantly scaring them with tales of Others that are coming to get them, and use that fear to install himself as a authoritarian leader, replacing allegiance to the country's principles with allegiance to himself. I'm wondering, and not for the first time-- does someone write this stuff completely oblivious to the self-description he's providing, or is it a joke ("Watch-- I'm going to tell them straight out what we're doing and they won't bat an eye")?

We're going to slip in some school choice here--the "restoration of American education" must be a local thing, and "parents and local school boards must be empowered to achieve greater choice and variety in curriculum." By the way, he wants you to know that this devotion to state and local control is why his administration "rejects the Common Core curriculum" and all efforts to impose national standards or curriculum. Yeah, he has no idea what he's talking about here.

Vigorous participation in local government has always been America’s laboratory of liberty and a key to what makes us exceptional. The best way to preserve the story of America’s founding principles is to live it in action by local communities reasserting control of how children receive patriotic education in their schools.

Is that what makes us exceptional? Because I thought it was all that other natural law consent of the governed stuff. Also, this graf begs the question-- who installed the evil country-hating curriculum that this is meant to countermand? Did not state and local boards adopt their own curriculum? If they are "reasserting" control, exactly who are they taking it back from? Because I'm pretty sure the feds didn't force anybody to adopt the 1619 project. I'm also pretty sure that most history textbooks are already plenty conservative (check this whole thread). But as already noted--political hooey.

Section 2. The President's Advisory 1776 Commission.

 120 days for the secretary of education to set this up. No more than 20 members, all appointed by the Pres. Two year term, because at the end of two years, this evaporates, because how much time do you need to whip up a complete and accurate approved patriotic history of the US. Can include folks from outside government, plus the following ex officio members (or their stand-ins): secretaries of state, defense, interior, housing and urban development and education; assistant to the President for domestic policy, and for intergovernmental affairs. Nobody gets paid for this

They have to crank out a report within a year, give some advice about celebrating the 250th USA birthday, implement a "Presidential 1776 Award" for students who know a bunch of Founding facts and stuff, make sure the patriotic education is incorporated into parks, battlefields, etc, oversee some grants, and whip up some PR activities. There will be a chair, and USED will come up with an Executive Director, as well as funding this thing. 

Section 3. Celebration of Constitution Day.

Schools gonna celebrate this day right, or we're gonna cut their federal funding. Because compliance is the American way. Also, yes, you are correct in thinking that all of the section 1 quotage is from the Declaration, not the Constitution.

Section 4. Prioritize the American Founding in Available Federal Resources.

Check the couch cushions. There has to be some money to fund this lying around somewhere, attached to some pre-existing programs. Just repurpose that stuff.

Section 5. General Provisions.

Disclaimers. This doesn't have enough force to push aside any actual laws or structures or jobs already in place.

You'll not9ice that while this has a purpose and a commission, it doesn't have a mission. The commission is supposed to meet and come up with... something. Not a curriculum, mind you, because that's not a federal job. Just write a report, in which this group of bureaucrats whips up a specially created version of 250 years or so of history. Sure.

Yes, it's a bunch of PR hooey, and may vanish entirely in the near future. Which is good, because political indoctrination is not the way you create patriots, and insisting that there's only one view of the past is not how you do history, and trying to codify a white nationalist view of our checkered and complicated past is not how you make America great. Nor is any of this how you raise real thinkers, but I've already talked about that. Here's hoping we don't ever have to talk about any of this again.

Survey: Pandemic Effects on Early Childhood Education

Defending the Early Years is an organization whose stated mission “is to work for a just, equitable, and quality early childhood education for every young child, by informing educators, administrators, and parents about how children develop and learn best and advocating for the active, playful, experiential approaches to learning informed by child development theory and evidence-based research.” 

DEY has done some valuable advocacy work around the issues of too-early academic instruction and the introduction of on-line pre-school (yes, that’s really a thing). This summer they conducted a survey looking at the effects of pandemic education, and they’ve just released the results.

