Conflict, Silos, and Choice

One of the less common arguments in favor of school choice is that public schools are just a mess of conflict because people of different beliefs are forced to educate side by side. Wouldn't it be better if everyone could just go off into their own little silo and educate just with like-minded people?

Well, no. It wouldn't.

A couple of decades back, I went to Divorce School. The tuition is very high, and other people have to help pay the cost of your education, so I don't recommend it. But you can learn a lot there.

One thing I learned is that if conflict exists, you cannot disappear it somehow. What may feel like putting it off or tamping it down is really just putting it into an escrow account where it compounds interest and eventually emerges even huger than when you stuffed it in there. If the conflict exists, you are going to deal with it, one way or another, sooner or later. 

A common method for trying to disappear conflict is to try to make the people on the other side of the conflict just go away. Sometimes that takes the form of trying obliterate them in some sort of total victory, sometimes just erasing them somehow, and sometimes simply making them go away. 

The thing is, none of these work. All have been attempted on various scales, and none of them work.

A history of modern warfare, the first time in human history when leaders imagined that the technology existed to truly erase the enemy, shows that from the Third Reich to the middle east, policy based on the notion that the other side can be completely obliterated is failed policy that simply increases suffering and waste of human lives.

In the world of culture panic, we are seeing an attempt to erase certain folks. "Maybe," the theory goes, "if we just made everyone pretend that LGBTQ persons don't exist, we could end all the noise and conflict over that stuff." It's not working. It isn't going to work. 

The current rising love of authoritarianism is cut from the same cloth. If we just had a Really Strong Leader (like Viktor Orban or Putin) he would just make all those dissenting voices shut up forever. This comes with an attempt to Other the opposition, casting them as stupid and/or evil instead of other actual human beings that we need to talk to.

As Americans, we ought to know better. "Wouldn't everyone just be happier in their own place," is the language of segregationists. Segregated silos are bad news, particularly in a diverse pluralistic society.

The more obvious bad part of segregation is not just that diverse people are kept apart. Segregation of people facilitates segregation of resources. If your position is that you don't really want to pay to educate Black kids, then putting all the Black kids, and only Black kids, in the same schools makes it much easier to create policy that directs fewer resources to Black kids. Segregation also works for resource hoarding-- if we put all the rich kids in the same schools, then we can insure that only they benefit from certain privileges. 

But there are other problems with choicing our way to segregated silos. 

One is that every silo is a bubble, and within that bubble, stupid prejudices are free to grow. They're reinforced; say "All mugwumps like pineapple on their pizza" and a hundred heads will nod in agreement, and you'll be that more certain that those pineapple-eating mugwumps really are awful. 

Well, the argument goes, mugwumps will have a school of their own to eat all the pineapple pizza they like, so it's fair. I understand the reasoning. It just doesn't reflect what actually happens. What actually happens is that when marginalized students and families create a siloed option of their own, they turn themselves into easily-identified targets. Anti-LGBTQ folks don't have to say, "Well, those awful people are out there somewhere" and wave their hands vaguely about. They can--and repeatedly do--point at an LGBTQ-friendly charter or private school and declare "How can we allow that!!" Those echo chamber bubbles allow the worst ideas to fester and grow and, ultimately, explode.

Certain conflicts exist in our country right now. LGBTQ persons exist, and some folks wish they would not. Some folks want to keep working on our issues surrounding race and other folks would like to be done with all that. How do we manage religion? Where do we go with democratic norms in a pluralistic society? And why do some people put pineapple on their damn pizza?

The conflicts exist. Nobody wants them. Nobody likes them (though some folks find them useful). But they are here, and one way or another we will be forced to deal with them.

To pretend that we can create samethink silos for schools--or any other part of society--and thereby make our country a better place is a silly idea. We are a diverse, pluralistic country. If you just wish we weren't, well, I wish all my hair grew back, but we can't live the lives we wish we had, only the ones we actually have. 

A diverse pluralistic society based on democratic norms is going to have conflict, and we can either deal with it or let it curdle and mess with us. We're currently operating at a disadvantage, with a shortage of leaders willing to engage in difficult conversations, and we are certainly not going to create such leaders by raising generations in samethink silos. Yes, conflict is hard. Sometimes it's unavoidable. Suck it up and do the work, because there is no way out but through.

Practicing On Cyber Students (Sort Of)

The Relay Graduate School of Education, a pretend graduate school started by pretend teachers, has come up with a great new training idea--practice with pretend students. But not just any pretend students-- AI pretend students. Because if it has AI in it, it must be extra cool and shiny. Except that once again, the actual product promises so much more than it actually delivers.

