TX: Far Right Book Banning In Action

Steve Bannon was one of the Trumpers to start arguing that school boards needed to be targeted, and he soon found a partner in Patriot Mobile, a mobile phone company with a christianist nationalist bent ("America's only Christian conservative wireless provider"). They're headed by Glenn Story, a CPA on a mission, that in recent years has veered more toward Dominionism and the Seven Mountains, which are all about how Christians are supposed to take over the rule of society, both in government and culture (one such group once gave Betsy DeVos an award).

Patriot takes millions of dollars and pumps it into far-right causes, and Story decided that they would like to follow Bannon's lead and grab themselves some school boards in Texas. Bannon and Story put on a little show in August for attenders of CPAC.

“The school boards are the key that picks the lock,” Bannon said during an interview with Patriot Mobile’s president, Glenn Story, from the floor of the Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC, in Dallas on Aug. 6. “Tell us about what you did.”

Story turned to the camera and said, “We went out and found 11 candidates last cycle and we supported them, and we won every seat. We took over four school boards.”

“Eleven seats on school boards, took over four!” Bannon shouted as a crowd of CPAC attendees erupted in applause.

The districts were in Southlake, Keller, Grapevine, and Mansfield.

Southlake we've visited before. It's in Southlake's Carroll Independent School District that an administrator suggested that a book about the Holocaust should be balanced by a book representing the other side. They leaped right on the book banning rubric bandwagon, and all this after several years of trying, sort of, to address local issues with racism. 

Carroll is also the district where Patriot moved to take advantage of a boneheaded Texas law requiring schools to put up any "In God We Trust" posters that were donated. So Patriot donated a bunch, and so did some other folks who put the text in Arabic and with gay pride colors. 

Keller Independent School District also did their new owners proud by going after a bunch of books, including an Anne Frank adaptation and the Bible. But back then the district was still hewing to the notion that these books included divisive concepts or sexual content.

Now, it seems, the Keller school board isn't even trying to pretend that there's any principle involved here except bigotry and bias.

Joni Shaw Smith, a Moms for Liberty board member, said she was concerned about some of the books on the new acquisition list. Which matters because now the Keller board must approve any and all books purchased. 

The board already had a strict list of limitations on books, but this week they extended it to include "discussion or depiction of gender fluidity" at all. Not a depiction that involves depiction of nudity or sex acts. Just any depiction at all. As Bookriot points out, that forbids any mention of trans persons as well. 

Lots of folks had lots of things to say about this, but the award for most unintentionally hilarious comment comes from another Texas politician who attended the meeting:

“You promised to defend our kids, you promised to put education above indoctrination. … That’s what you’re doing tonight,” said Nate Schatzline, who recently won a seat in the Texas House.

“You have put no political beliefs inside of this,” he added, which drew laughs from some in the audience.

Indeed. 

It's all worth paying attention to because in this move, the mask has slipped. This far right crowd may try to get their feet in doors by making noise about the innocence of children and graphic sex and shocking depictions, but here's the endgame for many--to simply erase LGBTQ persons from sight. And not just for their own children, but for all children. It is not Texas's finest hour. I sure miss old fashioned actual conservatives who believed in actual freedom and not the suppression of every piece of human existence with which they disagreed. 

ICYMI: Post Election Blues Edition (11/13)

Well, that was a party. Here's hoping your state was more Michigan and less Florida. Now back to work. Here's some reading from the week.

Initial merit pay vote has troubles

In case you haven't followed my link elsewhere, here's Justin Parmenter's take on the newest development in North Carolina's quest to trash teaching. 

Dozens of youths illegally employed to clean meat plants, Labor Dept. says

From the Washington Post, this appalling story about youths working in highly dangerous jobs, and the employer's efforts to hide it all from the authorities. Surprise--the youths are all Spanish-speaking.

How a viral teen app became the center of a sex trafficking hoax

Also from WaPo, one more story of Why We Can't Have Nice Things, and how current moral panic can trash just about anything, in spite of facts.

As Teen Loneliness Rates Soar, Schools May Be Making It Worse, Scientists Say

Yes, it's a lot of depressing stuff this week. This is a Newsweek story via MSN, and it gives folks in education an awful lot to think about. 

Denver Archdiocese’s guidance to Catholic schools: Don’t enroll transgender students. Treat gay parents differently.

Not that it's a surprise to anyone, but it's still a bit stunning to see it in print and official. In the Denver Post.