Links to the survey were sent out through the organization’s social media accounts, so there is some self-selected tilt to the respondents, but since that tilt is likely to be toward people who care about early childhood education (and who have an internet connection), these results are still worth looking at.

The respondents are pretty evenly split between parents and teachers of children between 0 and 8 years. with a smaller group who are both.

A third of both parents and teachers were not working, with more than a third working full time from home. About two thirds of the parents reported their children were doing some sort of remote or online schooling. That broke down into 24% daily lessons less than an hour, 23% 1-2 hours, and 19% more than 2 hours. 31% had daily assignments to submit, while 38% submitted weekly.

Adjustment was a challenge. Only 15% of the parents reported that students had an easy or very easy adjustment, and only 23% of the parents reported an easy or very easy adjustment for themselves. From the teacher side, only about 1 in 5 teachers reported that more than half of students adjusted well across all ECE age groups. Virtually nobody thought that all students adjusted well. Of teachers, only about 1 in 5 reported an easy or very easy adjustment.

The survey also asked respondents to rate particular areas of concern. More than half of parents were somewhat to very concerned about all issues, but financial, returning to work, and children falling behind only drew under 60% of responses. The greatest number of parents rated an increase in child or parent stress as a concern, with more than 60% very concerned. Safely reopening schools and children missing social interaction with peers followed closely 87% and 90%. Academic concerns fell in the middle of the pack.

The areas of concern for the greatest number of teachers were safely reopening schools, establishing relationships with students, and an overall increase in stress for both children and teachers.

The survey also allowed for open-ended responses. Some tidbits from that portion include the not-surprising result that younger children “rarely stayed engaged with Zoom meetings” and that parents reported much of the online learning was not age appropriate. While many students found the entire process boring, some families did report that the experience increased communication and engagement within the family itself.

Technology itself was a challenge, a concerning result since the nature of the survey meant that respondents had, at least, a decent dependable internet connection. In areas less well-covered, the tech problems could only be worse.

The survey is from the beginning of last summer, which in pandemic terms seems to be about a thousand years ago, and we can reasonably expect that some districts are better-prepared and more well-organized this fall than they were last spring. But the results of the survey still provide one more set of data points about how teachers and parents working with the very youngest children are experiencing pandemic emergency schooling. The full report is worth a look.

Originally posted at Forbes.com

School Choice Disempowers (Almost) Everybody

The standard argument for school choice is that it will empower all sorts of folks, but it's just not so. In fact, modern school choice is designed to deliberately strip power from all sorts of public education stakeholders.

Unions

Let's start with the most obvious--one big dream of choiceniks is to finally break the damned teachers unions. You can see in pieces like the one I discussed yesterday just how badly some conservatives want to make teachers unions go away; for some hard righty folks, the entire public school system is just a scam set up to generate revenue for the unions, which in turn function simply as a fund-raising arm of the Democratic Party.

The charter dream model has been built around the fully-empowered visionary CEO, who should be free to do whatever his vision tells him needs to be done without government regulations or union contracts limiting his options. For charteristas, freedom to hire and fire at will, to extend the work day and work year as far as they wish, and to set work conditions as they wish are all an essential part. They want to "empower" teachers to obey whatever orders the boss wants to implement.

Vouchers of course move us into the world of private schools, where unions have never been a factor. Moving teaching jobs out of public schools and into private schools (particularly private religious schools) automatically turns them into non-union jobs. 

Taxpayers 

Every choice system, but most especially vouchers, disempowers all taxpayers who have no children. Only families get to decide where the kids go to school, taking in their backpacks not just their own taxpayer dollars, but the dollars of other taxpayers. In small districts like the ones in my region, you can see the effect starkly--a dozen families can unilaterally decide to cut funding to the public school system by three quarters of a million dollars, and the rest of the taxpayers have no say, nor do the school board members they elected to be stewards of their tax dollars. 

Taxpayers may object to the diversion of spending. They may object to a voucher system that allows their tax dollars to support a school that rejects students (and faculty) who are Black, brown or LGBTQ. Under such a system, those taxpayers have no say and their elected representatives have no power. 

