ICYMI: Fall Cleaning Edition (9/18)

You may do spring cleaning at your house, but here we hit a point of "Hell, it's going to be cold soon and we'd better get things straightened out before we're trapped in this house." Having to counteract the Forces of Chaos doesn't help, either.

Here's some reading from the week. If you find something you think is worthwhile, remember to share it from the original source and create some traffic for that piece. In the case of media outlets, it may convince some editor to do more of that kind of coverage.

Biblical basis for critical race theory is justice

Yes, it happened again. An actual Christian wrote a piece making a case for the value of critical race theory! From the Citizen Times.

Spotsylvania board selects unqualified superintendent

This is the kind of crazy you get when a group takes over your school board. Fire the old super, offer the job to an unqualified crony. 

Disrespect: 5 Ways Teachers Are Driven Out!

Nancy Bailey lists five ways to convey your disrespect to your teaching staff. None are recommended.

Go Go Gadget Arms

Grumpy Old Teacher walks us through the fun of administering a digital test in a one-to-one school. 

Satanic Panic is making a comeback

You may remember the good old days when satanic worshippers were the favorite hobgoblin of the far right. Well, here we are again... From NBC news

6 questions to better understand NAEP scores

Yeah, that seems like an age ago, doesn't it. Almost as if the scores are good for a brief freakout and then everyone moves on. This is a good quick primer on the scores, from Jill Barshay and the Hechinger Report

How book bans turned a Texas town upside down

A nice in-depth piece from the New York Times, looking at how this baloney plays out on the ground. 

Heritage Foundation and Its Partners Are Methodically Working With State Legislators to Pass Universal School Vouchers

As always, Jan Resseger has done her homework for this depressing story.

November in Florida

At Accountabaloney, Sue Kingery Woltanski has been listening to what Ron DeSantis has to say about his future plans, and it's not pretty.

Praying Coach Is Too Busy For His Old Job

You remember the case of Joseph Kennedy, the Washington state football coach who wanted to hold public prayers on the fifty yard line even though his school district said, "Don't." You remember that the case made it all the way to the Supreme Court, where the court decided in the coach's favor in a decision that required a willful ignoring of the actual facts of the case. 

Justice Gorsuch wrote in his decision:

Respect for religious expressions is indispensable to life in a free and diverse Republic—whether those expressions take place in a sanctuary or on a field, and whether they manifest through the spoken word or a bowed head. Here, a government entity sought to punish an individual for engaging in a brief, quiet, personal religious observance doubly protected by the Free Exercise and Free Speech Clauses of the First Amendment.

It's such a mischaracterization of the facts of the case one has to wonder, if Gorsuch is correct, how such a case could have been decided so incorrectly by lower courts.

The answer, as laid out in detail in a dissent by Justice Sotomayor, is that Kennedy's "observance" was not brief, quiet, or personal. As Sotomayor writes

Official-led prayer strikes at the core of our constitutional protections for the religious liberty of students and their parents, as embodied in both the Establishment Clause and the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment.

The Court now charts a different path, yet again paying almost exclusive attention to the Free Exercise Clause’s protection for individual religious exercise while giving short shrift to the Establishment Clause’s prohibition on state establishment of religion.

To the degree the Court portrays petitioner Joseph Kennedy’s prayers as private and quiet, it misconstrues the facts.

Also, after noting that the majority just threw out the Lemon test, she writes

In addition, while the Court reaffirms that the Establishment Clause prohibits the government from coercing participation in religious exercise, it applies a nearly toothless version of the coercion analysis, failing to acknowledge the unique pressures faced by students when participating in school-sponsored activities. This decision does a disservice to schools and the young citizens they serve, as well as to our Nation’s longstanding commitment to the separation of church and state. I respectfully dissent.

The dissent uses pages to lay out the many details of how Kennedy was not quiet or brief, including his invitations to opposing teams to join in, and that very special time where he went out and led a student prayer right in front of the administrator who has just asked him not to. Why the District didn't just fire him for insubordination I do not know.

In the end, SCOTUS ordered the district to reinstate Kennedy as coach even though they had never fired him in the first place--he'd simply failed to reapply for the job and subsequently played victim; it didn't matter, as Kennedy's lawyer kept saying he was fired, and Justice Alito also said he was fired. But SCOTUS said he had to be re-employed, his lawyer threatened to spank the school district if they didn't, and Kennedy said he'd be back the instant they sent word.

