Why, Jeff Yass?

I've read some Jeffrey Yass profiles, but it will be hard to beat the one just published by Robert Huber at Philadelphia's City Paper. It's not just an illuminating profile of Yass, but of the motivation behind many of the privatizers.

Huber traces Yass's devotion to school choice back to his time on the Cato Institute board and a conversation at a Cato event with Milton Friedman.

“‘If you had a lot of philanthropic money, what would you do with it?’ And Friedman said, ‘I would fight for school choice. That’s the fundamental problem with the country. Nothing is more valuable than school choice.’ So as a gambler, I was like, well, I got to ask the guy who has the best opinion. I want to bet with him. So it certainly made sense to me. … [It’s] pretty obvious that nothing could impact society as much as school choice.”

Which is a window into Yass’s way of thinking: He drills down into the most rational viewpoint held by the smartest people — ­of course, he’s the one deciding what’s most rational and who’s the smartest — ­and then runs with it.

Yass is a free market true believer. Competition will improve education. Education will reduce poverty. And he sees one other outcome that he likes:

“As students flee [to schools of their choice], those government schools would have to shut down,” he says, trotting out his favored term for public schools. “And that’s a good thing. If a school cannot fix itself, if it does not adequately educate its children, if it shortchanges the families it is supposed to serve, it doesn’t deserve to be open.”

Huber mentions, not for the last time, the complete self-assuredness with which Yass pitches his ideas. Schools are a big wasteful bureaucracy. Having the money follow the child will work. And all the rest because, as Huner writes, "Jeff Yass has absolutely no doubt that he is right."

Huner delves into Yass's technique of primarying anyone from his own party who doesn't back his choicer agenda (an old DeVos tactic). And while one of his PA partners, state senator Andy Williams, says that Yass just loves kids, Councilwoman Kendra Brooks argues that he does not give a damn "about education policy for the families and children in my community. He just doesn't want to pay taxes. Asked what she would say to Yass, she offers Huber this:

“I really would like to know the why,” she says. Why his focus is on Black and brown children and why he thinks he knows best what they need. “Why does it have to be grounded in pulling these children out of their communities and transforming them into something different?”

 Folks often rush to accuse privatizers of looking to make plenty of money, but one old friend of Yass's, when pressed, offers a motivation--

Power. Huber expands. "The power to upset the apple cart, to blow things up, to have his say."

Power and focus, perhaps. Huber pulls an example from a Texas race in which he backed David Covey, from the far right wingnut part of the GOP, simply because Greg Abbott told Yass that this guy would be their friend on choice. Telling Yass about Covey's extreme beliefs, Hubert mines the following:

Yass claims that he was unaware of that; Governor Abbott, he says, told him Covey was a sane human being, and if there were a really bad guy who was in favor of school choice, Yass says he wouldn’t support him.

Later, I press Yass on that: What of conservative candidates he supports who would try to cut spending on programs that help schoolchildren — Head Start-type programs, say, or school lunch programs — in the name of cutting taxes? Does that concern him at all?

“No, frankly,” Yass says. “Because the school choice issue is so much bigger than anything else that I don’t really consider those things.”

Perhaps whether Covey is a bad guy is debatable, but Yass not knowing exactly whom he supports — or considering the fallout from what policies they’ll pursue — is chilling. (In the end, Covey lost. Barely.)

Huber believes that Huber sincerely wants to fix US education, and agrees that we "desperately need to have an open debate on the state of our schools, our urban schools especially." Yass says he welcomes that debate.

But to many people, it looks like he leaped from debate to certainty long ago, and that he is dangerously gaming our politics with all the money he is throwing around in the name of education. That criticism doesn’t matter, not to Yass. Because he believes he is right.

Because he is utterly certain that he knows the answer:

We have seen this movie before. Bill Gates, because he successfully launched a technocratic empire. Betsy DeVos, because she has a direct line to God. Jeff Yass, because he's gotten incredibly rich beating the system. Countless other wealthy people, because they have been successfully in one business endeavor or because they are sure they know the mind of God.

Each certain that they know The True Answer, and each endowed with a mountain of money that they can use to appoint themselves the Boss of All Education. True Believers who don't feel the need to hear other opinions and able to use a juggernaut of money to roll over anyone who disagrees (aka "people who are wrong"). 

Folks like Yass aren't really interested in wealth, but money is how they keep score (literally true for the guy who made his stake playing poker). I reckon that Yass doesn't want to pay taxes not because he wants that actual money, but because how dare the government try to take something that belongs to him. How dare they try to exert power over him. Still, these rich privatizers attract a whole host of folks who are happy to follow in their wake and gather up the cash they shake loose. But for Yass et al, it's about exerting power in order to make the world conform to what they know is True. It's about winning. 