Parents

But how can that be. Betsy DeVos continues to insist that her vouchery dreams are all about empowering parents. Won't having choice in a free marketplace make families the rulers? 

Well, no. Nobody in any sector of the free(ish) market has a business plan that calls for making all possible customers happy. Same is true of charters and private schools. I defy you to find me a head office of any non-public school in the country where they ever have a conversation bout how to reverse the loss of parents "voting with their feet." Catholic schools are perfectly comfortable making it clear that not all students are welcome. Big time charters like the Success Academy chain bend parents to their will, not vice versa. Any parent who sits in an office and declares, "You better fix this or I'm outta here," is most likely going to get polite directions to the door. Charter and voucher schools don't need all the customers--hell, they don't want all the customers, especially the expensive hard-to-educate ones. They just need enough customers. And that's always way fewer than the total available. It's a supply and demand thing--the supply of students far outstrips the number of seats that the schools need to fill

Here's another good explanation of how this works, from the podcast Have You Heard. In the 100th episode, Jennifer Berkshire and Jack Schneider scored an interview with Charles Siler, a veteran of the Goldwater Institute. Talking about the hosts' new book (A Wolf At The Schoolhouse Door--you need to get this), Siler explains the far right's dislike for collective action, and how that extends to parents--

They hate collectivized labor, but it's not just labor. They hate collectivization. And not just in the like economic sense of socialism or communism. If you look at what they do to democracy, like they hate direct democracy, voter suppression is a part of it. Why? Because it's, it's public collectivization. So like when you defeat all of the unions, people start to turn to the ballot to increase the minimum wage, right? It's the last place they have for kind of collective action where they protest in the street, a place for collective action, which they also work to curtail. But one of the things that I think is really critical for school privatization is that it isn't just about dismantling the collective power of organized labor. It's also about breaking up the collective power of the consumer. And so by individualizing education, you remove PTOs, you remove districts and, and families with homes.

Like I own a home in a very like desirable school district. You remove these ways that make it easy for parents to, to collectively organize and fight for good education. They talk about, and you alluded to this quite a bit like the Uberization or making education like Amazon, you think Amazon gives a shit. If I have a bad customer experience, I could spend hours complaining about some issue I have and they don't care. And that's what they want for public education. They want to disempower families. So it's not just collective labor, it's collective power of individuals that they see is, I mean, really internally, like they see as kind of lesser people, there's definitely a disparaging eye to people they see as takers, even though they're doing the greatest amount of extraction of wealth and resources that they can. 

Who Isn't Disempowered? Guess.

With no collective or empowered group to stand against them, privatizers get that much closer to living in the land of Do As They Please. It's not better for students, for families, for education, for the country; it's better for them. 

This is a unifying them for the "democracy is not the point--liberty is" crowd-- collectivism is bad. Well, bad in the sense that in order to be part of a collective, like a team or a board or a democracy or a functioning society, you have to give up some of your individual liberty. But the rich and powerful have accumulated a huge amount of liberty for themselves, and they would like to give up as little as possible. A publicly owned and operated school system is just one more obstacle to their perfect liberty state. Disempowering all the Lessers just helps them get closer to that fabled state.

ICYMI: Dear God Let It Please Be Over Soon Edition (11/1)

 Of course, it probably won't be. This is probably going to drag out for weeks. But we can hope that we're, as they say, turning a corner this week. Hope you en joyed that extra hour. Happy All Saints Day. In the meantime, here's some stuff to read. 

A Voting Rights Battle In A School Board Coup    

In Georgia, the battle over voting, schools, and race, surfaces in yet another battle. New York Times reporting.

The fight for the suburbs started in schools   

EdWeek also travels to a part of Georgia where te white folks just don't want uppity Black voices on their school board.

One Teacher's Black Lives Matter Lesson Divided a Town  

Or at least revealed divisions that were there. Newsweek has this not feel good story.

Charter Double Dipping

Carol Burris and Greg Leroy in the Daily News explaining how charters engineered a relief fund windfall.