A Science of Reading reader to go with the latest Hanford podcast

Courtesy of Paul Thomas, a useful guide to some actual science.

What I believe Emily Hanford misses

Nancy Bailey asks some questions about what Hanford may or may not really get about reading instruction. 

The Right Wing Mothers Fueling the School Board Wars

From the New Yorker, so mind the paywall if you've already burned your free reads. A great dig into the culture wars and the women who have helped push them. 

The Damage Is Already Being Done

Sue Kingery Woltanski is a school board member in Florida, and she blogs at Accountabaloney. She has fears about the level of disinformation and distrust currently in play (and commenters show up to provide evidence). This is what Florida looks like on the ground right now. 

Oklahoma teacher helms campaign against banned books after being threatened by conservatives

Remember Summer Boismier, the English teacher who got in trouble over sharing the link to the Brooklyn Library's banned books program. The woman who got harassed by a bunch of conservatives (including the dudebro now in charge of Oklahoma education). Here's what she's been up to since then.

Many schools are buying on-demand tutoring but a study finds that few students are using it

Jill Barshay at Hechinger (via KQED) unpacks some study that shows that--shocker--students aren't all that interested in logging on for extra work from an online tutor. Who would ever have guessed?

Texas politicians rake in millions from far-right Christian megadonors pushing private school vouchers

NBC news with the also-unsurprising story that school voucher supporters are spending a lot of money to rent some politicians.

I'm going to brag on my home town here, recently profiled in this Pittsburgh news outlet. This is where I have lived and worked for most of my life. It's not a bad little place.

At Forbes this week, I took a look at a policy memo by Helen Ladd about some problems inherent in charter schools as currently practiced. 

Jeb Bush Charterpalooza Is Back!

For over ten years, Jeb Bush's Foundation for Excellence in Education (FEE), these days going by the nom de reform of ExcelInEd, has sponsored a Grand Gathering of reformsters, an annual Big Wet Kiss to privatization. All the big names are there, and while the budget here at the Curmudgucation Institute does not allow me to attend, it's always interesting to take a look at the schedule to get a sense of where the movement's head is these days.

The National Summit on Education convenes the nation’s leaders in education policy to share what works, what doesn’t and what’s next in education policy. Join us as we host more than 1,000 legislators, state superintendents, policymakers and advocates at the 2022 National Summit on Education in Salt Lake City, Utah, at The Grand America Hotel.

Right off the bat, one notices that this doesn't sounds as chartery or privatizy as it has in years past (like just back in 2017, when Betsy DeVos was the big guest speaker)

So here we go, to the National Summit on Education 2022.

Jeb! kicks things off with the first keynote. There's a lunch keynote about 21st century skills, then a first day wrap-up session with Axios explaining how to do better PR. The second breakfast keynote is Emily Hanford (still billed as a journalist and not an advocate) and a Science of Reading panel, followed by an international update on pandemic recovery. I'll save the final big presentation till later.

In between, there's an assortment of breakout sessions to choose from. Those include:

How states are building stronger teacher pipelines.

There are, of course, no teachers involved here. But you can learn secrets of building that pipeline from representatives of Indiana, Florida, and Tennessee (Commissioner Penny Schwinn). Not sure these are the states to listen to on this subject.

How test-based accountability helps students far beyond the classroom.

Lordy. Tom Kane, Aimee Guidera and Eric Hanushek are going to peddle the same old bullshit about how results on the Big Standardized Test correlate to future life outcomes. Prediction: nobody will present any evidence that getting a student to raise her BS Test score will improve her life outcomes.

Power to the Parents.

Derrell Bradford (50CAN) moderates a panel not, as you might have guess/feared, about how to ban books and ga teachers, but about "unbundling," an old reformster favorite in which families shop for education piece by piece. This panel is about the newest school choice options, and there doesn't seem like much to see here.

Designing choice programs for impact and sustainability

Mysteriously, this panel includes a rep from New Hampshire, where the new choice system has not had a chance to prove sustainability and has mostly had the impact of steering tax dollars to families that already had children enrolled in private schools. Arizona, another place where vouchers have mostly given funds to rich folks who were never in public schools in the first place, is also represented. moderated by Shaka Mitchell from Betsy DeVos's American Federation for Children

Innovative Learning, in and beyond the classroom

A panel moderated by Adam Peshek, senior fellow at Stand Together (formerly the Charles Koch Institute) with reps from Utah, North Dakota and Idaho on getting credit for learning outside the classroom. 

Oh, and some folks from Tennessee are going to explain their new funding formula, maybe, sort of.