He was sent reinstatement paperwork at the beginning of August. But now the fall football season has come and--twist!-- Kennedy is nowhere near Bremerton. Danny Westneat at The Seattle Times has been tracking his busy fall:

Instead, as the Bremerton Knights were prepping for the season in August, Kennedy was up in Alaska, meeting with former Vice President Mike Pence and evangelist Franklin Graham. On the eve of the first game, which the Knights won, Kennedy was in Milwaukee being presented with an engraved .22-caliber rifle at an American Legion convention.

The weekend of the second game, which the Knights also won, Kennedy appeared with former President Donald Trump at the Trump National Golf Club in New Jersey. He saw Trump get a religious award from a group called the American Cornerstone Institute.

Coming up this month, Kennedy’s scheduled to give a talk as part of a lectureship series at a Christian university in Arkansas.

“Place a PR/Publicity Request,” invites his personal website, where he’s known as Coach Joe.

It’s an increasingly surreal situation for the Bremerton schools. They were ordered to “reinstate Coach Kennedy to a football coaching position,” according to court documents. But the now-famous coach is out on the conservative celebrity circuit, continuing to tell a story about “the prayer that got me fired” — even though Bremerton never actually fired him.

Read the full Seattle Times piece if you need to raise your blood pressure a bit. 

So given the choice between doing the job he sued over, or making the circuit as a celebrity martyr, Kennedy has chosen the latter. If there was ever the slightest shred that there was a real matter of principle at the heart of this case, it should evaporate. Just one more excuse to batter the wall between church and state. 

Why Permissionless Education

"Permissionless" is a bit of a buzzword in some corners of the choicer community these days. 

Jeanne Allen of the Center for Education Reform tosses it around a bit, particularly when she's working on the STOP award, a prize that Pennsylvania gazillionaire Jeff Yass funds and promotes. The P in STOP stands for permissionless.

Meanwhile, the Stand Together Trust, which used to be the Charles Koch Institute, likes "permissionless" a lot. Their substack, previously "Learning Everywhere," is now called "Permissionless Education" and the Stand Together folks even plan to do a whole session at the 30th annual SPN meeting entitled "Expanding the Permissionless Education Market: Lessons from Everyday Entrepreneurs." Because nothing says "everyday entrepreneurs" like Koch money and the State Policy Network, that great collection of big-time right-wing thinky tanks. 

"Permissionless" is a term that seems to have emerged from the world of blockchain. Here's a guy named Tim Denning talking about his permissionless revelation:

Permission-seeking is such a tragedy.

So much human potential gets wasted because of it. When I went down the rabbit hole of blockchain technology years ago, I came across the word “permissionless.”

I instantly fell in love.

He goes on to describe the permissionless economy in glowing terms. You don't have to get past gatekeepers. You don't need skills or qualifications to start. There are no bosses. "The value you add creates proof-of-work."

If you haven't spent much time soaking up blockchain discussions, they very much resemble the naive dreams of libertarian free-marketeers. Just be awesome in your own special way, and success and prosperity will find you. 

But mostly, you shouldn't need anybody's permission to be awesome, and you definitely should never have to answer to anyone.

You can find places where blockchain world overlaps with education, like ed3, hoping to develop the future of education with web3. Here they are talking to Manuel Maccou at BanklessDAO (he's also a co-creator of Cypto Nexus) about how a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) can "enable permissionless education where teachers become students and students become teachers." Maccou is currently working on Mass Effect, a "knowledge exchange protocol." 

If that all seems a bit much, the world of education dismantlers is just focusing on that one term-- permissionless.

Here's the Yass definition of permissionless education: "free to exist and thrive without dependence on regulatory bodies."

From the Center for Education Reform: As Ted Kolderie puts it, innovation is letting people try new things, without having to prove it already works. In other words, without permission.

And here's Adam Peshek at Permissionless Education explaining that proposed schools shouldn't have to produce a bunch of reports for government or investors or anyone else (also, interestingly, noting that charters have not turned out to be laboratories of innovation at all, and that's why we need to let other avenues grow.)

The main thread is simple enough. "Innovators" should be free to try whatever they think might work, which would be a more acceptable idea if we were talking about new frontiers in toaster design. But we're not talking about toasters--we're talking about letting folks experiment on young humans.

Permissionless is about being unaccountable, about not having to answer to anybody. Which is just one more variation on the old Koch-far right search for a government-free Land of Do As You Please.