NC Candidate Backed by anti-teacher millionaire  

If you're in North Carolina, you want to pay attention to this race for state superintendent.

We Couldn't Find It  

How bad can the for-profit college sector be? How about a school with no students or faculty. USA Today has the story.

Death by a Thousand Cuts    

Teacher education programs are taking continued hits, and the teacher pipeline is getting narrower and narrower. From Inside Higher Education.

How an education crisis is spurring a tectonic shift in Arizona politics

What has to happen for voters to support both Trump and increased taxes for public ed? Arizona is forging a whole new path. Jennifer Berkshire reports on this odd political shift.

DeVos will let religious groups apply for charter grants  

Surprising absolutely nobody except some pro-charter Democrats who were sure that the charter movement was all about social justice, Betsy DeVos took the next step in shifting taxpaer dollars from public to private religious schools. Here's Matt Barnum with his take at Chalkbeat.

DeVos on the Docket  

Here at the Institute we've taken many shots at the74, which started out aspiring to be an anti-union player for ed in 2016. But nowadays they do some actual legit journalism, like this pioece breaking down the record-setting lawsuit total racked up by Betsy DeVos.

Bad Leadership Creating School Crisis  

Jeff Bryant is at the Progressive laying out te details of a national shortage of capable school district leaders.

Teachers Struggling To Pull Students Out Of QAnon Rabbit Hole  

Buzzfeed with an interesting look at the challenge of having students in your classroom who have adopted bananas beliefs.

Betsy DeVos's Scary Story   

If parents know best, what's wrong with this guy in a DeVosian scare story. The indispensable Mercedes Schneider breaks down this Halloween 

The National Review Vs. Evil Teachers Unions

Upon first reading "Teachers Unions and the Myth of 'Public' Schools" at National Review, my immediate impulse was to just mutter "fatuous bullshit" and move on. But this piece is a fine distillation of a current genre of writing--the piece that blames current school closures on the self-serving teachers' unions, who see distance learning as a great way to pursue their dream of being paid for doing nothing. And as such, it needs to be responded to, even if only by a lowly blogger. Also, the National Review is not some completely stupid rag, and it should do better than this.

The writer is Cameron Hilditch, a William F. Buckley Fellow in Political Journalism at National Review Institute. He's originally from Belfast, went to Oxford, and has been playing in the big leagues. When you see his picture, you're going to think he looks like he's about twelve, but it's not fair to hold that against him; in my picture at the top of this blog, I look like I still have hair. 

Hilditch comes out of the gate mighty aggressive:

American taxpayers have been hoodwinked by the whole idea of “public schools.” No other institutions get away with such bad behavior on the part of some employees who staff them.

He cites the last batch of NAEP scores as his proof, making the usual mistake, deliberate or not, of mistaking NAEP "proficiency" for "adequacy" instead of "top quality." He calls these numbers "appalling," based on the fact that he wants something more to blame on public teachers unions that "continue to behave like the nation's most lucrative and powerful racketeering ring." 

All of this allows him to sidle up to his point, which is about the use of a "public" and "private" as political language; "these terms," he claims, "stop us from thinking clearly."

"Private," he argues, is at a disadvantage in a democratic society because it's "a word used by individuals to make claims on their own behalf against the claims of others." But with "public," he says, "at a time when loneliness and social isolation are rampant (a premise that cries out for some actual support), it conjures up associations with community, solidarity, and collective effort."

Those associations with "public" he argues, allow the people who work in such institutions to cloak themselves in nobility when they're "just as nakedly self-interested as everybody else." Now back to his main point of attack:

The saddest and most salient example of “public” institutions that are nothing of the sort in the United States is our “public” education system. These schools are advertised to taxpayers as institutions that serve every child in the nation. In reality, they serve the interests of no one other than the small group of Americans who work in these schools as teachers and administrators.