This is all good old reformy stuff. For each of these explicitly reformy topics, there are sessions about fairly pedestrian topics-- retaining high quality teachers, literacy, getting more post-secondary degrees, math success strategies, broadband access, education-to-workforce pathways. All of these topics are being addressed by various reformy types, but their inclusion typifies the lack of any real core to today's disruption movement. Much of the old standards-- charter schools, high stakes testing, states standards--are now part of the status quo, and this sort of gathering may be a bit too tame for the burn-it-all-down-and-give-the-money-to-private-Christian-schools crowd. 

Nevertheless, the closing lunch keynote features "Arizona Governor Doug Ducey, Governor Kevin Stitt and education visionary Sal Khan, founder & CEO of Khan Academy, for an inside look at the education innovations unfolding in Arizona and Oklahoma." Ducey is getting the ExcellInEd's Excellence in Education award for all the hard work he's done to trash public education in Arizona. The award, the program announces in a swell non sequitor, "recognizes the trailblazing contributions of visionaries who are transforming education and elevating student achievement. Prior honorees include Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels, Success Academy’s Eva Moskowitz and Khan Academy’s Sal Khan." 

It is emblematic of this gathering that it happens on a Thursday and Friday, thereby insuring that it is not attended by people who actually work in education. Sponsors include the Walton Family Foundation, Western Governor's University (an online competency-based college that failed its federal audit), the Bezos Family Foundation, College Board, Donors Choose (bummer), Stand Together, edChoice, plus a host of other reformster groups and a bunch of businesses as well, like Pearson and NWEA and edmentum. What's not in sight is any serious number of actual educators.

But then that's not really the point. The point is to get policy and business joined to crack open the big taxpayer education piggy bank. I can believe that many of these topics are being discussed by people who have a sincere interest in the education aspects of them--but then why not have actual educators there? In the end, Jeb's big gathering is like a bunch of lawyers getting together to discuss the best techniques for appendectomies, or a bunch of teachers sitting down to hash out the best way to run a multinational corporation, or economists talking about anything. Can't wait to hear how it all turns out. And there's still time to register before this kicks off November 16-18 in Salt Lake City, and the participants enjoy "an unparalleled forum for exchanging results-based solutions and strategies that can shape public policy so critical to transforming education. This unique conference serves as a catalyst for accelerating student-centered education solutions across the nation. Join us as we ignite ideas and inspire change." Ka-ching.

PA Midterms and Education

We managed to dodge a couple of bullets in PA this time, but there's no reason to relax.

Doug Mastriano had threatened to chop education funding in half, and was likely to support every kind of gag order possible to bring public schools in line with christianist beliefs. But Mastriano ran an unusual campaign, deliberately ignoring traditional media and counting on the christianist network of social media and churches. It did not work out for him.

Fetterman vs. Oz was not that important from a public ed standpoint, but it sure was nail-biting entertainment. For a guy who built his empire as a media star, Oz was a terrible campaigner. You could easily convince me that some/all of his coms team simply hated him. Some of his unforced errors went national (crudite, anyone?), but his campaign was an endless supply of easy set-ups for Fetterman's team, right up until the final Sunday when he encouraged supporters to find him ten voters before the Steelers game, allowing Fetterman to point out what PA sports ball fans already knew--the Steelers had a bye and weren't playing that day.

Most interesting story of that campaign? It looks as if Fetterman's debate performance actually may have helped his campaign and stopped Oz's momentum.

The results were wonky. In my small rural county, folks went harder for Oz (64%) than Mastriano (61%), which I would not have predicted. Both of them were outperformed by the local House GOP candidates, which was less surprising (my dog could win an election here if he ran as a GOP dog). 

The other surprise is that the state House might flip Democrat. Even if it doesn't, that means the GOP won't have a super-control of the House. That's good news for education, as GOP reps repeatedly try to launch the same gag laws, anti-reading rights laws, and various forms of vouchers that have appeared in other states.

However--and it's a big however--one of those GOP voucher proposals for education savings accounts got the full-fledged support of Governor-elect Josh Shapiro during the campaign. Perhaps that was merely strategic (supposedly it help keep PA gazillionaire Jeffrey Yass from dumping a pile of money into the Mastriano campaign), but it bodes ill for public education in Pennsylvania. The only reason Shapiro looked okay on public education is that Mastriano looked spectacularly apocalyptic. But now groups like the teacher unions that supported Shapiro will need to shift gears and apply some education and pressure on his administration. And it remains to be seen if Shapiro will continue Governor Tom Wolf's long and fruitless attempt to reform charter and cyber-charter funding rules in the state. 