This is the legacy of Citizens United and every other SCOTUS decision allowing unrestricted spending by the rich in politics. Want to find a person with ideas about how education ought to work? You can find one on every street corner, but only a few have the financial might to inflict their view, no matter how ill-informed, on the rest of us. 

Read this full piece. It's a good window on how these folks think and operate. 

ICYMI: Batten The Hatches Edition (8/25)

The Board of Directors goes back to school tomorrow, while the Chief Marital Officer gets her students on Tuesday, so things are cranking into high gear here. Plus lots was going on in the world of education last week, so I've got a mountain of reading for you today. Let's dive right in.

The First Day of School

John Merrow, longtime distinguished education reporter, writes what he wished his grandchildren's teacher message would be on Day One. It's pretty good.

Ten Non-Standard Ideas for the Beginning of the School Year

Experienced educator Nancy Flanagan with some unusual but cool ideas for starting the year.

How About, First and Foremost, We Agree to Not Suck the Joy From Their Lives

Teacher Tom, a Seattle pre-school institution, also has some thoughts that are particularly important as school starts. About what we can and can't measure in education.

The fastest-growing college expense may not be what people think

Probably not news if you have college students in your family. Hechinger reports on one more side effect of the housing problems in this country.

Bible Teaching in Every Classroom? In Oklahoma, Few Signs It’s Happening.

Ruth Graham, behind the New York Times paywall, takes a look at Ryan Walters and his attempt to force the Bible into every classroom. 

The Joy of a Cell-Phone-Free School Day

The indispensable Mercedes Schneider reports on just how delightful it is to have a cellphone-free classroom. (Spoiler: very).

I'm a high school teacher, and my school banned cellphones in the classroom. Every school should do the same.

If you want more on that same theme, here's Emily Brisse in Business Insider of all places, explaining how a ban made her students' lives better. 

As School Year Starts, Pennridge School District Still Needs to Revise Shadow Banning Book Policy

Jenny Stephens continues to do great work for the Bucks County Beacon. This piece follows the Pennridge School District and its continued wrestling with shadow banning of books (and if you don't know how that works, you should study up).

Collateral Damage in Yet Another Reading War

Paul Thomas looks at how the alarm bells over US student reading ability have been rung over and over, falsely.

A New School Year Brings More Weapons

Steve Nuzum talks about how things are going with weapons in school in South Carolina these days. Could be better.

Several states, DOJ take interest in case where Cobb teacher was fired behind book read in class

This is the case of the teacher who was fired for reading "My Shadow Is Purple" to her Fifth Graders. All sorts of folks are interested in making sure the court doesn't uphold her termination. Erica Murphy covers it for 11Alive.

Resist the AI guidance you are being given

Earlier this week I lambasted the Chicago Public School administration for their bone-headed AI guidebook. Benjamin Riley also took them to task, and his task-taking is worth a read.

Parents can still pay for theme park passes using state scholarship money

Remember all those stories about how Florida voucher dollars were being spent for all sorts of iffy expenses? Well, once word got out, reports Jay Waagmeester for the Florida Phoenix, the state did not a thing about the issue, and so it continues.

Most Americans are leery of book bans — but they don’t oppose all restrictions, survey says

Erica Meltzer reports for Chalkbeat that Americans mostly think book bans are a bigger threat than children seeing naughty things in books. There's some more nuance to be found.

Politicians step up attacks on the teaching of scientific theories in US schools

From The Conversation, a look at how science education has been and continues to be challenged.

How People Vote. How People Choose a “Good” School. Is it Common Sense?

Nancy Flanagan looks at how the culture trickles down into school, and how common sense isn't always what we think it is.

The Girl Scouts sued wife of North Carolina Republican gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson over nearly $3,000 in “money owed”–and won

North Carolina has two of the most bananas candidates for office in the nation, and Justin Parmenter continues to track their various misadventures.

Part 2: Parents’ Rights Activists, Privatizers, and Project 2025 Conspire Against Public Schooling

Jan Resseger has been looking at the people looking at Project 2025 for even more information about what it means.

Love of Teaching is Under Attack

David Finkle is known mostly as the man behind Mr. Fitz, a super comic about teaching. But every once in a while he does some blogging, too, and you should not miss this post about the erosion of the love of teaching.

