FL: Waving the Sheep's Clothing

School Boards for Academic Excellence is a far-right organization was launched to "challenge woke bureaucracy." Yet they are brandishing their sheep's clothing, trying hard to look neutral and non-partisan. So why not wave their right wing flag proudly. I have a story from Duval County in Florida that is an excellent illustration of why these groups pretend to be something other than what they are.

SBAE's right wing credentials are unquestionable. Their leadership team combines experience from the State Policy Network, assorted Koch groups, the John Locke Foundation, the Heartland Institute, the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity, the Independent Woman's Foundation, and more of that flavor. Their leadership team has previous experience lobbying against the ACA, attacking unions, and launching "classical" charter schools. And they have teamed up with Jordan Adams, a Hillsdale College product who has tried to make a dent in the business of dewokifying school curriculum. (If you want more details, I've written about the group here and here.)

It's a culture panic, Moms for Liberty-style, public school dismantling group. 

So why pretend to be anything else? Why not wave the MAGA hat boldly about?

The Duval County school board in Florida was one of the boards targeted by Governor Ron "Florida is a free state for people who agree with me" DeSantis, and the right has been successful in turning the board over. And the new right-wing majority would like to go to the SBAE conference in January, a conference co-sponsored by the Florida Coalition of Conservative School Board Members, a group with actual direct ties to Moms for Liberty. Oklahoma's Ultra-MAGA Ryan Walters and Florida's DeSantis sidekick Manny Diaz will be speakers.

There were members of the public that were educated enough to know what SBAE represents--an attempt to hammer a far right agenda into local school districts.

But board members just waved the sheep clothing. 

"This event is no different than any other non-partisan organization like FSBA, (which the board is attending this week) or the Council of Great City Schools conference which board members attended In October. It is simply another opportunity for our board to receive professional development to better serve the students of DCPS," Vice-Chair April Carney told Action News JAX, apparently with a straight face. JAX also copied some of the neutral language from the SBAE website. 

Meanwhile, First Coast News reached out to SBAE executive director David Hoyt to ask about the claims the group was hyperpartisan. “We are a truly nonpartisan group,” Hoyt said. Reporter Regina Di Gregorio asked about comments made and the fact that "conservative" is right there in the co-sponsors' title. “Conservatism is a set of values, it’s an ideology, but partisanship is a political party," Hoyt said. "So, I think there’s an important distinction to be made there," responded Hoyt. So, you see, ideologues can still be non-partisan. To her credit, at the end of her report, Di Gregorio wears an expression that says, "Yes, I know that's a bunch of baloney."

So why put on the sheep's clothing. Because it provides cover for folks who want to use super conservative activist services without looking like wingnuts. Because sometimes the press will not bother to look under your costume to see what's hiding there. Because it gives you something to say when people who have seen under the costume speak up. Because it lets the ideologues that want to ally themselves with you some political cover so they don't have to deal with too many of those pesky people who like representative democracy and public schools. 

Duval has its issues, like other districts, with financial problems and hiring challenges, so it will be great for the conservative board majority to go learn about how to manage the media and do some lobbying for your favorite culture panic issues. I'm sure that will help.

The lesson here is to pay attention and do your homework, not just for yourself but for all the other folks (including, in some markets, the media) who haven't. That's the only way to be sure you don't get surprised by a sheep with really sharp teeth. 

No, The Sliding Scale Won't Work For Vouchers

Thomas Arnett, senior fellow at the Christensen Institue, has an idea about how to make vouchers work better. It won't work. But watch how he almost gets it, and it's an instructive failure.

The Christensen Institute is all about the beauty of Disruptive Innovation, that whole process of kicking things over so you can Get Shit Done beloved by Silicon Valley dudes (many of whom have moved on from disrupting things to offering piles of monetary tribute to new the new President so that maybe he won't disrupt them). So they've been fans of the disruptive innovation of dismantling public education and innovatively selling off the pieces.

In "Bending the Arc od Innovation To Benefit All Students," Arnett is responding to a discussion between Derrell Bradford and Mike Petrilli about whether or not wealthy families should benefit from vouchers. Bradford said sure, for the practical reason that wealthy folks make good and powerful allies when you're trying to sell a policy to legislators (the only people to whom voucher policies are ever sold). Petrilli said that states should target lower income folks in the name of fiscal responsibility. 