This is the classic anti-union vision of public education-- the whole education system is set up as a scam to fool taxpayers into providing gobs of money to sinecure-filling teachers and undeserved political power to union leaders. And Hilditch lays on the purple prose with a trowel:

Since the teachers unions can shield their own avarice with claims of “public service” to children, they can manipulate the actual public into thinking that more money, job security, or political power for themselves is in everyone’s interest instead of their own. They can claim that the hopes and dreams of America’s children are somehow mystically present in their paychecks and their extended holidays as if the funds in each of their bank accounts amount to some sort of progressive eucharist of which the entire nation partakes.

But while Hilditch can badmouth teachers like a pro, he does not actually provide a counter-argument. Is his claim that public schools don't actually serve all students? Then some sort of evidence would be helpful here; he just name checks graduation rates, test scores, and graduate employability without details, as if those constitute proof. 

The object of all this high dudgeon is teachers unions that are resisting re-opening of schools during the pandemic. This is a not-unpopular narrative among some folks, despite the fact that it doesn't have much basis in reality. There are plenty of parents out there who are not in any hurry to send their kids back, and plenty of private, charter, and non-union schools (which in some states include public schools) that are also keeping their doors closed. Hilditch is going with the "there's no real danger here" argument, specifically, there haven't been any surges in K-12 schools so far. Just a few deaths here and there. That leads him to arguing 

In typical fashion, the teachers unions are arguing that their actions are meant to protect the health of both teachers and students.

"In typical fashion" does the heavy lifting here, suggesting that teachers don't really care about anyone's health, and that such uncaring selfishness is standard fare for Those People. It also proves that they either "don't know or don't care" about the long-term effects of distance learning, then he goes on to link childhood brain damage directly to teacher union policy (not with evidence--he just links it by saying it's so). 

He also takes a swipe at Becky Pringle, lifting a quote from a Politico profile of the new NEA president. She's talking about what the union will do in the face of second DeVos term:

She said that “we will lift up all of the things that they are doing to destroy public education, to dismantle it, to hurt our educators’ rights to organize and have a voice to advocate at work for our students and for their community.” Notice the sentence structure. It isn’t “our students and … their community” whose “rights” are being “hurt.” It’s “our educators,” who stand in as middlemen between taxpaying parents and their children in order “to advocate at work for our students and for their community.” They claim the mantle of “public educators” when they should be called “taxpayer-funded educators.”

This is just... well, that parsing of the sentence structure is a reach. The NEA represents teachers, not the public. But he's pointing at a distinction without a difference. Teachers do, in fact, stand up as advocates for students, families, and taxpayers. They do it all the time. And his zinger at the end is kind of zing-free. Yes, teachers are taxpayer-funded educators. This point lands about like sneering, "And you know, those public school teachers all teach in public schools." Well, yeah. So? 

In fact, this is the closest Hilditch comes to hitting the major point that this whole piece dances around--the word's "public" and "private," when applied to schools, have actual meanings, not just shades of political rhetoric. A public school is funded by the public, owned by the public, operated by elected representatives of the public, and accountable to the public. They cannot turn away any students without extraordinary processes. A private school is privately owned, privately operated, and accountable only to its owners. They can turn anyway anyone they want to turn away. We're living through a long-term attempt to get these private schools the use of public funds, but even in those cases, private schools remain privately owned and operated. Words have actual meanings. This is not something that a traditional conservative should need to have pointed out to him.

But Hilditch's argument, such as it is, rests on sloppy conflations. In his conclusion, he says:

The assumption that government-run schools operate in the “public interest” has prevented us from noticing the many ways in which teachers unions operate in their own self-interest.

Also, a bicycle, because a vest has no sleeves. The only way this sentence even makes sense is if one assumes, as Hilditch seems to, that public schools, public school teachers, and the teachers unions are all a single entity. They aren't. He seems really, really pissed that the pandemic hasn't shown everybody that public schools are just venal and selfish. Again, I can't believe that it's necessary to explain to a traditional conservative that things are complicated, especially worldwide pandemics in which hard data is scare and actual leadership on the state and federal level is even scarcer. Even simple complicating factor like, you know, teachers mostly don't want to die or have a hand in the deaths of students or students families, but nobody can show exactly how much risk is involved in opening doors, or we could note that teachers would prefer, mostly, not to teach from home, because it's mostly an awful imitation of the work they really love to do, or that the equations of home v. school learning are different for Black and brown families. (And as always when confronting the Hilditches of the world, teachers want to know--if we've got such a stranglehold on the schools and the taxpayers, why are we still not rich?)