Skyrocketing Test Gains in Oklahoma Are Largely Fiction, Experts Say

I don't really want to spend all this time with Oklahoma, but Ryan Walters is such a raging firehose of incompetence that he keeps coming up. 

Federal agency joins criticism of Oklahoma education department's financial controls

Meanwhile, the feds have been checking out his work and have found the education dudebro-in-chief is less than awesome when it comes to taking care of the financial side of things. Than there's the screw up with Title 1 funds. 

School choice and a history of segregation collide as one Florida county shutters its rural schools

Kate Payne for the Associated Press with the tale of a Florida district struggling with history and race.

Why Black Teachers Matter

A study shows that Black teachers matter for more than just Black students.

Florida school board pauses chaplain plans following interest from 'Ministers of Satan'

In a completely unsurprising development, Florida school discover the law allowing them to put a chaplain in schools is not working out exactly as they were hoping it would.

Naught for Teacher

I missed this when it ran in The Baffler back in April, but Jennifer Berkshire's look at the Democratic Party's work on conservative education dismantling is timely.

Cartoons on Parent/Teacher Conferences

Larry Cuban collected some cartoons. Just in case you could use a break

At Forbes.com this week I updated the continuing saga of Carson v. Makin, the case that required Maine to funs religious charters, and an overview of the whole cellphone ban thing. 

Join me on substack-- you get all my stuff straight to your in-box. It's free!

Call Them By Their Name

Names have power, so it makes sense that young humans, who are generally in search of both identity and some amount of power over their own lives, will often try to exert some control over their own names.

As a teacher, it's not a fight worth picking. I taught so many students--soooooo many-- who wanted to be called by another name. Sometimes it was perfectly understandable-- a common nickname for their full name, or going by a middle name. Sometimes it was a leap-- "Albert" would prefer to go by "Butch." I had some unusual cases, like the girl who had the same name as three other students in class, so told me she'd rather go by Andrea (pronounced Ahn-dray-uh). And a few times, I had a trans student who wanted to use a different name.

Did I agree with all of them? No more than I agreed with some of my students' questionable fashion choices. But it cost me nothing to honor these preferences, to give students that small measure of control over their own identities. It was a small thing for me, but a thing that helped make my classroom a safe, welcoming space where we could get on with the work of learning to be better at reading, writing, speaking and listening.

So I don't get teachers like Vivian Geraghty, the middle school language arts teacher who found herself with two transgender students and a) refused to call them by their chosen names and b) asked to have them removed from their classrooms.

Geraghty is going to matter because she was told to resign, maybe, and then sued the district. Based on a U.S. District judge decision, this matter is going to trial (at least partly because there seems to be dispute about what actually happened). According to court documents, the students made their request on Day One and Geraghty knew these requests were “part of the student’s social transition” but disagreed because of her religious beliefs and “wanted those students out of her classroom."

Geraghty cites her religious convictions as the reason she would not honor the student request, and though this is a fashionable hill for christianists to die on these days, I don't really get it. Why is transgenderism the such a heinous crime against religion and conscience that they cannot even acknowledge such people exist is beyond me. 

Part of the dispute is over whether Geraghty jumped or was pushed. Her defense is from the Alliance Defending Freedom, the conservative culture panic law group that has made several trips before SCOTUS, including Dobbs. They say Geraghty could not put aside her beliefs to "affirm untruths that harm children."

And yet she was okay with treating two actual children like this.

I do not and probably never will grasp the current argument that one cannot practice one's faith unless one is fully free to discriminate against people of whom you disapprove, and yet that argument surfaces again and again. 

But I do believe this-- it is not a teacher's job (nor, really, that of any adult) to tell a student who he or she is. We can nudge, offer encouragement and support, and create a safe place for them to try to figure it out. But the most basic part of treating a human being like a human being is to call them by the name they have for themselves. If you can't do that and if you insist that you must have the God-given right to make your disapproval of their identities clear to them in every interaction, then you do not belong in front of a classroom. 

Mystery Choice Coalition Opposes Harris-Walz

So this ran under a Fox logo yesterday:

Who might this pro-privatization group be? Turns out that Fox picked up a press release from the murky Invest In Education Coalition that gave both Democratic hopefuls and F in education.

We've dug into these guys before, and it's a twisty story. Let me try to pare it down to the essentials.

IIEC is a group that exists primarily to promote the Educational Choice for Children Act, a federal act that would create federal tax credit scholarships-vouchers-- much like the Educational Freedom stuff that Betsy DeVos tried hard to sell when she was in DC. At least, that's what they're all about currently.

