Do Americans Overwhelmingly Hate "Woke" Policies?

You may recall that Parents Defending Education recently burst on the scene as the latest education astroturf, this time tilted hard right. Their battle against "indoctrination" in schools now includes a new weapon--a poll, which they're touting under the headline "Americans Overwhelmingly Reject 'Woke' Race and Gender Policies in K-12 Education." (Have we reached the point yet where "woke" is used like "politically correct"-- only by people trying to denigrate a straw version of the ideas that it supposedly represents?)

There is, of course, a fine art to writing polls, particularly if you're looking for a particular result (and it's fair to both sides that art). "Would you rather lick a toad or kiss an attractive model" becomes "Americans overwhelming dream of making out with famous models--is American marriage in trouble?" And that's pretty much what's happening here. We'll dig a bit deeper into the results in a bit, but lets look at tyhe marquee results that are being blasted across the interwebz.

The top finding is also the most obviously skewed. 

25% said it was somewhat or very important for schools to “teach students that their race is the most important thing about them” compared to 70% who said this is not important or not at all important.

This is presented on a list of things "that administrators... in your area could do." The poll indicates that the items on this list were "randomized"-- it's not clear if that means the order was randomized or (as is the case in another section) that only some of the 804 responders were asked each item. The list does not include anything like "ride unicorns through the playground area," nor does it offer evidence of anyone, anywhere who is actually proposing that students should be taught this.

The next item on the list says that 87% agreed that students should be presented with multiple perspectives and not just one "that the school perceives is correct," which is a hugely leading question, but not a hugely leading as what the pollsters actually asked. Responders were presented with two opinions and asked to state "which comes closer to your own opinion." The choices:

Smith says: Because learning how to think through issues is important, students should be exposed to different opinions for and against an idea. Teachers should provide students with more than one perspective.

Jones says: Because social issues are so important and believing the wrong ideas is so harmful, students should only be exposed to ideas the teacher or the school believes are correct.

Note that Jones says students shouldn't even be exposed to the ideas, thereby guaranteeing that this will come close to what practically nobody believes. Imagine if we rephrased Smith as "Students should be taught all opinions, including those that have been debunked and disproven by experts in field" and Jones said "Students should be exposed to the best, most current thinking on topics." It would cover the same issues--but it wouldn't get PDE the answer they want.

Other top findings. 52% said their local school had increased emphasis on issues of race and gender, and 57% said their local school had become more political. However, only about a quarter of the respondents have children in school. And we later learn that 42% of those do not know whether their school is teaching social, cultural, and race-based topics "in the traditional way" (whatever that is) or not. Only 29 parents believe their child is being taught in the "new way." 29. And yet somehow over 400 people are sure that there's a rising tide of woke-itude in their local schools.

74% are somewhat or strongly opposed to schools teaching that "White people are inherently privileged, while Black people and other people of color are inherently oppressed and victimized." The press release leaves out the word "victimized," which strikes me as a key word triggering a negative response here. This item was only given to 641 of the respondents; meanwhile, only 6.8% of the total respondents were Black. They also tout 88% opposing "assigning white students the status of 'privileged' and non-white students the status of 'oppressed'," --asked only of 491 of respondents but again, where is that happening? What does it even mean--"assigned status." 

The press release marks that 69% oppose schools teaching that "America was founded on racism and is structurally racist," but that's not the whole item in the poll--the whole goes on to include "and that racism is the cause of all differences in outcomes and achievement between racial groups." which pretty much guarantees the answer they're after. 

75% oppose teaching there is "no such thing as biological sex and that people should choose whatever gender they prefer for themselves" makes it into the press release, but the part that charges it up with "and that concepts like male and female are outdated" does not. 

Finally, the press release mentions that 80% oppose "the use of classrooms to promote political activism to students." The actual polling item is more specific asking if schools should "Promote social justice political activism in the classroom by making protest signs and banners, conducting walkouts, and awarding course credit to students who engage in political protests and activism."

There are some items that didn't make the press release, such as  asking if schools should teach "students that the United States was stolen from other people and inform them the school they attend and the houses they live in are built on stolen land." Even with that loaded language, only 56% were strongly or somewhat opposed.

The biases otherwise revealed are unsurprising. The majority of respondents favored capitalism, Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King (who appears without "Junior"), the Founding Fathers, and local schoolteachers. They do not favor socialism and cancel culture. The most-watched news source that was reported is Fox. 47% conservative vs. 32% liberal.

