Ready for Hologram Teachers?

 One more innovation that nobody asked for, the hologram professor is another idea from the ed tech folks.

Much of the noise seems to be in the post-secondary world where-- well, here's one pitch:

The hologram professor is an innovative educational experience based on “telepresence” and, crucially at this juncture for higher education, it can recreate the natural dynamics of face-to-face environments – by creating a hologram of the lecturer in multiple classrooms at once, offering greater closeness and warmth for distance learners compared with current videoconferencing systems. Knowledge and experiences can be exchanged in real time while students interact and carry out activities in their classrooms.

In this version (from Mexico), the professor stands in front a black background with a standard batch of videoconferencing tools (camera, microphone, speakers)--which is our first clue that we aren't really talking about a hologram at all, but a regular 2D image projected on a "holographic screen." The students sit in their various classrooms, and the professor sees them on monitors. There's also a screen running slides, materials, whatever. This model--a full body live video version of the old videoconference teaching model--is popular in some places.

There are other models out there, most notably models that depend on some sort of augmented reality (AR) headset rig. These could involve actual 3D teachers, the hinted-at catch here being that to actually record a hologram involves multiple camera images being scanned and combined and generally not something that can be done live. So you get a 3D recording, without student interaction.

The first model allows for interactions, sort of, and in one version, the teacher can move around a bit. 

But the bottom line here is that when someone is talking about a hologram teacher they are either talking about A) a fancier version of the same instruction-by-video already available Youtube or B) a version of Zoom with a bigger screen so that you can see the teacher's whole body and not just her face. And to get A, there will be a significant investment in hardware and techs to run the program.

Also, any discussion of this has to include this tweet in response to an article about holoteachers:

President of my college touted this idea in a dept meeting 15 yrs ago. Students will get access to "real professors," he said to a room of living profs. My usually quiet colleague's response? "Ok, before you bring in the hologram, do you think you could fix the clock in 216?"

— Paul Gilmore (@PaulOscarTate) January 13, 2022

So while this is another of those ed tech developments that has been "just around the corner" for twenty-sone years, it doesn't look like anything really useful is showing up any time soon.

FL: When Compliance Culture Replaces Compassion

I don't usually cover these sorts of stories, but I've seen the body cam footage. The mother of the child is plans to take legal action. I don't blame her.

I'm always cautious about stories centered on student complaints about being mistreated by schools. A school's hands are tied when it comes to responding; a student's records are confidential, and so a fuller picture can't be shared. 

But I've seen the body cam footage.

On September 22, 2021, a fight broke out on the campus of Palm View K-8 School (Palmetto, Manatee County, Florida). One 12-year-old student recorded video of the fight on her phone. The administration wanted to confiscate the phone. The school resource officer, a sheriff's deputy, attempted to take the phone from her, first in the cafeteria and later when the child was being detained. Both times she pushed him away. The second time she was dropped to the floor, cuffed, and arrested. 

That's the basic outline of the story.

Let's talk about what the body cam footage from the deputy shows. The raw footage has been shared with me; for obvious reasons I cannot share it with you.

The footage begins with the officer talking with three female administrators. Early on, the officers indicates that he's ready and willing to cuff her and walk her out. One of the women (identified by the paper as the principal) says, "I don't think I want her in handcuffs, but I do want a severe consequence and I want her off my campus." Another of the women agrees that the girl should be used as an example. The officer indicates that "on the street" he would already have arrested her based on the push she gave him in the cafeteria. There's further discussion about handling the students involved in the fight. Then they're back to discussing the student with the video. The principal wants her gone and asks, "She has an IEP. If I do this [pointing at the officer], is she gone?" They are far more alarmed about "she was recording me without my permission," which they seem to think is illegal (it isn't). The girl does reportedly have both an IEP and a behavioral plan.

The officer clarifies to one of the women that he is not there to make an example "but if she becomes an example, so be it." She underlines that they support law enforcement. "Respect for the badge," she repeats. "Respect for the badge."