Maybe Hilditch is just upset that people are too nice to teachers. His final line is "But as long as they have the language of the 'public'-'private' divide to draw upon, they’ll probably succeed in convincing themselves and a good deal of voters that they are the selfless ones." It is symptomatic of the piece that the antecedent of "they" is unclear. Public schools? Teachers? Teacher unions? It's not clear. But whoever it is, Hilditch apparently just plain wants people to stop liking them. 

The comments mostly sing with the same stringent vitriol, but there is one on-point reply from an actual teacher:

Is there a way that don't have to look at everything in absolutist terms? Everyone is an enemy sent to destroy us? I am a teacher and I care about my kids. I appreciate my union and it's efforts to create a better working environment. I appreciate that they give us a voice and the admin listens to that voice. They advocate for us and for the kids. Can't we all do more than one thing at a time? Public schools do try to help kids. So do the teachers. This article is dripping in poison as are a lot of the comments. I think the slim possibility must be considered that teachers and public schools are trying to the right thing.

Hilditch appears to be quite certain that nobody in the public school sector is trying to do the right thing at all, ever. I started reading his piece getting angry, started laughing somewhere in the middle, but by the end just wanted to ask, "Who hurt you, buddy? Would you like a hug?"

Psychic AI and Plagiarism Detection

 Artificial Intelligence is used to sell a lot of baloney. It would be bad enough it were used only to teach badly and provide poor assessments of student work, but AI is also being hawked as a means of rooting out plagiarism. For an example of this phenomenon at its worst, let's check in on a little webcast from Mark Boothe at Canvas Learning Management System. He's talking to Shouvik Paul at Copyleaks, a plagiarism checking company and partner of Canvas. I'm going to watch this so you don't have to--and you shouldn't. But you should remember the names just in case somebody at your place of work suggests actually using these products.

We start with a quick intro emphasizing Copyleaks' awesomeness. And then Boothe hands it over to Paul, the Chief Revenue Officer at Copyleaks, because when you want to talk about a product, you definitely want to talk to the revenue people at the company. Incidentally, sales and marketing has been Paul's entire career--no computer or education background anywhere in sight. But this is going to be a sales pitch for thirty-some minutes. Great.

First, Paul offers general background on Copyleaks. An AI company, building "very cool" stuff. That includes a product that does grading of essays on standardized tests. It takes humans hours, but their Ai can grade those papers "within seconds" within 1% accuracy of a human grader. Spoiler alert: no, it can't. They have offices around the world. 

So they were working on ed tech, and "as we all know" everyone from universities through k-12 is using some kind of plagiarism detection (oh my lord-- does that mean there are first grade teachers out there running student paragraphs through turnitin?). Paul says they found that some of the technology out there was outdated, meaning that when you're out there in education dealing with students, "it's such a cat and mouse game--they're always looking for new ways to beat the system." So we're going to adopt a cynical premise about those awful students as a starting point. Great. 

"Let's face it. What's the first thing a student's going to do? They're going to youtube, and they're going to type in something like 'how to cheat plagiarism check' Right?" And he is showing us on screen many many many videos on how to beat the plagiarism detection software out there. The most common recommendation is to paraphrase.

So they asked themselves why plagiarism detectors weren't detecting paraphrasing and the answer they came up with is "paraphrasing is really complicated" which I guess is more esteem-affirming than "software is really stupid and doesn't actually understand words." That admission would also have implications for a software product that claims it can grade an essay in a second.

But take "I'm going to Utah." Paul points out there are only a few ways to say that, which is just wrong, unless you're not very bright or don't have a very big vocabulary. I toyed briefly with listing all the many ways one could write that sentence, but none of us have the time for that. Paul points out that millions of people might write it the same way, but that doesn't mean they're plagiarizing--there's just only "that many" ways to say it. It occurs to me that an important factor here is the reasons that someone would want to write the sentence in the first place, but I don't believe we're thinking that hard about the problem.