The poll was conducted by Competitive Edge Research & Communications, a firm that is about polling and PR-- "Our grassroots campaigns seek to influence public decisions by finding supporters and activating them." Their clients include politicians whose campaigns they helped push to victory. 

And if some of the items on the poll seem improbable in a straw man, nobody is actually doing that kind of way, remember that push polling is a thing. Remember that in a push poll the idea is not to measure opinion, but to plant the idea that something is going on. One infamous example would be the push poll in the South that asked "Would you be more or less likely to vote for John McCain...if you knew he had fathered an illegitimate black child?" Thereby pushing the idea that the McCain's adopted daughter was really his love child. 

This PDE poll is a fine example of a poll created to help folks make a point they already intended to make. PDE president Nicole Neily offers this summation in the release:

The results of this poll confirm that the campaign by extremists to transform our schools into political activist training camps is deeply unpopular among Republicans and Democrats alike, with only a narrow sliver of the farthest-left voters viewing ‘woke’ education favorably. This poll is a shot across the bow at those school districts, school boards, state legislatures, and governors who have either implemented ‘woke’ policies in schools or stood by while activists did so. Dividing our kids and communities based on skin color is abhorrent and has no place in America. Those who do so will be held accountable.

Bark loud enough and hope that people will start to believe you're a big dog. But there's nothing here that PDE wasn't already asserting repeatedly. Just some polling numbers to help make it look true.  It's unfortunate, because the issues here are complex, complicated, and requiring a great deal of nuance and understanding of the local picture on the ground. But conservatives are pushing this hard all across the country (perhaps on the theory they need something more base-activating than Joe Biden, and culture wars have never failed them before). We do have a lot of race and gender and class and culture issues to work out; none of what the PDE does here is particularly helpful; just using some astroturfing to shore up political operations.

And meanwhile, at the bottom of the press release, there's PDE's handy form for turning in any indoctrinators that you've heard about in your neighborhood. Don't worry--you can put on your brown shirt anonymously while you nominate someone to be canceled right into a re-education camp.

The Anti-Education Economy

A recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education asks "Our blind faith in the transformative power of higher ed is slipping. What now?" 

The article looks at the long-time US love affair with higher education, an affair that is one part long-standing respect (of some folks) for more and more education and one part the relentless drumbeat of articles pointing out that college graduates make more money. The favored government fantasy is that more education will result in a better economy, the dream of Smarten Up economics that seems as potent for some folks as the dream of a Trickle Down economy is for others. 

Get an education, get a better career, make more money, lift the economy of the whole nation. Education opens doors, lift boats, leaps tall buildings in a single well-funded bound. 

But for decades, that push has existed in tension with another push--the push to hire people with no more education than is necessary for the least amount of money we can get away with. "It's great that people are getting all this education and training," says business. "But we are working hard to avoid paying for it."

We've seen a steady push to break jobs into small. cheap pieces. Hiring a chef is expensive; let's break food production into simple bits so that we can just hire minimum-wage workers to drop the fry basket and wrap the burger. Craftsmen get a great deal of training and develop a lot of skill and are therefor expensive; let's break the production of this product into assembly-line bits, so that we don't need to pay for a lot of training and skill and craftsmanship.

Break up and even outlaw collective groups that allow educated workers to bargain for better wages and benefits. 

And if that leaves us still paying more for educated workers than we want, let's find cheaper ones. Let's move the jobs to India or China, where educated workers are good enough and way cheaper. Or let's transition to automated robot laborers, who are cheaper still. 

Part of our trouble with the transformative power of higher ed (and all education for that matter) is that it transforms people from low-cost meat widgets into people who deserve a higher wage. So as a country, with one hand we give a big thumbs up to education as an important, necessary thing for every citizen, and with the other hand, we do our best to fend off the requirements of a well-educated labor force. 

We offer as a sop, "Well, if you don't like the wages there, get a better job!" But at the same time, folks are trying to get more of those better jobs to disappear. And now that the treadmill has suffered a pandemic stop and people are, in fact, walking away from crappy jobs, suddenly employers are whinging about it. I get it--at least part of it. The notion of people being supported by taxpayers when they could be working doesn't sit well with me. But at the same time, if your business model depends on people being kept poor and desperate enough that they will settle for your crappy job, that shouldn't sit well with anyone. And really--if your workers are there with you because they're desperate and they've had to settle for your wretched job, that shouldn't sit well with you, either. For the past couple of decades, corporations have elevated the idea that they shouldn't have to consider loyalty to workers or the community that houses them--just cold, hard business decisions. Bottom line. Stakeholder benefits. Now they get to the experience the flip side of what happens when their workers don't consider loyalty, either.