The deputy goes to the teacher planning room (apparently used as ISS) where she is being held. Mom is then called, and asked to come get her. For the first of several times on the footage, the girl makes a move toward her pocket and the adults move in to prevent it. 

Now the girl just stews. Head down. She actually does a quick phone check, but the officer is apparently not looking. A moment later, the officer demands to see her other hand. After a few minutes, she walks to the other side of the room. The woman in the room asks if she understands why they have to do this. The officer asks if everything is all right at home. Then it's back to "keep your hands out of your pockets" and "I don't know what you have in there. Do you have a weapon in there?" More silence. The woman tells the girl that she's concerned because "if you videoed one of our staff without their permission, you could be charged, and I don't want that." The girl tries to speak up, but the adults roll over her. "Wasn't even no fight," she finally gets to say. "They was just yelling." Her point- "Ain't nobody going to care." Nothing worth posting. She stays leaned up against a study carrel. Her head stays down all this time. And for almost five minutes nothing happens.

29:48: Officer says "take your hands out of your pockets" and approaches the girl.

29:51: Officer "Why are you manipulating your phone?" He's right up to her now.

29:52: Girl "How am I manipulating my phone?" He's right up on her, and she starts to stand.

29:53: Her hand is still in her pocket. The officer grabs her arm with one hand and tries to pull her hand out of her pocket with the other. "Take your hands out of your pocket. She pulls her hand out of her pocket.

29:54: She pulls her arm away from the officer. At this point, it appears that the phone goes to the floor.

29:55: Girl "You just threw my fucking phone. Move!" The officer pushes her back, one arm on her shoulder, one on her rib cage just under her breast.

29:57: She steps back, pushes one of his hands away. He is standing arms out toward her.

29:58: Two handed push on her shoulder.

29:59: The woman says "Stop, stop, stop." Girl moves toward officer.

30:00: Girl steps back and hollers "Moooove."

30:02: Girl moves in and pushes officer.

30:03: Officer "Stop"

30:04: She pushes again.

30:05: Screen blocked by her body. Sounds of struggle.

30:06: She is on the floor. 

30:09: He is putting cuffs on her. She is crying.

It's that quick. 

The aftermath is hard to watch. Her shorts are pulled down; she's standing in her boxers. She will not stop crying. When the second officer joins (walking past a teacher who's berating her students because "the kindergartners have a better straight line than you"), the girl crying uncontrollably, calling for her Mommy. Before they walk her out, they switch her to a different set of handcuffs, demanding that she turn "all the way around" to face the wall and asking if there's anything in her pants they should know about before they search her. The officer repeats this many times, as if he really, really expects her to be carrying something illegal. And he reminds her, when she's starting to cry again, that he will treat her like an adult when she's acting like an adult. They take off her rings and the whole batch of bracelets. 

Then they walk her out, in cuffs, through the campus. They take her headband off and put her mask on as they load her in the vehicle. The deputy is carrying a Black Lives Matter key chain. It will be another half hour or so before her mother arrives at the school.

I've communicated with some folks close to the case. There are other threads of the story to follow, if we had the time and space here. I'm told that since this incident, the girl has been accused of having drugs in her backpack, which she wouldn't let them search because what she did have was her first tampons. The girl is several achieving many years below grade level; some accuse the school of wanting to get rid of her to improve their numbers. This is apparently the first year Palm View has housed 7th and 8th graders; one wonders if they are simply unprepared to deal with 12 year olds.

The girl may be shuttled off to Horizons Academy, a "recovery" school for warehousing problem students. Horizons' student body is 33% Black. Manatee County Schools student body is 20% Black. You have already guessed that the girl in this story is black, and all of the adults are white. And Manatee Schools have had some issues in the past, but let's just stay focused on this incident.

There are so many bad choices made by adults in this situation.