Education--particularly public education and all education being paid for with public tax dollars--must be accountable, and not just to the "consumers" in the "marketplace" (though they do in fact deserve assurances that they are not "buying" toxic junk), but to all the members of the society into which those students will be emerging. 

In fact, I suspect you'd find many people on any side of the various political divides who would stand up and say, "Yes, I am opposed to accountability and think schools should not be held accountable in any way." No, nobody would say that. Which is why we've got education dismantlers saying "permissionless" instead. 

 

Charter Dress Code Case Pushing For SCOTUS. Here's Why We Should Care

A dress code case with larger implications for the charter school industry is not done yet; charter profiteer Baker Mitchell has petitioned the Supreme Court to uphold his right to impose sexist dress codes. 

How did we get here

In North Carolina, Charter Day School back in 2016 was sued by parents who objected to a dress code requiring girls to wear skirts, jumpers, or skorts. Charter Day School is part of the network of charters operated by Roger Bacon Academy, one of the charters that focuses on a "classical curriculum" in a "safe, morally strong environment," which meant, apparently, none of those pants-wearing girls in their school (It also supposedly means things like sentence diagramming in Kindergarten and Latin in 4th grade).

RBA is owned and operated by Baker Mitchell, Jr. (an electrical engineer, not an educator), one of the titans of charter profiteering. Back in 2014, Marian Wang profiled the "politically-connected businessman who celebrates the power of the free market," and how he perfected the business of starting nonprofit charter schools and then having those schools lease their buildings, equipment, programs, etc from for-profit companies owned and operated by Baker Mitchell, Jr. That's where the Roger Bacon Academy, a for-profit charter management company comes in.

In 2019, a federal judge passed down the ruling that any public school in the country would have expected-- a dress code requiring skirts for girls is unconstitutional. The school quietly retired the item in the dress code.

But that wasn't the end of it. In August of 2021, the U.S. 4th Circuit Court of Appeals appeals court tossed out the 2019 ruling--sort of-- in a 2-1 ruling.

The two judges, both Trump appointees, ruled that contrary to the assertion of the lower court, that charter schools should not be considered state actors, and are therefore not subject to the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. The decision pointed to the larger issue in the case--deciding whether or not charter schools are public schools.

The federal appeals court was clear: Charter schools are not public schools. They are not state actors.

But wait--we're not finished

That decision was decided by a three judge panel. The appeals court, in July of 2022, issued an en banc (meaning the whole court and not just a panel) reversed the panel decision.

Galen Sherwin, the senior staff attorney at the ACLU Women's Rights Project, shared some of the details on Twitter. The defendants trotted out a "parade of horribles," which the court rejected. This ruling will not somehow stifle innovation. It will not threaten HBCUs.

Sherwin added that the skirt rule violates equal protection because it's based on the old notion that "girls are fragile and require protection by boys." Judge Wilkinson, who was part of the three-judge panel in the previous decision, lamented the end of the "age of chivalry." The majority noted that such an age was also the age "when men could assault their spouses" and that chivalry "may not have been a bed of roses for those forced to lie in it."

Sherwin reports that the court rejects the notion that the dress code was okay because it was oppressive to both genders. Discriminating against both men and women, the court notes, "does not eliminate liability, but doubles it."

And Sherwin passes on a great note from Judge Keenan (the 1 on the original ruling) who separately wrote against the argument that the code wasn't harming girls because they still got good grades. “We cannot excuse discrimination because its victims are resilient enough to persist in the face of such unequal treatment." "Nevertheless she persisted" apparently does not excuse whatever she must persist in the face of.

Kudos also to Judge Wynn who, Sherwin reports, "says the dissent's comparing school choice to ordering steak or salmon at a restaurant 'leaves a bad taste in the mouth. Subjecting girls to gender discrimination that causes lasting psychological damage is not the same thing as ordering fish.'"

Because of the underlying issue, many in the charter school biz lined up against Mitchell. 

The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools applauded the ruling:

The importance of this case could not be overstated, as it was the first time a federal appellate court considered whether public charter school students deserve the same constitutional civil rights protections as district public school students. The en banc court clearly and unequivocally affirmed that charter schools are public schools and, accordingly, must be bound by the US Constitution. Moreover, public charter school students have the same constitutional and civil rights as their district public school peers.