It appears that Madeline Will, a reporter for Education Week, caught the RGSE pitch at SWSX, and grabbed this unironic quote:

“In order for a teacher to become great, they need high-quality practice,” said Lequite Manning, the department chair of clinical practice and residency for Relay

The high-quality practice is to involve skills teachers need such as "getting to know their students." This happens through some text-based interactions. The teacher candidate plugs in some personal info, then watches a video of a talk between the head of Relay, Mayme Hostetter, and Layce Robinson, CEO of UnboundEducation, a teacher PD outfit. 

Then the AI finally shows up in the form of a letter from a "teacher mentor" who gives the candidate student demographic info. The candidate can ask the AI for advice on dealing with students. Let me say that again--the human prospective teacher can ask the computer for advice about how to deal with the imaginary human children.

Then the teacher begins "interacting" with the imaginary students. Note--the students are NOT AI, but are personas based on "real kids" that Hostetter and Robinson taught. Robinson have had some actual classroom experience (though only a couple of years are listed in her LinkedIn profile); Hostertter spent two years in a private boarding school, and three years in a KIPP charter. The candidate imagines sitting down at the student lunch table (an interesting choice, that) and "strikes up a conversation." Will says that the candidate has several choices about how to start the conversation, suggesting maybe that what we're actually talking about is a multiple choice Talking To Students quiz. Then the candidate shares with the AI mentor, and then is finally rewarded with one of two videos by Hostetter and Robinson--either an attaboy or a try-it-again video.

So, not very impressive, but one more entry in the drive for classroom simulators for teacher prep. I get the appeal-- an actual classroom is often unforgiving, and when you screw up, you may have to live with the fallout of your bad choice for weeks. But the dream of a classroom simulator that's like a, a Hostetter suggests, a flight simulator, is a silly dream. Simulating a physical object interacting with the laws of physics is a hell of a lot easier than simulating human interactions.

Not that folks don't keep trying. Back in 2016 there was a bunch of noise about TeachLivE, a classroom simulation with CGI students direct from Uncanny Valley School District. This looked creepy, but like this newest wrinkle, it turned out to be far less than it pretended. The teacher trainee is interacting with a CGI rendering of students, but those students were actually animated by "an interactor" who "controls the student avatars in the classroom, speaking through a microphone and using head-mounted and handheld controllers programmed to respond to certain movements." It's a blend of "program control and puppetry." 

What classroom simulators seem to have in common is the attempt to look as if they are harnessing cool new technology, when they really aren't.

In the late seventies, I had an education course taught by Robert Schall, who had years and years of actual public school teaching experience. We would develop and teach practice lessons, with our classmates as students. Also in the classroom was "Bobby," a compendium of every annoying student behavior ever. Dr. Schall didn't filter himself through a special algorithm or computer program or even put on some kind of costume. He just sat in the back of the room and gave us the experience of dealing with challenging students. After years in real classrooms, I can confirm that Bobby was an excellent simulation of the real thing. 

The best way for new teachers to learn about the classroom is direct experience, and the second best way is from experiences teachers who have spent years in the classroom. Trying to interpose shiny tech is both hugely difficult and also never likely to yield the quality of results from the first two sources. 

PA: Vouchers Feed Discrimination

In Pennsylvania, where we ought to be focused on responding to a court finding that our whole method of funding public education is both inequitable and inadequate, our Democratic governor Josh Shapiro and the GOP legislators just cannot get over their desire for more school vouchers.

This despite the fact that our current voucher system is both hugely unaccountable and also used to fund some jaw-dropping religious discrimination. 

So there are hearings going on (and have been for some time). Recently one of the people offering testimony was Susan Spicka, of Education Voters of Pennsylvania. Spicka is a rock star in the world of supporting public education. At a hearing of the House Democratic Policy Committee, Spicka opened her testimony with these lines:

In his budget address, Governor Shapiro said, “It’s ridiculous that here in Pennsylvania two women can get married on a Sunday and fired from their job on a Monday, just because they’re in love.”

What Governor Shapiro left out is that the children of this couple could get kicked out of their private school on Tuesday. And that tax dollars are used to support this discrimination.

Discrimination is a feature, not a bug, of school voucher programs. Pennsylvania’s Educational Improvement Tax Credit (EITC) and Opportunity Scholarship Tax Credit (OSTC) school voucher programs direct $470 million tax dollars into private and religious schools that can, and do, explicitly discriminate against students for just about any reason they choose.

During this particular hearing, Representative Ismael Smith-Wade-El asked the question that has been on lots of minds since the death of Nex Benedict (video below):

Do you feel that the outcomes of these sort of funding pass through and voucher programs pose a risk to the lives of transgender young people?