First and foremost--have the administrators of Palm View used a cell phone any time recently? Because you could smash my phone with a large rock, and every video I've ever taken with it is readily available on line where it is automatically backed up. And while we're in servicing them on how phones work, can we please give them some professional development related to legalities around videos.

This is what happens when compliance culture overwhelms a school. Lots of people made bad choices aimed at forcing a twelve year old girl to knuckle under and do as she was told. At many junctures, some of them split seconds, choices could have been made differently to de-escalate, but instead, a twelve year old girl had to pay for all the choices adults made by being marched out of her school in handcuffs because she wouldn't hand over her phone.

This is also what you get when an administration tries to use SROs as muscle. It has been clarified many times that the video issue was strictly a school disciplinary problem, not a criminal one, and the child's arrest was for "battery" against the officer. That means that if the school has simply handled the video themselves and not called in the officer in order to "make an example" and deliver "serious consequences," the battery would never have happened. The officer notes, more than once in the course of the video, that a call for law enforcement to this school is very unusual--why do it for this instance?

You can tell me there's more context here and as I said at the start, I get that there's context to school issues that the school can't bring up. The girl is clearly not a top scholar and maybe not a model school citizen. But there is no context that makes it okay beat down a child like this over a video on a phone. None. The mother says she's prepared to take legal action, and I don't blame her a bit.

It is hard to watch this girl become increasingly distressed and dismayed. In trouble, with nobody in her corner at all, the adults around her treating her like a problem, the entire process dehumanizing and degrading, leaving a child feel powerless and helpless--powerful feelings for children at that age.

In Classroom Management 101 we all learn that you don't corner a student and leave them with no way out. Apparently all of the adults in this situation skipped that day of class. I don't care if a child has pissed you off a hundred times in the past--once you stop treating them like a real, live human being deserving basic dignity and respect, you have lost the plot. Compliance culture, which values children's compliance over their humanity, is always a bad deal in a school, and it is the children who pay the price.

A PA Billionaire And An Initiative To STOP Public Education

The Center for Education Reform is an advocacy group that has never been shy about where it stands on the issue of public education (and the teachers who work there)-- they are not fans. The chairman and treasurer are both investment guys and their advisors are all investment and privatization folks. But the beating heart and voice of CER is Jeanne Allen. Lately Allen has been touting a new program that CER "partners" with, founded by some big money out of Philly.

We've talked about Allen before. She's the founder, president, and chief spokesperson for the Center for Education Reform. She graduated from Dickerson with a degree in political science, then moved on to study political philosophy at the Catholic University of America. She was the "youngest political appointee to serve at the pleasure of the president, Ronald Reagan, at the US Department of Education, then became the ed policy chief at the Heritage Foundation." She earned an Educational Entrepreneurship masters at University of Pennsylvania in a program that offers what I once called "a degree in soulless profiteering." She announced her intention to step out of the president role in 2013, but no successor was named and apparently, she stayed right in place.

Allen is an expert lobbyist and advocate. She knows politics and business. She bills herself as "one of the nation’s most accomplished and relentless advocates for education reform, and a recognized expert, speaker and author in the field." She has no background or experience in actual educating. But she does know how to brand herself. If you want to see her in action, you can watch this 2012 clip, but chances are that by the time she says, "You can't have parent power and have teacher union power" and says "teacher union" with the same tone of voice one would use for "rotting cockroach carcasses," you will want to say unkind things to her.

Allen has a laser-like focus on dismantling public education. It took her about fifteen minutes to get over her initial antipathy toward the Trump administration, and her analysis of the GOP's 2018 losses was that they weren't reform enough. She went to bat for cyber charters when even folks in the charter sector were slamming them. And she called for a full Reagan on the LAUSD teacher strike-- just fire 'em all. More recently she's been making the rounds explaining how covid is further proof that public schools should be replaced by full on choice. (You can read more about her here, here, here, and here.)