Meanwhile, as it turns out, some businesses have figured out how to lure workers back. You may not be able to get behind this paywall, but I can give you the short answer--pay workers more and treat them better. How is this a mystery?

Teachers have been on the forefront of this assault--break up the unions, strip them of power, and look for ways to "teacher-proof" instruction, so that any low-wage shmoe can open the box, follow the instructions, push play, turn on the computers, and let students consume their education at a low cost. Turn education into a consumer good, so that vendors only have to deal with "customers" one at a time rather than deal with the full weight of all taxpayers holding education-providing institutions to account.

Schools are where that tension keeps playing itself out. Education is important and you need it to better yourself, but at the same time, we are going to do everything in our power to avoid giving you better pay based on that education. 

Let me add my usual disclaimer that profit-seeking businesses are not inherently evil--they just have a certain profit-seeking set of priorities that are not always aligned with what's best for society at large. There are businesses and leaders who get it, but the neo-liberal gospel of "Just let the invisible hand guide everything and things will go great" doesn't cut it. And "blind faith" in education is just another way of saying that if you get more education, someone, somewhere will make things better (so I don't have to). Less faith, more actual support--that would be great.

ICYMI: Mother's Day Edition (5/9)

Honestly, it has been kind of a rough week here, and it's not getting better any time soon. So whatever else you do today, make sure you hug a loved one and let them know you care. Time is relentless and remorseless. Humans do not have to be. Here's some reading from the week.

Teacher Evaluations (Hammers and Nails)

Blue  Cereal Education with a story of what teacher evaluation looks like in the field, and why sorting everything into hammers and nails is a problem of its own.

The Great (Unemployed and Underpaid) Transformation

Nancy Flanagan takes a look at what has changed, and why we're not going back to "normal."

A state legislator is howling indoctrination because my 7th graders are learning the ocean is polluted

One of the new anti-indoctrination policy ideas now making the rounds is to force teachers to post their lesson plans and materials (the better for folks to catch educators in their indoctrinatin' ways). Justin Parmenter inadvertently became a poster boy for that initiative in North Carolina. He tells eth story at Notes from the Chalkboard.

As schools expand racial equity work, conservatives see a new threat in critical race theory

At the Washington Post, an overview of the current right wing freakout over CRT (or at least what they imagine CRT must be). Pair this with the next piece on the list.

Why the right loves public school culture wars

Michelle Goldberg at the New York Times suggests that the right needs something to get the based fired up, and since Joe Biden won't fill the bill, let's get excited about all that pub lic school indoctrinatin' going on.

Biden's American Families Plan would revolutionize life for poor children

Jan Resseger looks at the potential effects of Biden's big AFP proposal.

Authentic Education Reform Based on Diversity Research

Thomas Ultican takes a look a new book about diversity research and considers teacher voice in policy ideas.

Democracy Prep enabled its founder to rip it off

If you're puzzled by the story of how Seth Andrew managed to take a pile of money from the charter he founded, the indispensable Mercedes Schneider clarifies how it was all done. 

How a Miami School became a Beacon for Anti-vaxxers

The Centner Academy hit the news when it announced that it would fire teacher4s for getting vaccinated. That turns out to be just the tip of the crazy iceberg. The New York Times went digging.

AI May Have Hit a Dead End

At Salon, Thomas Nail considers why artificial intelligence research may have wandered down the wrong road.

Artificial Intelligence Is Misreading Human Emotion

Kate Crawford at the Atlantic explains why all those programs claiming they can read student emotion are actually bunk.

Science of Reading Advocates Have a Messaging Problem

At the very least. Chuck Goldenberg at EdWeek explains.

If people talked to other professionals the way they talk to teachers

McSweeney offers a perfect true/sad/funny chaser for Teacher Appreciation Week. 

Accountability Whiplash

It's one of the little inconsistencies in the reformster movement. 

Some will point at charts showing that spending on public education has increased steadily (in constant dollars) and ask, "What have we gotten for it?" 

There are answers to that question, including but not limited to A) more education for special ed students previously warehoused in some back room, B) better funding for previously marginalized students and C) more administrators, in part, to deal with increased gummint paperwork. The other part of the answer is that any taxpayer can demand a peek at the school district budget; you can find out where those dollars have gone. 