But they have existed in a variety of forms and have either absorbed, taken over, or just cannibalized various other groups and names, including My Kid's Future and Edtaxcredit50, along with ties to Brighter Choice, Foundation for Education Reform and Accountability, and Foundation for Opportunity in Education. 

The group and its sometimes partner group, the Invest in Education Foundation, have been run by a small assortment of people, none of them educators. Lots of finance guys, some lawyers, a former legislator and lobbyist, one professional astro-turfer, most of whom have come and gone, often quickly. They have a youtube channel, a twitter handle, and, oddly, a Facebook page that is pretty regularly updated. They have been pumping out endorsements for the likes of Lauren Boebert and Carol Miller. And they are fully on the MAGA wagon for Trump-Vance. 

Someone, somewhere, has been giving them large piles of money to play with. Per the 990 forms, the Foundation took in gifts, grants and contributions totaling almost $3 million over five years; about half of that came in 2018. The low point was 2020 with $179K, but in 2022 they brought in $746K. Digging back, we a measly $155K in 2016, but almost a million in 2017.

If you want more, let try to tell some of their story in a more straightforward time than my previous attempt, with the caveat that this is all the result of a lot of playing with the wayback machine plus digging through Twitter and Facebook.

Digging into Twitter leads us to the original handle for the account, @OpportunityInEd, and there we learn that Invest In Ed had a president-- Tom Carroll.

Carroll's LinkedIn says that he presided over Invest in Education Coalition and Foundation from March 2012 to March 2019, calling it "A think tank and advocacy organization focused on school choice in NY and nationally." He also says he founded #EdTaxCredit50 Coalition in January of 2017, which focused on pushing a 50-state tax credit and "the expansion of 529 college savings accounts in December 2017 to allow withdrawals for private K-12 tuition, the biggest federal school-choice initiative ever adopted."

Prior to his time at IIE, Carroll spent 2002-2012 as president of the Foundation for Education Reform and Accountability, a New York State choice advocacy group, and before that, founder and chairman of the Brighter Choice Foundation, a charter network in and around Albany. Though he doesn't mention it, a listing for Carroll at the Center for Education Reform also says that post-FERA, he headed up the Foundation for Opportunity in Education, which fits.

Carroll's 2012 arrival at Invest in Education aligns with the group's certification by the IRS. The Foundation was granted tax exempt status in 2012, and the Coalition in 2013. Both list an Albany post office box as their address, both list Anthony De Nicola (the current chair) as the principal officer.

Thomas W. Carroll left IIE to get busy in the world of Catholic private schools; he just last summer announced he'll be stepping down as the superintendent of Boston archdiocesan schools at the end of this school year. He started there in April 2019.

And in 2021. we find Maureen Blum, in her single 990 appearance as Executive Director. Her LinkedIn page says she was ED with IIEC for six years (2016-2022), and she says that IIEC was a continuation of Coalition for Opportunity in Education "due to a name change of company." She started out with the Coalition for Opportunity in Education in 2012 and served as Director of Outreach till the apparent name change in January of 2016. And before that she was with Brighter Choice since 2003 as director of outreach. She was also the ED of #EdTaxCredit50/USA Workforce Coalition from April 2016 through January 2022. Also, from 2002 till the present, she has been CEO of Strategic Coalitions and Initiatives, LLC, specializing in the "development of grassroots and community infrastructure designed to support and implement--" you know what? She's a professional astroturfer.

Digging through the wayback machine, the earliest IIEC website version is from  the team page is from May 21, 2022.

Back then, IIEF had a president-- Luke Messer. Messer was the CEO of School Choice Indiana. He was also elected a state legislator (2003-2006) then moved on to a US Rep from 2013-2019 (in the district Mike Pence vacated to become Governor), where he was founder and co-chair of the Congressional School Choice Caucus. He made plenty of choicer friends in the days after Trump's election and DeVos's appointment.

By May of 2022, he was a partner at the law firm of Bose McKinney & Evans. At Invest in Education, he worked "every day to enact a $10 billion federal tax credit that would help give millions of children access to a high-quality school." By June of 2023, IIEF's address was the same as that of Bose McKinney & Evans, and the site was sporting logos for both a foundation and a coalition. One thing Messer doesn't list in his bio is his years as a registered lobbyist (2006-2012), right after he tried to privatize some Indiana highways. And he's been out there as the face of Invest in Education stumping for choice on all the usual fun places.

By December of 2023, Messner was gone from the page and IIEC had no address. In January 2024, they had a new logo, and the board was down to three members. 