All of that is beside the point of paraphrasing, so he heads back to that, suggesting that they figured (he keeps saying "we" and how much do you want to bet that the revenue and sales teams were not actually a part of any of these product development discussions) that AI could be used to detect paraphrasing (because AI is like magic fairy dust sprinkled by unicorns pooping rainbows). 

And boy does he believe in magic, because he says the goal was to spot paraphrasing done with the intent of beating the system, and if there were software that could somehow read the writer's intent, that would be beyond amazing, since even humans have trouble sometimes detecting author's intent in a piece of writing.

But they have many customers, including big time legit colleges and universities. It's becoming clear that their marketing niche is all about the paraphrasing thing. They're uncovering more of that, Paul says. 

Other sales points he'd like to hit on. They're doing this in over 100 languages. They can also check code for computer science departments "being computer programmers ourselves." (Paul has never been a computer programmer.) Paul also claims they've figured out how to make the software self-improving so that it will stay caught up with the hot new plagiarism techniques. These are very "top level" things they are doing.

Now some info about how exactly they work, right after he sings the praises of Canvas, with whom they are deeply integrated. An unbelievable number of people are calling them to ask  if they can help with Canvas. And they can! It's turnkey! The controls are easy! They accept many files! They will catch paraphrasing! Here are many screenshots of the software controls. I am afraid that Mark Boothe may have left, or fallen asleep, or something.

Oh, hey-- that's interesting/alarming. I can compare a paper to a paper from a couple years ago. Who was storing that, and why? They get papers from all these schools and "add them to our internal database." And colleges and universities can add their own stored documents to the database, and they can check those for exact matches and--ta-dah--paraphrases.

Here are some screen examples of what the results would look like. It's pretty typical-- highlighted naughty parts with listing of where the match was found. Color-coded, so you can see exact matches or--yahoo--paraphrases. 

Now he's talking about intent again. Since there are only a few ways to write a sentence, we'd get too many false positives from people just landing close, somehow. But here comes the AI. "It's essentially understanding the logic." No, it's not. Okay, he's really stumbling through this explanation, so let me try to piece it together. See, if the page was blank, someone might have just written that sentence to write that sentence. But the AI is going to look at the context. And it's going to look for any other indications that "there is intent to cheat, deceive or to plagiarize." He's not going to tell us what those would be, though he looks at the sample paper and says the intent is pretty obvious, by which he apparently means that the paper is already loaded with cut-and-paste theft. Which is an interesting argument, since one might also argue that a student who depends on that much cut-and-paste is showing that he lacks the ambition to paraphrase anything. 

He's still stammering, the point being that instead of millions and millions of hits, the AI is narrowing it to just "the most likely" ones intended to beat the system. Again, if these guys have developed software that can divine author's intent, they can be doing so much more in the world than catching student paraphrasers. Imagine if, for instance, all political and diplomatic documents could be run past software that detects and explains the author's intent. 

Coding examples now. Zzzzzzzzzzzzz.......

He has now entered that mode of the person making the sales pitch who has run out of pitch, but not out of time. Post-Covid era, universities want to save money. We take customer support really really seriously. Very hands on. Opening the floor for questions.

Hay! Mark is still here and awake. He asks if they specialize more in college or K-12, and golly bob howdy but if they don't do really well in both. Historically it's been more higher ed, but "post Covid" (he has now referenced being "post Covid" a couple of times as if it's "now" which is an odd thing to say if you're anyone other than a person on the Trump re-election team, because we certainly still seem to be in a "during Covid" place) a whole lot of K-12 want this for remote learning stuff to go with their new Canvas learning platform. But there really is no difference in the way the product works, the methodology, what they search, for one market or the other. Second grade paragraph about flowers, college thesis about quantum physics-- they both apparently get the same treatment.

They are actually working on a "paper" about plagiarism trends pre and post Covid. They are finding a huge jump in cheating-- a "very unusual spike." They're watching the trends.