So things could look worse right now. We are not, thank goodness, Florida. But we are not Michigan, either, with its solid slate of public education supporters. The same debates that raged in previous years will keep raging next year, and public education supporters still have their work cut out for them. Catch your breath and let's get back to it.

An Election Story: What I Learned

This is not really a story about the election (or education) exactly, but about distraction, and about what I learned this time.

I didn't know that Rick and Fred had gone to Florida until they were on their way back. Let me tell you the story that leads up to that discovery, and what it reminded me of.

I've known Rick and his two brothers since we were all kids, mostly because our parents were friends. Rod was the youngest; in the tradition of youngest siblings everywhere, the most laid-back and fun of the lot. He was enough younger that he was still a student in high school when I returned as a teacher. 

In high school he dated Chris, a year behind him in school. I knew her because she played trombone in the marching band (I was assistant director) and in the town band section with me. A few years later, they got married, moved to Florida, built their dream house. Then a heart defect triggered a heart attack that took Rod's life. He was 26. 

Chris stayed in that house. Years later, she remarried. I don't know him, but Chris has a heart of gold, and if she felt Mike was worth marrying, that's all I need to know about him. 

I've known Fred almost as long. We've played traditional jazz together for decades; for many years his brother (who had played in band with Chris, too) was our drummer, and was also taken by disease way too young.

So after weathering many hurricanes successfully, Chris and Mike got hammered by Ian. Rick and Fred (both retired these days) loaded up and headed down. They drive to Florida, helped Chris and Mike and some other folks in that community rebuild and clean up, and headed back north just ahead of the next hurricane. (And there's a Go Fund Me)

I missed all of this until the tail end; my social media and much of my own attention was focused on the mid term elections and the worry what the outcomes could mean for various policies that I care about. My attention was so focused on the politics and policy that I missed some basic human stuff.

It's not that elections and politics and policy don't matter--they do. But it's a mistake to get so focused on them that we forget to note the basic stuff of life. Taking care of each other. Helping folks deal with the inevitable struggles that are part of life.

Ironically, Pennsylvania's campaign contained its own corrective. Fetterman, already a Regular Human type candidate, had his stroke, and struggled through recovery in a way that many pundits identified as a political liability, but which many regular human beings identified as the kind of struggle and striving that regular human beings go through. 

Politics matter, but they aren't life. They can make life easier or harder, but life itself is still about human striving and growing and building and working through whatever circumstances have thrown in our path, and helping those we are connected to, helping them do the same. 

This, perhaps, is why so much of politics has become screaming, a constant giga-decibel attempt to convince us that nothing could possibly be more important than Candidate X and Policy Y, because political operatives have learned that it takes a high level of screaming and fear and disaster-style rhetoric to draw our attention away from living our lives as human beings in the world.

Politics matter. One of the ways we watch out for our fellow humans is by working against policies that hurt them. But politics aren't everything, and human beings that we disagree with are still human beings. 

So what did I learn? I learned that I need to resist being distracted from life on the human scale just because the arena has become really loud and shiny. I'm reminded that my own definition--helping students become and discover their best selves, learning to be fully human in the world--is about human scale, and that's the scale I don't ever want to lose sight of. The central issue is always that people are trying to make their way through the world, and when we have the power to make their journey easier or harder, it is right to make it easier. Sometimes that involves politics and elections, but mostly it just involves paying attention and being human.

NC: Hammering The Teaching Profession

North Carolina continues to slowly dig deeper and deeper holes in which to bury public education and public school teachers. They've just launched another piece of their bad ideas, but in order to look at what just happened, we need a little context.

Our story so far

North Carolina has spent about a decade chipping away at public education. Here' are just some of the lowlights.

NC implemented one of those flunk third graders if they don't as the Big Standardized Reading Test laws. They froze their already-lousy pay schedule for teachers (in NC, the state sets the pay levels) even as that pay was shown to be Very Not Good.. When a report showed charter schools not doing so great, the Lt. Governor ordered it rewritten to look less negative; then a few years later they did the same thing again. Maybe it's because they are a great haven for charter profiteers. They decided to shovel even more public money into the voucher pipeline, while cutting millions from public ed funding (for Democratic areas). They tried to follow the failed Tennessee model of a state-run achievement school district (but it failed). When the legislature tried and failed to end teacher tenure, they told teachers they could have a raise if they gave up their job protections. They've set up rules to enable white flight. NC legislature is one of the ones that decided to fight on the hill of denying transgender bathrooms. And last year the Lt. Governor decided to organize a task force to catch any schools or teachers doing any naughty indoctrinatin' stuff--a state sponsored with hunt. This in a state where county commissioners can take school districts hostage if they don't like what the schools are teaching. And the legislature has been so determined not to fully fun public education that the court finally ordered the state to fork over $1,5 billion to education funding to settle a court finding from 1997 that required the state to stop farting around and fully fund its public schools (which it has been refusing to do ever since).