Spicka's answer was to the point. Yes.  

If you're not living in an area like this I don't think that you can understand the impact that this hate that is coming out of these churches has on communities and on children, and without the tens of millions of dollars in voucher funding that has been poured into Lancaster County since eitc ostc was founded, these churches would not have the revenue that they have they would not have the expanse that they have. These churches are being funded by voucher dollars and they are spreading the hate.

Spicka's full testimony is worth reading, but I want to underline this point because it is often overlooked. It's not just that these discriminatory schools reject and expel students who don't align with their particular values. It's not just that they take taxpayer dollars and then decide which students they consider worthy of receiving an education, once again demonstrating that the promise of school choice is empty--it's school's choice instead.

It's also that by strengthening and funding these schools, taxpayers are energizing a source of toxic attitudes in the community. People who want to treat LGBTQ persons as Other, treat them as (as NC gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson puts it) "that filth," get to gather together in a bubble, convince each other that their way is the only right way, and then go out into the community and act on that belief. 

We continue to see signs that increased anti-LGBTQ rhetoric fuels more abuse and mistreatment of LGBTQ persons, and funding these christianist organizations makes it easier for them to amplify their anti-LGBTQ voices. 

I use the term "christianist" because none of this discriminatory nonsense looks like the Christianity that I know. Look, if you feel you can't fully and freely exercise your religion without being able to marginalize, attack, and discriminate against certain classes of people, I'm pretty sure you're doing your religion wrong. You are making your community worse, and why taxpayers should finance your bad behavior is beyond me. 

ICYMI: Lost Hour Edition (3/10)

Don't forget to move the two or three items in your house that did not automatically change the time. Remember-- today won't be so bad, but tomorrow it's going to be a real treat to pull the bodies of yourself and your loved ones out of bed. But at least we have the comfort of knowing that daylight savings helps... something. I'm sure there's some good reason.

Well, here's your reading list, anyway.

Homeschooling, ‘indoctrination,’ Jan. 6: A look at NC’s new GOP superintendent candidate

Lots of election results this week, including news from North Carolina, where Republicans decided they wanted to go full wingnut, including this candidate for state superintendent.

Public Education Attack Measure

Thomas Ultican takes a look at the Network for Public Education report on how well states support public education.

The surprising promise and profound perils of AIs that fake empathy

From Amanda Ruggeri in New Scientist, a piece that isn't about education exactly, except that this has rather huge implications for the whole idea of teacherbots and what they can't provide students.

PragerU is a conservative video giant. Here's why it's trying to get into schools

Lisa Hagen on All Things Considered takes a look at the conservative propaganda outfit trying to pretend it's an education outfit.

Without Effective Public Oversight, AI in Schools Will Do More Harm Than Good

New report from the National Education Policy Center. Thorough and detailed and well worth the time.

Shocking Online Manifesto Reveals Project 2025’S Link To A Coordinated ‘Christian Nationalism Project’

Jennifer Cohn at the Bucks County Beacon has uncovered yet another planning document from Christian Nationalists who would like to be in charge of, well, everything. 

Nex Benedict’s death shows policy failures, harms from inaction

Oklahoma Policy Institute calls out the atmosphere of hate that led to Benedict's death.

After Nex Benedict’s death, LGBTQ youth group saw 200% rise in crisis contacts from Oklahoma

How are things going in Oklahoma? Not so great, reports Jo Yurcaba for NBC News.

Texas places state’s largest charter school network under conservatorship

IDEA catalog of financial misbehavior has ended up with a state takeover. Ikram Mohamed has the story for the Texas Tribune

Secret recording shows school voucher proponent talking of 'public hangings' of lawmakers

Phil Williams of News Channel 5 in Tennessee has some tapes revealing the kind of threats and arm twisting behind the push for vouchers in the state.

Pennsylvania state senator says cyber charter schools underperform at the cost of the taxpayer

The continuing mystery in PA. Everyone knows cybers are expensive and perform poorly, and yet... Meghan Schiller reports at KDKA News. 

Appeals court blocks Fla. ‘Stop Woke Act,’ says it’s a ‘First Amendment sin’

In other unsurprising news, DeSantis gets a setback and the First Amendment gets a win. By Anumita Kaur for the Washington Post

In Defense of School Sports

Have you noticed lots of young athletes spending the year in private pay to play programs for their sport? So has Nancy Flanagan.

North Carolina’s public voucher dollars are funding Christian Nationalist indoctrination in schools

Justin Parmenter continues to track some of the religious discrimination and indoctrination being paid for by North Carolina taxpayers. 