Allen has often had access to large piles of money (she once offered a $100K bounty for someone who could teach John Oliver a lesson). Recently she's been touting the STOP Award program, which is throwing around millions. It was created "to honor and advance the work of education providers that continued to perform during Covid." STOP stands for Sustainable, Transformational, Outstanding, and Permissionless.

STOP awarded $1 mill for 2021; now it has launched a $5 million "rescue fund" which was set up to take advantage of the Chicago strike by offering big bucks to private schools that would accept Chicago students--so maybe back to the drawing board on that one (the rescue fund is no longer featured on the CER home page).

The "founder" (the "o" might be a typo) of the STOP Award is Janine Yass, board member emeritus of CER. She founded the Boys Latin Charter School in Philly; she's been a board member for Save The Children and Teach for America. And she's married to Jeffrey Yass.

You probably haven't heard of Jeff Yass; heck, most of us in Pennsylvania haven't, but he's probably the richest guy in the state.

Yass did not get rich the old fashioned way. As a college student in the 70s, he played a lot of poker and did a lot of gambling. In favorable press, the story is that he used smarts and practice and Big Thinking to get good at it, and turned that smartitude into investment billions; some profiles say he started out as a "professional gambler," which strikes me as a fine description of investment work. He and his Susquehanna International don't look for a lot of publicity, but they are huge. In 2018 Bloomberg called the company a "crucial engine of the $5tn global exchange-traded fund market." And Yass has been putting all his money to work.

Yass is one of the major funders of the Club for Growth, an uber-conservative outfit with quite a history of bankrolling reactionary political activity; CFG has this year launched a national push for privatizing education with Betsy DeVos showing up for the kick-off. Yass has also run a bunch of money through the Students First PAC and buddied up with the Commonwealth Foundation. Registered as Libertarian, he sits on the advisory council of the Cato Institute and in 2015 tossed a few couple million to Rand Paul's campaign, which he followed up by backing the Protect Freedom Political Action Committee in 2020, which backed David Purdue, Kelly Loeffler, Madison Cawthorn, and Lauren Boebert. He backed a host of election denialists, including Josh Hawley, though he has apparently expressed some displeasure with their activities on January 6.

Given all that, you will be unsurprised to learn that Jeff and Janine Yass have thrown a lot of money at school privatization. A bunch of money has gone to Students First PAC, which in turn has handed the money off to Commonwealth Partners PAC, supposedly in hopes of having a say in Pennsylvania's governor's race. The advocacy wing of that group says they're all about cutting taxes and helping parents choose alternatives to public schools, goals that fit together perfectly with an agenda of ending the state's obligation to provide education and cutting parents loose (with a modest voucher payment to misdirect the crowd). Yass also supports the Commonwealth Children's Choice Fund which "supports candidates for state and local office in Pennsylvania who are passionate about6 expanding educational opportunity for children throughout the commonwealth." In all cases, we're talking about tens of millions of dollars.

He has talked about his plan to "dismantle and rebuild" Philadelphia schools as a voucher system in which each child would get a $10K voucher (instead of the $16,200 average that the city spends). Jeff and Janine Yass are big donors to the Philadelphia School Partnership, which aims to partner with Philly schools in much the same way that a vulture aims to partner with a dying wildebeast (it's run by an investment guy). Mostly they fund "good seats" in non-public schools.

All of this leads to headlines like "Jeff Yass, the richest man in Pa., is singlehandedly keeping school choice PACs flush." And Yass, like Allen, occupies that far right field position in the refoirmster game that does not even pretend that any of this is about improving or reforming public schools--it's about ending them, and with them the state's tax-funded obligation to provide each child with a decent education. Let parents work it out for themselves, somehow. 