Yeah, it's a lot.

To the surprise of nobody paying attention, North Carolina has trouble recruiting and retaining teachers. 

In 2017, the legislature created the Professional Educator Standards and Preparation Commission (PEPSC) to make recommendations on how to expand teacher preparation programs, create an accountability system for those programs, and to “reorganize and clarify” the licensure process.. The plan they hatched is not a good one, and it turns out that the commission is just a piece of government theater and the plan was actually hatched by several parties behind the scenes including SAS (the value-added testing folks) and the Sothern Regional Education Board (SREB), which was in turn pulling strings on something called the North Carolina Human Capitol Roundtable. Had teacher Justin Parmenter not turned out to be a dogged and determined filer of FOIA requests, nobody outside of the little theater would have known that the P in PEPSC stands for "Puppet." Buried behind a lot of secretive communication and string pulling, we find this statement:

The overarching goal is to create an outcomes-based licensure system.

In other words, a teacher merit pay system. Not a merit pay bonus system, but an entire teacher pay system based on "merit." 

Okay, so what just happened?

This week PEPSC continued to slow-march its plan, submitting a "blueprint" for the new licensure system to the State Board of Education. The vote to do so was "slim" (and a bit questionable), and while everyone seems to understand that the end game is a system in which "teachers would prove they are effective educators" aka "merit" aka "check those scores on the Big Standardized Test," the blueprint is a not the system itself, but a list of ten "general actions" that is just vaguely formed argle bargle.

That's in keeping with the plan developed by the PR firm hired to new revamped system, and the understanding of PEPSC and its friends, which is that if word of the specifics of this plan get out, and teachers hate it enough to rise up in protest, the plan will be seriously hampered, if not outright killed. It is a reasonable fear on their part, because this plan should be DOA and then killed with fire. So the ten item list seems designed to keep the ball rolling while postponing the day when too many people look at the actual plan (which PEPSC keeps insisting could continue to change, even though it has not changed in any major way since PEPSC's buddies first handed it over). 

Do we want to look at the blueprint?

Sure. Or you can skip this section and jump to the wrap-up. Fair warning--this is kind of dense. I will try to translate as we go. Here are the ten items on the blueprint:

1. Build the professional framework around articulated standards of practice (i.e., INTASC) with clear expectations for progression in attainment of the professional knowledge base. So, standardize teaching.

2. Build analysis and assessment of practice from a base of multiple evidence points in practice with responsible application as to how each informs practice. Standardize the assessment of standardized teaching.

3. Create advanced and lead teacher roles to support teachers in various stages of professional learning, practice, and transition into and through the profession. This is part of the PEPSC plan. Any time someone talks about adding steps on the professional ladder, the question you have to ask is--will they add rungs above the ones we have, or are they going to dig a hole and lower the bottom end of the ladder. In North Carolina, there's another question to ask, but we'll get to that in a second.

4. Build licensure around evidence of attainment of the knowledge base of practice appropriate to the purpose of the license. Again, the main point is to make licensure outcomes based. We don't want to know how well you're trained--did you make that kid's scores go up?

5. Create and adopt valid and reliable tools to analyze and assess practice and its impact on student learning A cornerstone of the professional knowledge base and the ability to make explicit the practices that positively impacts student learning. Teacher quality will be measured by student outcomes. Remember, this whole thing is backed by SAS, the people who invented value-added test crap (EVAAS, PVAAS, etc), a system that has been largely debunked and even thrown out in court.

6. Build on existing assets in identified professional knowledge bases and structures that correlate to positive impact on teacher practice and student learning Including the collaborative knowledge base that exists in EPPs and the partnerships between schools, districts, and higher education. Blah blah blah standardized teaching and VAM.

7. Develop new professional learning tools and structures that give flexibility in access to the professional knowledge base, evidence of having attained it, and evidence of applying it successfully in practice. Gonna retrain teachers because we know how to do that.