The Essential Narrative for Public Education Advocates: Public Schools Are Central to the Well-Being of Communities

Jan Resseger looks at some unfortunate implications of recent research. Does privatizing education change a community's very nature?

Illinois Prison Fired Teacher for Saying Jim Crow Laws Were Racist

Elizabeth Will-Greenberg reports for The Appeal on this story that is just as bad as it sounds. Bet you didn't know that Jim Crow laws were totally race neutral.

Over at the Bucks County Beacon this week, I wrote about the Independence Law Center doing the work of pushing bad policy in PA school boards. Also, at Forbes, I wrote about yet another attempt to push AI essay graders on the classroom. 

Join me on substack. It's free and goes straight to your email, where you can peruse my latest output at your leisure (even if you're running an hour behind). 

Vouchers Are For Dodging Regulations

This week, we saw the story of a charter school in North Carolina that, having been ordered to shut down, reimagined itself as a private school.

Expect to see versions of this story over and over again. Charter schools mostly require some sort of authorizer to sign off on their ability to function, and those authorizers are backstopped by the state. Meaning that even in a state like North Carolina, a charter school can be a big enough mess to get itself shut down.

Charter schools in some states have barely minimal accountability and oversight. But "minimal" is still more than "none," and "none" is what most states have in place for school vouchers.

For instance, in West Virginia, where someone just noticed that at least one microschool is failing miserably, the rules for getting voucher monies look like this:

The state doesn’t ask potential vendors to submit a business or education plan up front. Anyone who wants to be an authorized Hope “service provider,” including a microschool, must sign a contract agreeing to get criminal background checks on staff working with students and to notify districts when they enroll. To receive funds, vendors need only submit a W-9, a tax form for an independent contractor, and document the Hope funds they receive from parents.

That's typical. In most voucher states, all you have to do to be a voucher "vendor" is just say so. And it's not just that voucher laws lack any sort of oversight or accountability mechanisms--most of the recent voucher laws or law expansions very specifically forbid oversight or accountability.

This has happened even as voucher fans have retired the talking point that vouchers allow students to get a better education. Fact is, most voucher laws are carefully designed in such a way that we have no idea what quality education students are getting.

Why are we here? It's simple.

Voucher programs are not about giving students access to quality education. Vouchers are about giving churches and businesses access to taxpayer dollars.

The less oversight and accountability, the more access to those taxpayer dollars. If that costs some students a few years of their education, oh well. They are not the priority.

 

A Truly Terrible Use For ChatGPT And Its Ilk

"Teachers are embracing ChatGPT-powered grading," says the headline at Axios, and with all my heart I hope that's not true, because what a terrible idea. What a supremely terrible awful bad idea.

The good (-ish) news is that the article's source for this reported embrace is one of the companies pushing it. The bad news is that the company is Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, the 800 pound gorilla of school instructional materials. 

It's not that tech has no place in the world of writing (obviously). There have some good pieces of software, for instance, that grew out of the idea of providing a quicker, simpler way of attaching those comments that you find yourself using on student work over and over and over again (though in my experience, as with lots of software timesavers, there's a huge investment of time up front to get the time savings further down the line). 

But to use a bot to assess writing? Crappy idea.

This latest version (Writable) tries to soften the blow by calling for a "hybrid" system with "a human in the loop," which seems to mean that the bot assesses the writing and the human looks over its work, just in case. But why bother? To really check the bot's work would take as much time as just assessing the writing yourself. No, a human in the loop is just a wink wink nudge nudge moment, a way to help folks pretend that things haven't gone too far yet.

But what a lousy idea. Let me count the ways.

The software just isn't very good at it.

We have been over and over and over and over and over and over and over this. Computer software does not "know" or "understand" in any conventional sense of the words. Once you get past the very technical explanations (and here are three good ones of varying complexity), what AI language generating models do is decide, based on all the examples fed into them, what a very probable sentence might be. Give it a topic and specific sort of prompt (which basically allows it to narrow its sample base of examples), and it will give you a high-probability string of words. As an essay grader, what it can do is turn that around and decide if the submitted material falls within the probability parameters established by the examples it has "learned" from.

What it can't decide is whether or not the student has written something stupid. It may spot whether or not the student has included a specific example for support, but it can't judge how good an example it is. And given generative AI's propensity for just making shit up, it's not clear how good it would be at catching students doing the same. 

Misplaced trust in authority.

Your computer cannot think, does not understand, is not smart in a conventional human sense of the word. It's an object whose virtues are an absolute tireless ability to follow instructions at the speed of light. 

But since they first poked their heads into pop culture, computers have been portrayed as possessing some sort of objective superhuman wisdom and knowledge. And human beings continue to defer to computers as having some higher level of authority.