Sherwin tweeted a sadly insightful analysis:

The court rightly recognizes that ruling otherwise would leave states free to establish parallel, privately operated public school systems in a constitution-free zone, free to implement race segregation, religious discrimination, etc.

Which is a fairly good summation of what the voucher crowd is working hard to do anyway. The Supreme Court has ruled in favor of allowing the state to spend tax dollars on discriminatory education. And their "education freedom" rhetoric was echoed in this case. Aaron Streett, representing Charter Day School argued that the school is not a state actor, and that status "provides leeway for policies that some might deem discriminatory, but that's the spirit of individual liberty."

You call it discrimination, but hey--I call it freedom.

And now for the next act

Baker Mitchell(now 82), still thinks it's a good rule:

“We're a school of choice. We're classical in our curriculum and very traditional. I believe that the more of the traditional things you have in place, the more they tend to reinforce each other,” he said in a phone interview. “We want boys to be boys and girls to be girls and have mutual respect for each other. We want boys to carry the umbrella for girls and open doors for them ... and we want to start teaching that in grammar school.”

But that's not why they petitioned the Supremes.

Aaron Streett is an attorney with Baker Botts, a multinational law firm (where both Amy Coney Barrett and Ted Cruz once worked), and that he's the chair of their Supreme Court and Constitutional Law Group. Streett says that the majority opinion "contradicts Supreme Court precedent on state action...and limits the ability of parents to choose the best education for their children." After the ruling came down, Streett played coy about whether they would appeal or not; now we're past coyness.

The appeal is going straight after the underlying issue of the case

In its petition, the school argues the ruling by the appeals court is flawed because it identifies Charter Day School as a state actor. The school argues it is a privately run school that receives public funding through its charter, and therefore is not a government-run entity.

"The (court of appeals) decision ... profoundly threatens this model," said a statement from school officials in a Monday news release. "This holding undoes the central feature of charter schools by treating their private operators as the constitutional equivalent of government-run schools."

So, says the school, we are most definitely not a public school. Meaning we should get to do whatever the hell we want.

Will SCOTUS take on this case? These days, who the hell knows? 

It matters to the charter industry, which has in the past couple of years been left behind by many old friends who once viewed charters as a nice foot in the door, but believe now that the pandemic has given them the chance to kick the door down, so "Thanks for the help, charter schools, but we have a chance to get the vouchers we always really wanted, so good luck to you." 

For people still actually invested in the charter industry (both figuratively and literally) this continues to be a strategic puzzler. Do they insist on holding onto the "public" descriptor for charters because it's a good marketing tool, or do they insist they are private schools so that they can compete with private voucher-collecting schools by also discriminating as they wish? 

Meanwhile, the students who originally wanted to wear pants are now young women. But they were never really the most important part of this case. The rest of us should stay tuned for the next chapter.

Addressing The Teacher Exodus By Blocking The Exits

Well, that's one way to do it. 

There's no doubt that having a teacher depart mid-year puts a strain on a school district. Even if they leave at the end of the semester, which theoretically would provide a natural break in the year, students still have to readjust. 

There are a variety of ways to head off this part of the teacher exodus, like making life in the school less miserable. Administrators might even try things like talking to the teachers and finding out how they're doing and what they need. But a few states have taken a more punitive approach to the problem.

In North Carolina, teachers who leave before the end of their contract could have their license suspended for an entire year. That's a milder penalty than some are facing.

Some states like Illinois have laws on the books that have rarely been invoked. But now WGLT reports that a large school district in McLean County has actually refused the resignation of several teachers before the start of the school year. The situation is not unusual--you accept a job one place just to be safe, then another district makes a better offer, all before school even starts, and so you jump from one to another--but the response from the district was very unusual. Two of the teachers agreed to stay. Two others did not, and now their teaching licenses are in jeopardy.

Texas is leading the pack on this particular issue. The last half of the 2021-22 school year saw a record number of mid-year resignations; at least 471 contract abandonment reports have been sent to the state. While a one year suspension is possible, Texas can also revoke a teacher's certification. 

While the challenges created for school districts by losing teachers clearly demand attention, I'm not sure this is the best way to handle it.

First, I worry about forcing people to stay in the classroom when they have told you they don't want to be there. When someone says she wants to quit, does that not identify her as an employee that you do not want to hold onto. Maybe the process can include an attempt to address the issues that made that teacher want to leave, but still, as a parent, I'm not going to be excited about having my child taught by someone whose heart and mind are already way out the door.