Anthony J. de Nicola is the chair. He's also chairman of private equity firm Welsh, Carson, Anderson & Stowe, a New York private equity firm that specializes in tech and healthcare. He and his wife are big on philanthropic giving, including supporting the Catholic church.

Thomas E. McInerny is the secretary of the board. He's CEO at Bluff Point Associates, a private equity firm. He used to be a general partner at Welsh, Carson, Anderson & Stowe.

Robert H. Neihaus is treasurer. He's founder of GCP Capital Partners, a private equity firm.

In May of 2022, the board had three more members: Robert Flanigan, co-founder of Educate, LLC (where he's apparently just a "co-owner" since 2019) and former Merrill Lynch guy; Susan B. George of the Inner-City Scholarship Fund and the Catholic Education Advancement Office of the Archdiocese of New York; and Darla Romfo, president of the Children's Scholarship Fund, an outfit that provides "partial scholarships for low-income children in grades K-8 to go to private school," which sounds like voucher administration work.

Currently, those three, with de Nicola, are listed as the Foundation board. And IIEC finally has an address, now in Latham, NY.

One other name turned up on the 2022 and2020 990-- That's Michael J. Strianese, who was the CFO and COO for Invest in Ed, according to his LinkedIn from 2012-2018, then moved on to be CFO and COO for Northeast Charter Schools Network in Albany from 2019 on, so why he's on this 990 is unclear. Messer made $115,000 for his presidential duties; Strianese, $60K. On 2020, Strianese made $38,000.

There are lots of names of various backers and endorsers, but they are all backing and endorsing the federal voucher act, not the IIEC explicitly. There's no sign of actual staff (including whoever makes those Facebook posts almost every day and writes their press releases). 

I'm not saying that Fox could have easily googled their way to all of this before running with the IIEC press release, but a quick look at the website ought to make one suspicious that here's another organization that's not really an organization so much as a couple of folks with some contacts and deep pockets. 

It continues to amaze me how a couple of people can create an "organization" and with some slick web design and a good bank of email addresses that news organizations take seriously. But that is how the game is played these days, and so Harris and Walz get an F, from someone, for some reason. 

Chicago Schools' Terrible Awful No Good Very Bad AI Guide

It appears that Chicago Public Schools have tried to get ahead of the AI juggernaut with an AI guidebook, and it is... not good. It's an exemplar of the kind of wrong-headedness that is evident in so many educational leaders' thoughts about AI. 

I've read it so that you don't have to (unless you work for CPS, I guess-- sorry). But let's just sort of through, rather than hammer away at every of the twenty-some pages of silliness that sets out to provide 

"guidelines for ethical use, pedagogical strategies, and approved tools" for generative artificial intelligence and "integrating those tools ethically and responsibly."

There's a vision statement, jam packed with the sort of bureaucratic argle bargle that signals that we're a little fuzzy on what, exactly, the audience is supposed to be. Some of the radishes in this word salad:

pursuit of educational excellence and innovation, organizational operations, instructional core, drive community engagement, strategic adoption, enrich learning environments, success in a continually evolving technological world, steadfastly upholding, leveraging GenAI responsibly, enhance educational outcomes

Lordy.

We then jump into the AI portions of the guidebook, and things are looking bad right off the top.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) leverages computing power to mimic human cognitive functions such as problem-solving and decision-making.

Not really, no. Nor do we get a better explanation for generative AI in particular:

GenAI generates new content—including text, audio, code, images, or videos—based on vast amounts of “training” data, typically derived from the internet.

That's not really a useful answer, is it. Like saying "a piano is an instrument that produces notes"-- it's not wrong, but it completely omits the "how," and omitting the "how" from any discussion on GenAI is a terrible mistake, because if there's anything that is a) super important and b) widely misunderstood, it is how GenAI actually works. This is a link to three excellent explanations, but the very short answer regarding text is that GenAI strings together a series of probably next words. It does not "understand" anything in any human sense of the word. It is not magical, and it is not smart, and anyone who is going to mess with it must understand those things. Spoiler alert: at no point will this guide clarify any of that. Just "Magic box makes smarty content stuff! Wheee!"

Next is some guidance for staff in GenAI use. Start with what ought to already be a basic IT rule for staff--don't feed the AI any private information. 

Much of the guidance falls into one of two categories: 1) Can be done, but will be more time consuming than just generating materials your own damn self and 2) Cannot be done. 