Audience question-- what databases does this tool check against? Answer: a whole bunch. Many. 15,000 academic journals. A whole gamut. Follow-up question about moving from Blackboard to Canvas. Do they lose previously submitted papers? Answer: that's on you, basically. You do the exporting, if you can, good luck.

Mark calls for any last pitch from Shouvik, and he's going with, boy, people just keep hiring us, we are using AI, we are moving forward with machine learning, and that's why folks love us, including people outside education world. Okay--this is interesting; the BBC uses them to hunt down people who are stealing BBC content and monetizing it on other sites. They promise better results. Call them for more details or a demo. Here's my email.

Boothe takes the wrapup. 

And institutions buy this. And students have to jump through this hoop, and have their work discredited if they miss a hoop because some software psychically read their intent. There are days when think the term "artificial intelligence" should be banned.

DeVos New NAEP Baloney Sandwich

Betsy DeVos would like you to know--again, some more--that public schools are failing. 

Her exhibit this time is the newly-released NAEP results for 12th graders in 2019. And as usual at NAEP time, her brief exhortation is riddled with baloney. 

America is the greatest country on the face of the earth, and we should deliver our rising generation the greatest educational opportunities possible. Sadly, today’s results confirm America’s schools continue to fall far short, and continue to fail too many kids, especially the most disadvantaged.

Wave that flag. But recognize that the NAEP 12th grade scores did not break out students by low-income levels, so DeVos has no idea which students, exactly, are holding the fuzzy end of the test score lollipop. Also, let's not lose sight of the fact that the NAEP is administered to public and private schools, so the same schools that she wants a voucher-paved path to for students--those beloved private schools are in this mix, too.

It’s particularly troubling to see the results for our lowest performing and most disadvantaged students getting worse. Education funding flows most heavily to these students’ schools, but these data make clear money to schools alone will not fix the problem. It’s a problem of approach

Again, she has no idea whether the funding "flows most freely" to the schools of the low-scoring students. Nor am I sure which funding she's talking about. Title I? IDEA? I'm asking for millions of teachers who are dying to know which schools, exactly, are the beneficiaries of these freely-flowing funds. But DeVos brings up funding only so she can argue that more money won't help. Of course, 2019's seniors are another of the generations that have grown up knowing nothing except the reformy NCLB test-centered data-driven programs that ed reformers like DeVos have been pushing at us, but she's not going to talk about that. 

Of course you know where she's headed-- this report card should "light a fire" under education leaders to try something new "to avert another lost generation." Another? Is she worried about a repeat of the 1920s and Hemingway and Stein and Fitzgerald, or is there some other lost generation she has in mind, and if so, when did we lose them, and how were standardized test scores related to their loss? She wants education leaders to start working with governors and the White House and get busy empowering parents (aka vouchers). Again--private schools are part of these numbers. But here comes the finish:

We must start to act like our national security hinges on fixing this, because it does. We must start to act like our economic growth hinges on fixing this, because it does. We must start to act like our very future hinges on solving this now, because it unquestionably does.

But the "this" she wants to fix is scores that have stagnated for decades. Has our economic growth and national security been suffering? And is education really the only way to fix these things, because I heard that her boss had already fixed them bigly. Look--education disruptors have been chicken littling about the imminent education-fueled collapse of the country since A Nation at Risk 35 years ago, and yet here we sit. And while we have a few issues, I'm not sure that persistent racism, failed trickle-down economic theories, and a problematic health care system can be blamed on low standardized test scores--or more importantly, fixed by raising those scores. 

I made my statement about NAEP a year ago, and what I said still goes. NAEP is super-duper clear that it's a huge mistake to try to blame NAEP scores on any single factor. Other folks are super-duper clear that NAEP's PR boast of being a "gold standard" is perhaps not well-earned. And every year, NAEP scores debunk the notion that if we just had hard data, we could accomplish edu-miracles. Folks will keep using the NAEP scores to back up what they already wanted to say, packing the data into a sad baloney sandwich. This is a fine time to remind you that elections matter.