The STOP Award folks must have smelled blood when Chicago teachers walked out, and it may take a few days to adjust strategy now that Chicago Schools have agreed to make some sort of attempt to render their schools safer. But this program is bad news for public education, even as it provides one more ugly example of how some rich folks feel entitled to mess with the lives and educations of the lessers, and to dismantle US public education because it bothers them. We haven't heard the last of this.

How To Stay Open

My Uncle Frank, about whom I've written about before, recently suffered a stroke. He spent a couple of days at the hospital on a gurney, rather than on a bed in a room, because those beds were filled with unvaxed freedom fighters, presumably none of whom were saying, "Don't give me any of your life-saving medicines or treatments, because I don't know exactly what's in them." 

While I'm generally pretty good at remaining open to different viewpoints, I'm about done with anti-vaxers. I am sympathetic to the folks who have legitimate medical reasons to avoid the covid vaccine, even as I'm pretty sure that "religious objection" folks are just making shit up.

The lack of will surrounding the opening of schools is staggering. From districts that don't really have any policies and procedures in place yet, to those that think that having talked about them is as good as having actually done something.

I was reminded yet again last night as I sat at an organizational meeting for directors in local community theater. It was such a stark contrast with what we're seeing in schools.

First, the theater started with a basic premise--they want to stay open and put on shows.

From there, they went to some pretty simple policies.

Everyone in a show this season must be vaxed-- cast, crew, everyone. If they won't do that, they must be tested weekly. If they won't do either, they can just stay home. Also, everyone masks.

Meanwhile, the theater has an HVAC system that completely replaces all the air in the place about every 30 minutes. 

And if people are feeling kind of covidy, they are to stay home until they know one way or the other.

Of course this isn't perfect. People who don't drink before they drive sometimes have accidents. People who wear seat belts are sometimes injured or killed. But these steps improve your odds. 

The key is, I think, knowing your objective. Notice that the theater objective is not "make sure people who have political objections to mitigation methods don't feel put out." The one conce3ssion the theater has made is not to take the step most other live theaters have--requiring proof of vaccination to sit in the audience. 

The goal is to stay open. The goal is to mitigate the spread within the place so that critical personnel are not lost to illness, thereby putting the whole operation at risk of being unable to continue. 

Do these goals sound familiar?

There is much about the US response to COVID that I will never really understand, but high on the list will be the huge disconnect on re-opening schools. 

Folks really, really, really want schools to be open in person again. They have had two years to figure out what it would take to do that. In some cases they have spent the two years just kind of wishing hard. In some case, they have spent the two years figuring it out, but now that it's time to implement some of that, they're just going to not. In some too few cases, they even used the time to figure out how to do a better job if a school had to go remote. And in some cases they're going to be shocked and angry that teachers don't want to get back to it without any serious safeguards in place.

Vaccine mandates are somehow an intolerable act against human freedom, even though we already mandate an assortment of vaccines for school attendance. 

It is a reminder, once again, that we just aren't a serious people. We aren't serious about education in general. We aren't serious about gun deaths, and we aren't serious about dealing with COVID. We aren't serious about getting and keeping schools open safely, and we aren't serious about recognizing that in some cities, under some conditions, we can't have it just because we want it.

Somewhere along the way we also loss our pragmatism, becoming far less interested in getting the job done and more interested in Being Right or Making Our Point. So we end up with schools closed or open uselessly, even though we know plenty about what it would take to get it done right.

ICYMI: The Week It Hits The Fan Edition (1/9)

 Well, that was almost as much fun as when schools started up last fall. Fun times all around, for sure. And a hefty reading list for the week, and I'll warn you up front--it's not a cheery collection. A reminder that sharing is caring, and that if you find something here that speaks to you, it's a great idea to signal boost it out into the world. 

Teacher shortages will linger after the pandemic wanes

Andrea Gabor at Bloomsburg opinion looks at the problems that pre-date covid and will outlive it as well. Secrets to try? Maybe rethinking what professional respect id supposed to mean.