For instance, CPS wants teachers to verify the tool's output. "These systems and their output require vigorous scrutiny and correction." Because the output might include "hallucinations" (aka wrong things the software just made up), the output "requires careful review." But if I'm going to have the computer kick out my lesson materials, and then I am going to spend a whole lot of time doing research and review of those materials, where am I saving time, and I wouldn't I be just as far ahead to put it together in the first place? 

Also, CPS wants teachers to "avoid using any GenAI outputs that might contain copyrighted material without clear ownership." You can do this, the guide says, by "examining the work for a copyright notice, considering the type of content and source (i.e. content issued by the US government is generally public), or referring to websites that store public domain works or the Copyright Database." This is bananas. You have no idea what the GenAI has trained on. GenAI companies have gone to great lengths (and increasing numbers of lawsuits) to avoid letting you know what the AI has trained on. The chance that any content generated by any AI is the result of training on or inclusion of copyrighted materials is somewhere around 99.999%, and the chances that you can confidently check an AI's output for copyrighted material is 00.0001%. 

CPS warns us that "all models reflect the biases in their training data," but they only warn about this insofar as it might perpetuate stereotypes, discrimination, or DEI problems. All worth considering, but it's also worth mentioning that there are a zillion other biases in the world ("Lincoln was not a great President" "Certain types of data are more valid than others") and those can also work their way in. CPS suggests

Conduct thorough reviews to ensure outputs are not only accurate, but also free of unintended biases and align with our educational goals. Verify and assess the source information that GenAI outputs are relying upon.

Again, the first takes a whole lot of time, and the second cannot be done. 

Always document the use of AI tools. I'm not sure what this accomplishes, exactly. Are teachers going to hand out worksheets marked "Generated by ChatGPT"? CPS says to make sure that "all GenAI engagements are traceable and accountable," which raises sort of an interesting question-- can GenAI results be traceable when they are not replicable? But throughout the guide, CPS is clear that they want "detailed records of when and how GenAI tools are used." If I were cynical, I might think this was a bit of a CYA paper trail for the district. But hey--maybe you can just have GenAI generate that detailed record for you.

How about academic integrity. CPS says that "students should submit work that is fundamentally their own," whatever that means. But also, "students should clearly identify any AI-generated content they have used in their assignments." This should work as well as telling students they are obligated to show where they have cut and pasted paragraphs from Wikipedia into their paper. 

Don't use AI to "create inappropriate or harmful content." But CPS does have a whole page of "positive GenAI use for students."

Use GenAI as a brainstorming partner. Synthesize a variety of opinions and propose compromise solutions (I think this one is meant to handle your group work). Use GenAI image creators to bring ideas to life. Overcome writer's block by suggesting a variety of ideas and writing prompts. Ask GenAI to propose unconventional solutions to problems. Use GenAI as an interactive tutor. Generate immediate feedback on first drafts of written assignments (but not, I guess, if that makes it not fundamentally your own). Oh, and use generative search engines like Perplexity as a research assistant (that would be the AI that is in trouble for scraping data without permission, which would seem to conflict with some of the ethical concerns CPS has).

CPS also has guidance for educators and staff. There are some restrictions suggested; for instance, Gemini and Copilot, two GenAI programs that pretty much every student has access to, should not be used by students under 18. 

As with any new student-facing technology, the introduction of GenAI tools invites educators to consider how GenAI can further the underlying goals of their activities and assignments instead of impeding them.

This is wrong in the way that much ed tech introduction is wrong. Teachers should not be asking how the technology can help-- they should be asking IF the technology can help and whether or not it should be allowed to help.

But, Lord help us, CPS even has some specific suggestions of how certain assignments would go without and with GenAI. 

Not all of these are terrible. The elementary science assignment in which students let the AI try to depict an animal and then figure out what the AI got wrong? Not bad at all. Some of them are pointless. The elementary social studies assignment in which students role play as leaders and answer questions--why does the teacher need an AI to generate questions? And how much magical thinking is behind the notion that having AI design interventions for individual students is better than having the teacher do it?

Some are short-circuiting education itself. Like the science assignments that suggest that, instead of having students run experiments, just have the AI run "virtual" experiments and tell the students how they went. Not how to have students learn science (but it is how to justify cutting labs and lab supplies out of budgets). 

And some are just bananas. Have the AI role play a character in a book, or retell the story from that character's point of view? I have seen nothing to indicate that an AI is any way capable of faithfully doing that work (at best, it will steal from human-completed versions of that assignment). 

There is a link to a list of 851 CPS-approved GenAI products, and if someone at the office has extensively vetted each and every one of those, they deserve a huge raise. 