I've only ever had one beef with accountability hawks. I believe taxpayers are absolutely entitled to accountability by their local school district. My argument is with the instruments used to assess what districts are doing (spoiler alert: the Big Standardized Test is a spectacularly bad accountability instrument). 

But the real whiplash begins when some accountability hawks then stump for school choice and vouchers. "We are not getting enough accountability from our public schools, despite all the rules that require transparency from them," they say. "So instead, let's give the taxpayer money to schools that have no accountability requirements at all."

In fact, many of the voucher bills being floated around the country specifically stipulate that the state will in now way interfere with the operation of the private schools receiving voucher money, which is another way of saying "We will not hold these schools accountable in any way, shape or form." 

I understand accountability hawks. I understand choicers. What I don't understand are the reformsters who live where the Venn Diagram overlaps-- "We are upset about the lack of accountability in how public schools spend tax dollars, so we would like to see those tax dollars pumped into a system that offers no taxpayer accountability at all." 

We have now hand ample opportunity to see how accountability plays out under super-choice systems. Arkansas spends $3.3 million on a voucher program with little-to-no oversight. There's the story from Arizona about the $700,000 of voucher money spent on beauty supplies and clothes. And there are stories we don't even know yet because nobody is tracking what happens to those taxpayer dollars. 

"Parents!" is the standard response, the idea that parents, acting as the invisible hand of the marketplace, will provide all the accountability. But we know that doesn't work. We know that the last time vouchers were used on a large scale, it was by white parents trying to get their children out of newly-segregated public schools. No less a choice fan than David Osborne said at a recent Bellwether webinar (I'll post a link when it gets posted) that the research tells us that parents do not close bad schools. Nor would I expect them to--a private/charter school doesn't have to make everybody happy, doesn't need to hold onto all customers, and in fact can function better if it chases away everyone who's not a "good fit." I will bet dollars to donuts that Eva Moskowitz has never changed one letter of Success Academy policy because some parents had threatened to walk, nor are the many anti-LGBTQ private schools collecting taxpayer money going to loosen their policies because some parents will walk with their feet. 

The other problem with parent-based accountability is that there are plenty of taxpayers who are not parents of school age children. In a parent-based accountability system, those taxpayers get no say. Nobody has to be accountable to them. They get no say, even though they will have to live and work with the results of that system.

Accountability whiplash can be explained in part by faux accountability hawks, reformsters who don't really give a rat's tuchus about accountability other than it's another tool for discrediting public schools.

But what remains is a mystery--reformsters declaring "We don't think the public school system has enough accountability, so we would like to replace it with a system that has even less." 

"Liberty!" is the other call. As long as enough parents want an all-white academy that teaches the earth is a 4,000 year old plate and the Civil War had nothing todo with slavery and vaccines are a dangerous Big Pharma hoax, then they should get to have that school AND the taxpayers should foot the bill. 

But as we have been dramatically demonstrating for the past few years, our country and its taxpayers have a vested interest in a citizenry that doesn't believe dumb things. Yes, we will have to have constant arguments about what belongs on the list of dumb things, but there is no benefit to the country or its taxpayers in a system that lets everyone avoid ever having their beliefs challenged. Yes, finding your way to understanding through diverse and multifaceted aspects is complicated, but there is no virtue in answers that are simple and wrong. 

You can't have it both ways. Either taxpayers deserve to have accountability for how their tax dollars are spent, or parents deserve to freely spend taxpayer dollars without accountability or oversight. 

Teaching Legacies

It's easy as a teacher-- particularly if you've taught in a single school for a lot of your career-- to think of your legacy being in the building or in some program that you created or nurtured. But that's not it.

As you approach retirement, you may notice (if you haven't already) that no matter how ever-present and plugged in you may be, no matter how many invaluable extras you provide, once you are gone, every trace of you vanishes pretty quickly. Your room is redecorated, your furniture gets divided up by your former colleagues, and as for your standing within those four walls...

The year you announce your retirement: The Legendary Mrs. McTeach

First year you're gone: It's so weird without Mrs. McTeach here.

Second year: Yeah, I sort of remember a Mrs. McTeach

Third year: Mrs. McTeach? Didn't she used to teach here?

Fourth year: Who?

It's the nature of schools-- students pass through pretty quickly, even though they feel like they've been there for a thousand years. 

Actually, your legacy has left the building long before you have.

Right now I'm in the middle of overseeing a local writing competition, operated for twenty-some years now in honor of Margaret Feldman. Let me tell you about her.