Michigan superintendent: Let's address teacher shortage

The MI state education leader in an interview discussing the problems that have led to this challenge, and what might be done about it.

TennesseeCAN Knows the Plan

Governor Lee has a great new idea of how to carve up inadequate funding to make it better, but Andy Spears notices that somehow, reformsters at TennesseeCAN already know what's in the plan. Not a good sign.

Why we could soon lose even more Black teachers

Sarah Carr at the Hechinger Report talks to some former Black teachers about what could be done to stop the loss of so many Black teachers.

Open letter to Indiana legislature on subject of pending critical race theory bills

Shane Phipps tries to help the legislature understand why this is a bad idea.

I am a school board member. Anti-CRT bills are stoking fear in our district.

Oh, New Hampshire. What happened to you? A school board member in the granite state talks about what the attacks on teaching about race have meant. Here's a line about the transformation into more strident parent comments:

That transformation was concerning — not because parents don’t have the right to share their views and concerns with their school board, but because the content of their concerns seemed divorced from the reality of the teaching happening in our district.

It's been a long, arduous week for Massachusetts teachers. Why won't state leaders apologize?

Neema Avashia talks about how MA leaders dropped the ball this week.

Controlling the fear

Jennifer Orr blogs about her own stress this week as a teacher, and asks some important question about what, exactly, the current goal is.

NY High School Students' COVID Experience

The indispensable Mercedes Schneider has a look at that Reddit post that's been making the rounds, describing NYC's opened schools as not exactly firing on all cylinders.

Who gets the blame when school shut down?

Well, you know the answer, but Jessica Winter at The New Yorker offers a more fair and balanced look at the issue.

Don't blame teachers for covid quarantines and closures

Steven Singer would like you to stop laying all of this disruption on teachers. Here's why.

America doesn't have enough teachers to keep schools open

Anna North at Vox explains just how close to the edge most schools are right now.

The demise of genuinely public education

One of the hardest reads I had this week. Nancy Flanagan has stayed pretty optimistic for years, but that has changed, as this doom post explains.

Profits for Non profit charter schools

An interview with Carol Burris appearing in Jacobin

Why education is about to reach a crisis of epic proportions

Mark Perna at Forbes lays it out again in an article that you probably already saw this week because everyone was sharing it.:

In order to reach and teach students effectively, teachers must forge a human connection with them. Today’s younger generations simply will not move forward in their education and career journey without that connection. This is a non-negotiable; it’s just who they are.

What K-12 textbooks are like now

Bob Shepherd lays out a sample lesson. Tongue firmly in cheek.

100 Ohio school districts file anti-voucher lawsuit

Jan Resseger has a great explainer for that lawsuit in Ohio in which public schools are fighting back against privatizers.

Voucher lawsuit filed, voucher proponents dissemble

As voucher fans try to defend against that Ohio lawsuit, Stephen Dyer looks at some of their claims, including the claim that they provide a great service to communities of color. (Spoiler alert: they don't)

Dark money in the holy city

I don't usually put Diane Ravitch posts on this list because I figure if you read me, you probably already read her. But this is one not to miss. A reporter was looking at charter shenanigans in Charleston. Here's what he found, not published anywhere else, including at the paper that used to employ him.

A Note of Reassurance from your School District Regarding Our Updated Omicron Policies

McSweeney's is here once again with a darkly funny take on school district responses to the current surge.

Finally, over at Forbes this week I wrote about an important new book and why school choice is really bad at transparency.

PA: Number of New Teachers Plummets

 This was rocketing around the Book of Face this morning. It's not encouraging, but I have verified it.

The actual source of the data is what's known as the Act 82 report, which requires the state Department of Education to report on how many Instructional Certificates it issues every year, which is a good measure of new teachers. I'm looking at the spreadsheet for Act 82, and I can report a few details to go with these lousy numbers.