Second, if you're problem is that you don't have enough certified personnel, actively reducing the number of certified personnel available seems counter-productive. Of course, that's fine if you're one of those states changing rules so that any warm body can be put in charge of a classroom. Texas is not one of those, but if I lived in a warm body state, I'd keep an eye peeled for this sort of teacher-punishing rule. 

Tough times call for tough measures, I suppose, but states ought to be careful to impose tough measures that help solve the problem and not worsen it. 

Black Ariel, The Classroom, and the Expansion of the Ordinary

The current wave of freakouts over non-white fantasy fiction characters has broader lessons for all of us, if we're only willing to learn them. Yikes-- Black elves in Middle Earth! Oh nos! A Black Ariel in live action Little Mermaid! 

There was a great post on LinkedIN from Bonnie Dilber, an HR professional. She writes, in part, regarding the overlap between those freaking out over Black fantasy characters and those who do the hiring at companies:

If someone has been so strongly influenced by a movie made in the 1980s that they can't support a Black woman playing a mermaid, than how are they looking past seeing white people as directors, VPs, and Chiefs day in and day out to envision a Black person in the role?

Part of working towards equity is recognizing the archetypes we've developed for what a "leader" or "doctor" or "politician" or "fancy singing fish" look like so we can check those biases and make sure that we don't miss out on people who check every single box except "looks like what I pictured when I thought of this title."

In the language of those objecting to everything from Black elves to a same-sex couple on Peppa Pig--particularly ordinary folks on social media or in my supermarket--there's the idea that these characters represent a change. They're angry that somebody deliberately chose to create these characters, which just brushes up against an important truth--

Every character design represents a series of deliberate choices, but for some folks, that deliberate choice is about editing or altering, because every character in a story should be set the automatic default of white and straight. 

In other words, in some folks' thinking, a white straight character does not represent any sort of deliberate choice, but every non-white non-straight character results from a deliberate choice to alter, edit, even replace that straight white default. 

This same thinking is reflected in laws like Florida's "Don't Say Gay" law, that include an injunction against teaching anything about gender roles. Folks feel strongly about this. Here's Dave Rubin on Youtube telling us that if he found out a teacher talked to his six-year-old about gender or sexuality, "I might kill that person."

Except, of course, everyone talks to six-year-olds about gender and sexuality all the time. Every kids' book (and I have read roughly sixty gazillion of them with the Board of Directors) that shows a Dad coming home from work and a Mom who cooks and cleans at handles the nurturing of the children. Every children's book that shows a male Dad and a female Mom. Heck, every adult who thinks it's cute to talk about a six-year-old's boyfriend or girlfriend. All of that is talking to six-year-olds about gender and sexuality. Just not, you know, anything other than the default. The ordinary. The regular.

The right is cranky not exactly because there are Black elves and Black mermaids and lesbian polar bears, but because these all push aside some ideas about what is normal, natural, regular, default, ordinary. These all challenge the idea that white and straight (and male) are not a choice, but an effortless way of being that just is. That while every other choice about a character or a person's way of being has to make a case for itself, being white and straight (and male) isn't supposed to need to. 

There's a lot of complaint about the notion that woke folks are being driven by superficial skin-deep distinctions, itself a telling image, as if all this other non-white non-straight stuff is a skin slapped over the proper ordinary default. "I don't see color" ends up meaning "I see everyone as sharing the same ordinary normal default identity as mine." And as Adam Serwer notes in his Atlantic piece

It’s worth noting how rapidly right-wing language about colorblind meritocracy melts away when it does not produce the desired results. Perhaps the actors cast were simply the most qualified?

In the classroom, some of this argument should be familiar, going all the way back to when folks first starting picking apart the canon on the theory that maybe there were things worth teaching that weren't the product of dead white guys from England and America (who, if they were not straight, at least didn't say so but pretended to the normal ordinary regular default identity). 

Choosing what to teach and choosing how to envision futures for our students are all exercises that bump up against this new challenge.

Checking our assumptions shouldn't be an unexpected challenge in teaching. It's part of the teacher's journey in one form or another. Forty years ago I had to realize that no, it's not okay to assume that students and parents share the same last name. You can't default to the assumption that all your female students like boys. And no, you can't make assumptions about students' most likely future based on what you see when you look at them. We can't, as Dilber says, disqualify someone because they check every box except "looks like what I imagine when I think of that role."