She was born and raised in this small town. Her father made a smallish fortune by inventing and selling a watch lubricant and running a jewelry store (most of the smallish fortunes in my area came from something to do with oil). He was also an accomplished musician. Margaret was an athlete in high school, graduated early, and attended college. From there, she eventually ended up in DC working for the OSS (the precursor of the CIA) which she did for many years, before finally coming back home and teaching English at the high school where I graduated and taught. She was fearless and feisty, but also very proper. By the time I was a student, she was occasionally subbing. By the time I was on staff, she had stepped back from that, but she still ran a summer literature program for some students. She copied off the New York Times crossword puzzles and put them in teachers' mailboxes, and stopped by to chat. 

She new all sorts of people, mostly from her time in DC, and she was a source of inspiration to the generation of students who had her in class. When Aunt Peg passed away, the most immediate reaction of those students (now long-matured men and women) was to collect money to set up a foundation in her name. One ongoing function of that foundation has been to stage an essay competition for students throughout the county in her name. 

Keeping that competition afloat this year is a labor of love for me on two counts. The competition has been run by a woman who came to town and was befriended by Peg, who then recommended her to the district when an opening appeared in the department--that was my long-time teaching partner, who passed away suddenly and unexpectedly less than a year ago. So I'm working to keep the project afloat in memory of both of them.

That is what a teacher's legacy looks like-- grown-ups out in the world making use of the tools that teachers gave them years ago. If you teach in a small town, you get to appreciate that legacy a bit more. My hair is cut, my teeth cleaned, my car fixed, my food prepared, and my path just regularly crossed by students that I have taught over the decades. That, and the internet makes the whole world a little smaller, too. 

Teaching is one of the rare fields in which, like a blindfolded gardener, you never get to see the end product. You get a hint, a glimpse of the outlines, as the students head out the door. But so often you don't get to know the rest of the story. You can look around your room, your building, but your legacy is not there. It's out there, somewhere, in the world. Maybe a bit in your colleagues. A foundation funded by former students is nice, but not everyone gets that and anyway, you aren't around to see it. 

This is why, for years, I've said the best Teacher Appreciation Week gift is a personal, handwritten-on-paper note. Though advocating for public education is right up there, too. And some folks would do well to spread their appreciation out over the year, rather than being appreciative for one week and a jerk for the other fifty-one. 

But a note. A note is nice. You are somebody's legacy, and it means something to them to hear that you appreciate their role, back in the day, in your life. I guarantee it.

Khan Academy Expanding To Littles

The pandemic has been very, very good to Sal Khan, and he's ready to grab the big sticky ball and run with it. He recently did an interview with Emily Tate for EdSurge, and it's all just as discouraging as you would expect.

Khan opens with a few thought about pandemic life in the Bay Area:

“Obviously, some aspects have been suboptimal for everybody,” he says, acknowledging that his family has been extremely fortunate. “Every now and then, it's been hard to do a call while the kids are screaming or something like that, but between meetings, to see them or have lunch with them or go on a walk with them, that part has been actually quite nice.”

Then, just a few paragraphs later, Tate asks "How did you adapt to meet the needs of students during the pandemic?" Spoiler alert: his answer does not have anything to do with having lunch in person or taking walks together. But it did introduce me to another data-tastic term.

In normal times, we see about 30 million learning minutes per day on Khan Academy. When the pandemic and the closures started, we saw that go up to 90 million learning minutes per day by the end of that week.

I'm going to assume that "learning minutes" is a clever rebranding of "screen hours." If not, I'm dying the see the research that allows Khan to distinguish between minutes in which students are learning things and minutes in which students are staring blankly at a screen. But the non-answer to the question transitions into a plug for a new Khan product--Khan Academy Kids (slogan--"Joyful learning starts here!")

Khan Academy Kids is a "free, fun educational program for children ages two to eight." Tate offers Khan the chance to tell the story of this new program.

Let’s rewind to six or seven years ago. Everyone used to ask me, “What about early learning?” Honestly, I had a young family then, and I saw more than ever how important those pre-K years are. And I saw the advantages my kids had before they showed up to kindergarten. Most people who are middle-income or better, the Common Core kindergarten standards almost seem ridiculously easy. Like, of course my kid knows how to do those things. They probably got that [concept] when they were 3 or 4 years old.

But then you see so many kids who might show up in kindergarten the first day—and this was eye-opening to me—who haven't seen a book, some of them have never been read to.