Some of those numbers are out of states certificates, and some are add-ons. Both have plummeted. The peak year of 2012-13 saw 2,343 out of state certs; 2019-20 it was 878. At peak, there were 6,771 add-ons (way above average) but 2019-20, the number was down to 931.

Looking from 2013-14 through 2019-20, here's what has happened in certain certification areas of K-12.

Grade PK-4 has dropped from over 3,000 to under 2,000.

English 7-12 has dropped form 666 (I know) down to about half that.

In 2019-20, there were 5 new certifications for French K-12 issued in PA.

Phys-ed dropped from about 350 to 130.

Math from almost 400 to under 150.

Social studies from 722 to 300.

Act 82 also breaks down new certs by the college that birthed them, and virtually all of the state's heavy hitters saw big drops over the last decade. A handful (Geneva, Grove City, Tork, West Chester) hung on or improved. Geneva and Grove City have small programs and are very conservative schools--make of that what you will. Many of the big programs have seen a collapse over the last decade of around 50%, driving or driven by shutdowns of some or all of their teacher programs.

Administrative certs follow the same pattern. The high was 1,032 issued in 2012-13, but in 2019-20 there were just 693 new administrative certificates issued.

At this point, there's no reason to be mystified about this. We're talking about a generation that has seen teachers maligned and reduced to test-prep content delivery units. They have seen public school denigrated and teachers micro-managed, and they watch teachers struggle to support a family on stagnant salaries. They are choosing a different path. These numbers just help see clearly how bad the problem has become.

Bonus: If you'd like an even deeper dive from an actual scholar, here's a report on this data from Ed Fuller and Andrew Pendola at Penn State.

AI Did Not Write (Most Of) This Post (Or: "Why our screens are filled with so much crap")

Once more, someone is trying to cash in on the prospect of teaching an AI to "write" and resolutely calling it an AI when it's just one more algorithm scraping the internet for samples that it can regurgitate, sort of correctly, sort of not. Hooray for automating mediocrity.

Meet Jarvis (yes, that's a cute nod to comics nerd-dom), an algorithm that can make it "fast and easy to create content for your blog, social media, website, and more!" It's not cheap, but there's a free trial, and I gave it a shot because I remain fascinated by the still-unfulfilled dream of getting a computer to do language.

Jarvis is one year old, founded by Dave Rogenmoser, who was co-owner of Market Results, co-founder of Redwood Recruiting, and co-author of Beyond the Grind, a book that may never have made it out of Kickstarter about how to "fuel the fire" (and add value") by two guys who quit their jobs to become entrepreneurs. It was supposed to kick off a movement, but the kickstarter was canceled in November 2014. Rogenmoser's co-entrepreneur/author was Chris Hull, who is also a co-founder of Jarvis. Rogenmoser graduated from Kansas State U with a BA in Marketing back in 2011; Hull has a BS from Oklahoma State U in Secondary Science Education, though he apparently has never taught. It's not clear what "quit our jobs" really means in this context, but these plucky guys are here to have a computer write your stuff.

Jarvis promises big--just give it a topic, maybe a sentence, and some hints of what "tone" you want, and it spits out words lined up in sentences and paragraphs. You can ask for your output in many different languages, which gives this the extra level of bad computer translation on top of bad computer writing. And I can report that it does it all in seconds. Entrepreneurs will never have to hire humans to string words for them again, ever. Hooray. 

Here are some samples. This first one is sort of an open attack, where I start and then hand it over to Jarvis, then he tosses back to me, and so forth. You get two tries by the algorithm for each prompt, but for our purposes, one will be plenty. The result...

Trying to advocate for teacher safety during a pandemic is like trying to push jello up a pile of dead salmon. While, fortunately or unfortunately, depending on who you ask, the "pandemic" hasn't happened yet and can be argued as not even happening this year. But teachers in Chicago are still fighting to keep their jobs, in fear of catching the flu or any other illness that may be going around.