This is just a mess. The guidebook repeatedly insists that students and teachers use AI ethically, but there is little evidence that the folks behind this have wrestled with many of the deep and difficult ethical questions behind generative AI. How much is too much? How do we reckon AI programs' unauthorized and undisclosed use of people's work for "training"? And while CPS wants teachers to monitor how and how much students use AI, they have no more thoughts than anyone else about how teachers are supposed to do that.

Teachers do need some help dealing with the AI revolution. This is not that. Look online for some thoughtful and useful guides (like this one). The best thing I can say about it is that it smells like the sort of thing that arrives in teacher mailboxes from the front office which they then ignore. This should be one of the prettiest, slickest items in many circular files.

How Khan Academy (And Others) Fudged Their Research

Computer tutoring is the hot thing, and the big players have all sorts of sexy research numbers to back them up. Are the numbers bunk? They sure are. 

I'll warn you--this is spun from an article by Laurence Holt, a guy who has worked with NewSchools Venture Fund, Amplify, and, currently, XQ. But most of my readers don't also read Education Next, where the piece appeared in April. But his point is too important to ignore. 

Thanks to COVID, computer-delivered instruction has experienced a boost, from microschool to catch-up interventions. Programs include Khan Academy, i-Ready, Dreambox--but here's the question--

Do they work? In August 2022, three researchers at Khan Academy, a popular math practice website, published the results of a massive, 99-district study of students. It showed an effect size of 0.26 standard deviations (SD)—equivalent to several months of additional schooling—for students who used the program as recommended.

A 2016 Harvard study of DreamBox, a competing mathematics platform, though without the benefit of Sal Khan’s satin voiceover, found an effect size of 0.20 SD for students who used the program as recommended. A 2019 study of i-Ready, a similar program, reported an effect size in math of 0.22 SD—again for students who used the program as recommended. And in 2023 IXL, yet another online mathematics program, reported an effect size of 0.14 SD for students who used the program as designed.

Did you notice a key phrase?

"For students who used the program as recommended."

So how many students is that. Well, Holt checked the footnotes on the Khan Academy study and found the answer--

4.7%

Not a typo. The study threw out over 95% of the results. Holt says that the other programs report similar numbers. 

I suppose the takeaway could be that folks should be trying harder to follow the program as recommended. Of course, it could also be that students who rea motivated to follow the program as recommended are the most ready-to-learn ones. 

But if you hand me a tool that has been made so difficult or unappealing to use that 95% of the "users" say, "No, thanks," I'm going to blame your tool design. 

It's a problem eerily similar to that of ed tech itself, where the pitch to teachers is so often, "If you just change what you do and how you try to do it, this tool will be awesome." When the main problem with your piece of education technology is that it's not designed in such a way that your end users find it actually useful, that is on you. 

In the meantime, schools might want to be a little more careful about how they select these programs. Ed tech companies are interested in marketing, in selling units, and if they have to massage the data to do it--well, the free market. As I've said many times before, the free market does not foster superior quality; the free market fosters superior marketing. And nothing markets in the ed sector like Scientific Evidence Supported by Hard Data.

Always check the data. Always. 

Houston and the End of an Era

Maybe you missed it because VP choices and the assassination attempt sucked up so much oxygen, or maybe you are not a fan of the author, but in mid-July Robert Pondiscio put up a piece about the Houston school takeover, and you should read it.

In "The Last Hurrah," Pondiscio frames the Mike Miles takeover as the last gasp of the big urban takeover model of reform, a model, he suggests, never really worked. 

There are two things that have always set Pondiscio (AEI Fellow and former Fordham guy) apart from the rest of the reformster crowd-- five years spent in an actual classroom, and real experience in journalism. Like his book about Success Academy, this piece clearly reflects a bunch of legwork and some level reportage that will annoy people on all sides.

There's history here. Pondiscio locates Houston in particular and Texas in general as the "Bethlehem" of ed reform. Teach for America. The Texas Miracle that Bush II used to sell No Child Left Behind. Rod Paige. The first Broad Prize for Urban Education, given in 2002, went to Houston. Then in 2013, Houston won it again. Then they stopped handing it out because the judges couldn't find a worthy district. 

That, Pondiscio shows, was reflective of a "gloomy pattern" in the world of "wholesale systemic reform." He looks back at the big marquee names in the field (Michelle Rhee, Joel Klein, et al) and notes that "promising initial gains prove evanescent or quickly plateau" and years later have vanished.

His profile of Mike Miles emphasizes the reformster's "hard-charging" super-self-confident attitude, including the belief that he will succeed where all these others have failed because they just didn't reform hard enough. He also notes, at length, and throughout the piece, the many, many, many objections to Miles both in terms of substance and style.