8. Articulate clear distinctions across pathway entry points and progression focused on successful entry into the profession and transition to fully autonomous professionals. Open up more "alternative" paths to the classroom.

9. Build and fund a compensation and reward model that reflects the importance and value of the teaching profession, and that attracts and retains people in the profession. 

10. Secure funding to support the infrastructure of the framework as well as its discrete components

These last two (pay teachers well and fund this whole thing) bring us to the question that has to be asked in North Carolina. North Carolina has refused for a quarter of a decade to implement a plan for fully funding its public education system. They have repeatedly implemented pay scales that drag North Carolina teachers backwards. What are the odds that they will really implement better teacher pay and then fund it? 

TL;DR. What does all this say?

This deliberately obfuscatory language appears to hide a plan that is familiar to ed reform watchers. 

Expand your pool of possible hires by lowering your bar until a blind rat could step over it. Shore up your untrained and underqualified people by standardizing the act of teaching so that it's just paint by numbers and educational fry cookery. Pretend that you can measure the effectiveness of that system by using some BS Testing run through a VAM calculator (which just happens to be the proprietary cash cow of one of the backers of the plan). When you find teachers who are good at getting test scores, promote them and make them part of the process of prepping the fresh meat at the bottom of the scale. Pay the few at the top a bit more, and as for the bottom--well, you know what happens to pay when a job can be easily filled by any number of people.

I am not sure where in North Carolina, or anywhere else in this country, you can find people who honestly, sincerely believe that this plan will make the teaching profession in North Carolina more appealing. 

I suspect what you can find are people who believe that a system like this will make teaching positions easier and cheaper to fill.

In either case, the people who believe this plan will work are kidding themselves. The people on PEPSC who voted for it should be ashamed of themselves. Members of the State Board of Education should be pummeled with e-mails, as should all elected officials who come within five hundred feet of public education. 

This is not a plan that will serve anyone well, least of all the students of North Carolina, and no amount of flowery argle bargle and secret meeting and general misdirection is going to change that. Bad news all around. 

Microsoft Gets In The Tutoring Biz, Too

You can tell that something is trending in education land when the Big Guns go out and buy themselves a seat for that trend. Last fall, with little fanfare, Microsoft bought itself a little edu-biz called TakeLessons, which gives Microsoft a place in the online tutoring and education brokerage game.

TakeLessons was reportedly founded way back in 2006 in San Diego and has raised somewhere in the $20 million neighborhood in investments since. The model is something like Outschool, Brainly, and GoStudent. Like Outschool, TakeLessons serves as a sort of broker. Tutors sign up and students sift through the available "course options" to find something they like. "Teach what you love" says the teacher entrance page. "Flexible, affordable learning with top-rated instructors," says the main entrance page. 

Who exactly us rating these teachers? Well, that's kind of unclear. The lessons are largely focused on music, languages, and the performing arts, with some other odds and ends thrown in, including academic tutoring and culinary lessons (though the site boasts 300+ subjects to choose from). It is based in many major cities, and offers a variety of methods-- you can learn via video, online instruction, group or solo lessons, or even set up in person learning.

TakeLessons has some enthusiastic boosters and a whole bunch of unhappy former customers/gig workers (see here, here, and here), though many of those date back to the pre-Microsoft days. The complaints include trouble with a persistent link to TakeLessons on the Microsoft Edge "just opened" screen. Synergy, baby.

Microsoft has been a bit slow to seize the pandemic distance learning and tutoring wave, though LinkedIN is also trying to do a learning thing combined with what they incorporated when they acquired Lynda.com (did you forget that LinkedIN was also owned by Microsoft). There's teams, which some schools used to get through the pandemess. Folks see possibilities here.

The TakeLessons acquisition bolsters Microsoft's reach in edtech. While the company has not disclosed a specific plan for the acquisition, the synergies between Teams, which was used by 100 million students during the pandemic, and lesson provider TakeLessons are difficult to ignore.

For example, TakeLessons could provide custom learning solutions for school districts or other customers. "This acquisition is in response to the growing demand on personalized hybrid opportunities and expands our product offerings to TakeLessons consumers, a leading online learning platform," a senior executive told CNBC in an email.

Of course, that was last September when these dreams were being touted, and as yet, TakeLessons doesn't seem to be positioned to take on the high quality tutoring universe right now, and one never knows when talking about the company that brought us both Microsoft Office tools and the Zune. Lord knows we need a few more players in the tutoring biz.