However, computers are machines. They do exactly what their human programmers tell them to do. Even when they employ machine learning to "teach" themselves, they do so according to the instructions of human programmers. In short, computers do not implement and express the computed wisdom of some higher power; they simply implement the ideas of whatever humans programmed them. 

When it comes to insights that might take a human a lifetime to work out, like complicated computations, computers get us knowledge that we can trust and which would have been hard to find otherwise. But an essay is not a computation, and a computer has nothing to offer that improves on human judgment. Software assessment of writing should just be viewed as humans using the programming to make a judgment about writing, not as some sort of objective wisdom over and above what humans could provide. Yet, I'm afraid that some folks will view it as exactly that, and instead of treating the software assessment as they would one more human voice in the room (whose judgment might be suspect), they'll treat it as some digital Word Of God.

Distorting the entire process.

Writing is the work of communicating thoughts, ideas, emotions, and other human stuff to other human beings. Stringing words together in order to satisfy the algorithm is not any sort of meaningful writing (and that is true even if the algorithm is being applied by humans). This is conditioning young humans to string words together in a manner completely unrelated to anything they want to say or express.

Lord knows we don't need computers to promote this bad kind of word spitting. I've seen too many students who figured out that trying to focus on what they actually think or believe just gets in the way of satisfying the assessment algorithm that gives them their grade. And the Big Standardized Test only enshrined that sort of anti-writing as a important goal. 

What do you suppose it does to a student's approach to writing when they start with the understanding that they are writing not for a human audience, but a computerized one? Not to communicate, but to perform word spitting for a digital audience? 

Writable and its brethren are pitched as tools to save labor and time, but they save that labor and time by changing the very nature of the task and distorting the learning goals for students. 

It could be worse, I suppose. The software could be wired to a dispenser that fed students a piece of candy every time they spit out an especially probably string of words. Or it could aim even more directly at the current internet cyber-hell, where AI spits out articles designed to be pleasing to the AI that pushes those articles on search engines-- "Ten Weird Tricks I Used To Enjoy My Summer Vacation (You won't believe number eight)"

I sure hope teachers don't embrace this attempt to train human children to become word spitting widgets. We can do better. 

PA: Central Bucks Taxpayers Fleeced By Law Firm

Back in its MAGA Moms for Liberty period, the Central Bucks School Board implemented so many discriminatory policies that both the ACLU and the U.S. Department of Education came after the district for creating a hostile environment for LGBTQ students. So they hired the law firm Duane Morris to do an internal investigation. Turns out that the result was not just junk, by hugely over-priced junk.

The Duane Morris firm was an odd choice to begin with, as the firm includes Bill McSwain, a former failed GOP gubernatorial candidate whose candidacy included such great moments as calling the West Chester Area School Districts' Gender-Sexuality Alliance Club an example of "leftist political indoctrination." So maybe not the guy to take a hard look at the district's LGBTQ environment unless your fear is that it's not hostile enough.

When the report was issued, the ACLU immediately noted

The district got what they paid for – a one-sided investigation that was never intended to take seriously the allegations of a hostile environment for LGBTQ students at Central Bucks

It was not great. But now it turns out that it was also hugely overpriced.

Folks noted at the time that the $1 million bill from Duane Morris was pretty steep. But it has since mushroomed to $1.75, and many folks are crying foul--especially because the previous board majority knew.

Reporting for the Bucks County Courier Times, Jo Ciavaglia unearthed some emails from an attorney whose firm had previously worked for the district to former Superintendent Adam Lucabaugh and former board president Dana Hunter. Those emails warned that the bills were seriously inflated and that the district should seek both detailed documentation and reduced charges. That email was sent in June of 2023.

The attorney noted that while McSwain promised that associates and legal assistants would handle most of the work, keeping costs low, that's not what happened-- a whole team was brought in, and billed hours like crazy. Maddie Hanna of the Philadelphia Inquirer (whose work is always top notch), dug through some of those emails, for specifics like $10,000 billed for a memorandum after the interview of a middle school principal. 

Turns out Duane Morris also helped the district draft some policy barring teacher "advocacy" in classrooms. The policy is a page and a half; it apparently took five lawyers to draft it.

This came under the same board that tried to give Lucabaugh a massive severance reward when the election showed shifting winds. 

Central Bucks is a wealthy district, but that's not an excuse to throw taxpayer money around left and right (well, mostly right). That this particular fleecing was performed in the service of protecting an atmosphere hostile to LGBTQ students is doubly odious. If ever there were board members who deserved to be ousted, it was that crew. Let's hope the current board doesn't find any more messes to clean up after.