This year, as the pandemic drags on, the number of flu cases continues to drop off. But the fear and panic that accompanied it at its height remains. Covid cases are up thanks to omicron and andromedous crashing at the same time.

You can also ask Jarvis to just pump out some stuff. Here I asked him to give me an opening paragraph for a blog post about teacher evaluation systems (thus letting me "blast through writers' block).

Are teacher evaluation systems effective? This is a question that has been debated for years, with no clear consensus. Some people believe that such systems are essential for improving teaching practices, while others maintain that they do more harm than good. In this blog post, we'll take a closer look at the pros and cons of teacher evaluation systems and discuss some of the latest research on the topic. Stay tuned!

At least this is recognizable as Actual English and not Almost English, but it's still terrible.

Jarvis will also write your concluding paragraph. On this one, Jarvis actually surprised me a little. The only prompt I gave him was that high stakes testing is bad for schools and damages the educational process. He also requires a call to action, so I said get legislators to end the practice. Here's what he wrote:

Conclusion paragraph: High stakes testing is bad for everyone involved. From the school children who are subject to these tests, to teachers who have their lesson plans influenced by test scores and parents of students whose grades may affect where they go to college or if they get scholarships, high stakes testing has a huge impact on all aspects of education. The best thing we can do as Americans is advocate for legislators that will end this practice once and for all. What’s your opinion? Do you think our politicians should take steps towards ending standardized assessments like PARCC, ACT Aspire and other common exams across the country? If not why not?

That was with a "casual" tone, so I tried again with a "witty" tone

Conclusion paragraph: The practice of high stakes testing is a bad idea for schools and damages the educational process. It’s time to get legislators on board with ending this damaging practice—for our children, we can’t continue to make education about money. Testing should be used only as an occasional diagnostic tool, not something that determines if students graduate or teachers keep their jobs. We all deserve better than what high stakes testing offers us; it's time that we demand change!

In both cases, the program scraped up some statements that aren't accurate, but did manage to scrape up some specifics. 

Jarvis will also generate a blog post outline from a topic idea, a feature the site says works best with listicles or how to posts, so I tried both. Here's the response to "10 bad education trends," formal style

1. The US is ranked 31st in the world for education

2. There are more than 1 million homeless students in America's public schools

3. 25% of high school seniors don't graduate on time with their peers

4. Black and Hispanic students drop out at much higher rates than white or Asian students

5. Average SAT scores have been steadily decreasing since 2006, while ACT scores have remained steady 

6. College tuition has increased by an average of 5% every year since 1978, which means that it costs twice as much today to attend a private college than it did 30 years ago

The student does not appear to have understood the assignment. Now let's try a How To for teaching reading

1. The benefits of reading

2. The importance of phonemic awareness

3. Phonics instruction

4. Fluency instruction

5. Vocabulary and comprehension instruction

6. Assessing reading progress

So who would possibly use Jarvis? Well, there are even whacky story generators, but most of the templates are for generating marketing posts. That includes content specifically aimed at Google, Amazon and Facebook. It will also crank out scripts and captions for Youtube videos and generate SEO titles and meta tags. 

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Weirdly, the algorithm managed to tie me to Forbes, but I've never written a word for Mashable in my life. This keeps with the algorithm's tendency to be sort of right, sort of not. 

Like all good services, this one has lots of upselling going on. At Boss Level the algorithm can do even more of the word-stringing for you, even if it's rudimentary crap. Here's the video sales pitch for having the algorithm create a five paragraph essay. Yikes.

So what have we learned?

Well, first, we've reinforced for the 60 gazillionth time that algorithms can't write. They can scrape through what a bunch of other people have written and string together words that sound right and may or may not be right. If they were students in my old high school classes, they would not do particularly well.

Second, we've gotten a peek at how soi much internet sausage is made and a sense of why so much "content" doesn't feel particularly authentic, rich or good. I can only imagine what will happen when the algorithms are all scraping up word strings churned out by other algorithms