And so immediately, out of the gate, in kindergarten, you're setting up a hierarchy of who's likely to succeed and who's likely not. So there's clearly a space for this, but I would tell people, “I have ideas, but that's not my expertise, and we don't have the expertise in-house.”

That expertise was shortly to arrive via Duck Duck Moose. That company was founded in 2008 to create learning apps for children. The three founders included Carol Hu Flexer (degrees in architecture, former product manager at Intuit, granddaughter of Hong Kong book publisher), and her husband Michael (software engineer at multiple start-ups). The Flexers had a two year old child who, they noticed, liked to play with their iPhone, so they went ahead and decided to start another start-up, tapping friend Nicci Gabriel, with whom Michael had done some work before, as a designer and illustrator. Gabriel started out as pre-med. The Flexers have classical music training.  You'll have noticed that nobody involved has actual education background, but they do have a process, described as "Observe children. Brainstorm. Prototype. Build. Test with children. Learn. Refine. Repeat all steps again. And again. And again."

They were founded in the Bay Area as a for profit company and picked up investments of about $7 million in venture capital, backed by Stanford, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Sequoia Capital. They developed 21 apps and won some awards. Then, in 2016, the company was "donated" to Khan Academy. Khan tells the story of them approaching him and, instead of cashing in through acquisition offers, looking to secure a legacy of "impactful education work." So now they are Khan Academy Kids.

Khan acknowledges that children need more than screen time ("outdoor play, being with friends, and ideally a pre-K program") and says that the app "leans quite heavily on social-emotional learning." And he cites a UMass study of 4-5 year olds using the app which found it got better results when compared to "two wholesome apps that did not target kindergarten readiness skills." That seems to be the source of a twenty-minute recommendation for the amount of time to park your tiny human in front of a screen. 

The interview also includes plugs for schoolhouse.world, an enterprise we've covered before. Short form: peer-to-peer tutoring, micro-credentials, and a batch of shady characters including Arne Duncan.

It's appropriate that Khan tells his own story in plugging schoolhouse-- "Khan Academy started with me being an analyst at a hedge fund and I was tutoring my cousins." Khan also notes "We've always known that the gold standard has always been high-quality tutoring, but no one's ever acted on it because it's hard to scale and expensive." Spoiler alert: schoolhouse.world does not solve any of those issues , nor is it about high-quality tutoring. It's more of the stuff built on a foundation of well-connected, well-heeled amateurs who figure they can easily create an educational revolution.

ICYMI: What? May Already? Edition (5/2)

That whole April thing seemed to slide by quickly. What could come next? 

I'll remind you (as I haven't in a while) that sharing is your power as a reader, and that if any of these really speak to you, the best gift you can give the writer of your favorite piece is more readers. Share.

I'm a Chicago principal. This round of testing won't tell me anything that matters.

Chalkbeat lets Seth Lavin explain why there's more to being a god student than getting a test score up to desired levels. How many of these sorts of articles do you think actual educators would have to write to be heard?

Bill allowing charter schools to circumvent districts becomes law without Gordon's signature

In the More Bad News department, Wyoming's legislators just rammed through a bill that lets charters become authorized without the approval of the school boards elected by the taxpayers who will have to foot the bill.

A Race To Nowhere With No Guaranteed Winners

TC Weber at Dad Gone Wild joins the ranks of people making a powerful and personal case for not freaking out over Learning Loss. 

General Education Has A Bad Rap

David Epstein was at Slate to share a piece from his book Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World, a copy of which I now need to buy. There are many good thoughts here, leading up to this final sentence: "Development is not linear, and diversions that set you back in the short term frequently become powerful tools in the long term."

AI Is Neither Artificial nor Intelligent

At Wired, an interview with Kate Crawford who says, among other things, that we have a regulation emergency, and that we need less research focus on ethics, and more on power.

Is There a White Supremacy Culture in Schools

One of the more challenging pieces that Nancy Flanagan has ever posted. Plenty to think about in terms of what values are actually associated with race.

The Real Solution to Learning Loss: Value Teachers and the Teaching Profession

At EdSurge, of all places, Torrey Trust and Robert Maloy argue that teacher loss and burnout is a bigger problem than "learning loss" (a phrase they say has become as widespread as "you're on mute").

Resigning with fire

If you haven't seen this clip yet, here's the teacher roasting his board on his way out the door. "If you respected us, you'd listen to us."

"Bust a Move": The Faculty Mix

McSweeney's comes through again, but you have to be old enough to remember the music that goes with these lyrics.