In particular Pondiscio notes Miles's military approach to management and the micro-management that comes with it. There's a goal here to grab the less capable teachers and force them into a very specific model that, Miles believes, will get results. 

The problem with totalitarian-style management is, as always, that if what the boss says goes and what the worker bees do is comply, then what the boss says had better be right, all the time, and Pondiscio points to some Mile ideas that are "more speculative and stand on shakier empirical ground." And Pondiscio is not sugar-coating the pushback:

A group calling itself Community Voices for Public Education organized protests, petitions, and testimonials from parents and teachers decrying what they saw as the “tired old script from 2012,” and asserting that NES was leaving children “overwhelmed, crying, and complaining.”

This year, “they’re not relating to us at all,” said one student. “This is not fun,” said another. “I feel like I’m in prison.” A former Houston ISD principal said Miles is instilling a “culture of fear.” The district’s largest teachers union mounted a picket to protest the reforms. At a September board meeting, members of the audience set alarms on their phones to go off every four minutes to mock the NES requirement that teachers stop every four minutes to do a multiple response strategy, which conjured up images of timers ringing on a fast-food deep fryer to goad a Pavlovian response from low-skill McTeachers. Nor did it help that the takeover was marked by what one former Houston ISD board member described as a series of unforced errors. Early on, district-made curriculum units were riddled with errors, and poor communications led to national news stories erroneously claiming that Miles was turning school libraries into detention centers for misbehaving students.

For Pondiscio, Miles's problems are a sign of how the context for full-scale reform has changed. "Ed reform embodied youthful energy and do-gooder earnestness" he says, having elsewhere noted more than once that Miles is--well, he's not young (he's my age). Back in the day, reformsters like Rhee were on magazine covers, and Waiting for Superman was a hot ticket, even shown at the Democratic Convention. 

As for Miles himself and his reaction to the criticism of his work-- "I'm old and I don't care."

It's not quite that simple, and Pondiscio crams a lot of nuance into a small space. But he notes that the clock is ticking for Miles, for a variety of reasons, including the super-voucher love of Governor Abbott, Miles's main patron. In one sentence, Pondiscio captures the current drift of reformsterism:

Among many red state Republicans, who often view traditional public schools as irredeemable cauldrons of “woke” indoctrination, ESAs have become the preferred remedy for public education.

For reformsters, particularly the reformsters of the past twenty years, the article may sting with its elegy for a style of reform whose time has passed, and a lack of optimism for Miles's prospect for success in Houston. For defenders of public education, there will be irritation with what Pondiscio has left out: details like how Miles did in Dallas, and details in the presented history that invite debate, particularly in the pictures from reformy days gone by. Regular readers of this space will have repeated urges to say, "Hey, yeah, but, wait--", including a longer litany of Miles's missteps.

But Houston's takeover and the history of big urban school takeovers would require a book. What Pondiscio has condensed into a tiny space shows many serious flaws in the Houston takeover, put in the context of a change in the reformy world. The piece suggests that Miles is doomed to fail, not just because of his plan's faults, but because it is a reform model that has always failed, and if it had ever had a time at all, that time has passed. 

Pondiscio's observation is that support and patience for Houston-style reforms has gone. 

If parents, politicians, philanthropists, and the news media have grown impatient with urban public-school reform, not even waiting for measurable outcomes before pronouncing the entire enterprise a failure—too disruptive, too disrespectful of teachers, too stressful for children—who is the constituency left for big-city reform? Who is left to champion change for the vast majority of children who, even in an emerging era of increasing choice, are likely to remain in urban public schools and struggle to read or do math at a reasonable standard, limiting their future opportunities and life prospects?

There are unexamined questions here--how is it that big city reform lost all of its supposed constituencies? And is it possible to champion change for those students without championing the Superstar CEO Takeover model for improving big city schools?  

Maybe being a) powerful and b) sure that you're right is not the recipe for successful leadership, and maybe that is doubly true when that particular management model has never produced any significant, lasting success. Maybe this idea has lost support because it's a bad idea. And maybe putting a hard-charging high-powered person in control of a school district is not the only way to lift up those students who are falling behind. Maybe this was a tree that was never going to bear fruit, and reform fans should have been cultivating something else entirely.

It's a piece that deserves some attention and discussion, well-crafted, with something for everyone to object to. It's an interesting picture of what's going on in Houston combined with an encapsuled history of one slice of reformster history. You may find plenty to jeer, but I recommend reading it anyway.