So yes-- the idea that elves and Jedi Knights are made up characters, but they aren't realistic if the elves are Black or the knights are female is kind of nuts. The notion that LGBTQ people are not an ordinary part of the world is--well, that takes us right into Flat Earther territory. But before we use all our energy making fun of these people, best we use some of it to examine whatever assumptions about "ordinary" we're carrying around.

This is not a bad thing. We sometimes frame history by the edges, the people who expand what is possible. But we can also frame it as the less edgy business of expanding what is ordinary. There will always be struggle there, people who fight like hell to hold onto the notion that only they are ordinary. But expanding the ordinary is how we widen the boundaries of the tribe and extend our embrace of what it means to be fully human in the world. 

Dear Teachers: AI is probably writing papers for your class

Have you really looked at your Microsoft Word tools lately? Because, yikes. We'll get to that in a moment.

We've been following the question for an algorithm that can write essays or add copy or other fun stuff. There have been advances, but also problems (like AI that "decided" to write Really Naughty Things). And the gibberish. Or the uncanny valley. Or the bloviating nothingness. 

But the search goes on because if writing were one more job that could be handled by computers instead of those annoying and wanna-be-paid-a-living-wage carbon-based life forms, well that would make some entrepreneurs very happy. And the flip side--an algorithm that could read and grade student papers would close that final gap in the search for a fully automated teacher-free classroom. 

But as Aki Peritz, writing for Slate, reminds us, there's another group of folks who welcome cyber-writing, and that's students themselves. 

Got an assignment? Feed an opening sentence into an algorithmic text generator like Sudowriter, and you'll get back a mediocre, somewhat hollow essay to hand in. In fact, Peritz argues, some of the awkwardness of the program actually echoes the awkwardness of as student writer. And it is, of course, untraceable by conventional plagiarism checking methods, because it's not actually plagiarized. It's just having a bot do your work for you. Bringing us just one step closer to a future in which an algorithm generates a page of text that is then graded by another algorithm, while students and teachers just sit awkwardly in a classroom doing nothing.

There are teacher solutions for this kind of cheating. Have the students write the essay in class. Better yet, listen to the old dictum that if an assignment is easy to cheat on, that's the assignment's fault and you need to redesign it. 

But there's an arguably more annoying AI out there, and one that's far more likely to be in use by your students.

I haven't paid any attention to my Microsoft Word menus in ages except when I need to find a way to do something I didn't already know how to do. But David Lee Finkle, creator of the teacher comic strip Mr. Fitz, tipped me off to this feature in one of his recent strips.

Microsoft Word's editor will now grade your work. Okay, it calls it "editor score," but it's given as a percentage in a style every student will recognize as a score. Up in the upper right corner of the screen, you see [editor], and it will spit out a score along with some advice.

The "advice" is a compendium of the same old mediocre algorithmic editing suggestions that Word has always offered. I ran some of my newspaper columns through the editor and got advice like "replace 'expertise' with 'ability' so that it's easier to understand" (except, of course, that's a fairly significant change in meaning. Chakaris (as in George) is flagged as a misspelled word--maybe I meant "Chakari's"? The phrase "it's telling that we describe..." throws it and it suggests "it's saying..." instead, which is just wrong. The program has lots of thoughts about commas. And it hates my tendency to coin my own words. 

The editor also checks for clarity, conciseness, and formality, and will let you set it for formal, professional, or casual. And there's a special setting for resumes. 

I ran this post (so far) through it, and got some suggestions for clarity and conciseness, including old standards such as getting rid of a passive voice and contractions. But as a piece of casual writing, I scored a 98%. 

I am imagining students running their essays through this and following all the advice so that their work is scrubbed clean of personal voice and yet with some additional weakness and inexactitude of language. As Mr. Fitz's student says, "You think I should stop writing to please the computer and write like a human being with flaws and all. To retain my humanity against our computer overlords."

But mostly I am imagining students saying, "What do you mean I got an 87 on this essay??!! My computer says it's a 93!" 

Okay. So language processing algorithms are here, and so widely distributed that they are unavoidably part of the education landscape. But they're tools (and not great ones), not crutches. Students have to learn that the algorithms can't actually "read" or "write" as we understand the terms, that the algorithms have some serious limitations, and that these uncivilized beasts must still be kept on a leash that's firmly in the hand of the writer. Or, you could just turn the algorithms loose into the wild, or lock them in a cage, and carry on without them.