But what Arnett is interested in is the idea, mentioned in passing, that vouchers could be based on a sliding scale. Arnett loves him some ESA vouchers, invoking the tired cliche of the 100-year-old outmoded school model. Reform stuff, he says, fails because it's incremental when what's needed is massive transformation--"new models of schooling outside established value networks." Yes, if we could just get everyone to drop their existing values and replace them with my existing values, the world would be a swell place.

ESAs, he thinks, could provide that clean break, based as they are on the model of handing people a stack of money and saying, "Okay, go find some education for your kid somewhere, somehow." He acknowledges that some ESA recipients will just gravitate back to the old ways, but maybe some would come up with cool new innovation. Unfortunately, his cited examples are microschools and hybrid programs, which are neither new nor innovative.

He now pauses to explain disruptive innovation, models that start "serving the fringes of a sector but eventually transform it." He cites examples Netflix and Amazon and Apple, all of which serve as excellent reminders that we are really talking about free market stuff, and that the free market will never ever display a commitment to providing quality service to all possible customers, and on that count alone, the free market is not qualified to take over societal services like education or health care.

But what about disruptive innovation in education? What would that look like?

They could look like microschools across a metro area forming a network that allows them to collectively offer experiences like team sports, band, theater, and school dances. They might be school sites that work like shopping malls, where independent course providers, tutoring centers, coding camps, makerspaces, and companies offering internships are all co-located to make it easy for students and families to assemble highly customized schooling experiences. Or imagine a single microschool expanding into a large franchise of schools across the country, thereby achieving the scale needed to systemize a model for helping any student—regardless of background—ace elite college admissions.

So, it looks like the free market. You know-- the market where everyone is free to buy either a brand new Lexus or a heavily used 2006 Kia. 

Now, Arnett is partway there with me on this. The disruption he cites, he notes, run on a motivation to pursue upscale customers who will pay a higher premium for a higher quality product.

In most markets, the more demanding customer tiers will pay a premium for higher-quality products.

Almost there...

But in education, there’s a problem with this pattern. Education’s “most demanding customers”—those with greater needs and more challenging circumstances—are often not those who can afford to pay higher prices for improved services.

Like students with special needs. If ESA policies "don't offer a premium" to those who handle these demanding students, the market will just walk on by, in search of more profitable business cases.  

That is as close as he's going approach Getting It. His idea is to make serving the more expensive-to-serve students, aka those with special needs, those from lower-income families, those that are more challenging. Because 

Without a mechanism that rewards schools for serving students with greater needs, we risk seeing a generation of new schooling models that only cater to students and families with inherent advantages. We’ll likely get models that are ever expanding the breadth, flexibility, and rigor of what they offer middle- and upper-income families while never tackling the expensive circumstances that make them hard for many lower-income students and families to take advantage of.

Which is, of course, exactly what we've got. And we don't have it, as he suggests, because we just stumbled into it by accident. In state after state, voucher laws have treated as sacrosanct the private school's right to operate without any interference or oversight by the state. That means that A) better private schools keep their right to discriminate as they wish for whatever reason and B) fly-by-night subprime pop-ups that exist only to cash in on vouchers can do a half-assed job without the state telling them to shape up ("market forces" will take care of them, we are promised). Exactly what he described is pretty much what we've got (though not much expanding of middle- and upper-income awesome offerings is happening), and we've got it on purpose.

The sliding scale that he proposes, with "market signals" that "motivate" providers by "tying higher funding to the ability to effectively serve students with higher needs" would require a couple of things. One is oversight and accountability (how else would we know who was effectively serving those students), and the other is money. And there's only one place to get the money, and that's from the people who have it. 

And there's the heart of his problem. We have plenty of hints about how people who have money feel about the government taking that money to better serve Other People's Children-- they don't much like it. That redistribution of wealth has been problematic since at least Brown v Board came down. The whole point for a whole bunch of school voucher supporters is to get rid of a system that requires them to pay to educate Those Peoples' Children and replace it with a system in which everyone's education is their own problem. 

Arnett is describing an education social safety net, and that's exactly what so many of his disruptive friends hate about the system we've got. He may want to see the "arc of innovation" bend in this direction, but many of his reformy colleagues would rather snap that arc into pieces before it bends an inch further. 

The School of the Future

It will be seamless and swift. AI will develop syllabi and lesson plans. AI will design and assign all the work to be completed. Then AI will complete all the assignments and send them to AI for assessment. (AI can then send personalized assignments to address the AI's weak areas, but it probably won't have to).

All the teachers will be fired. All the students will stay home. Building repairs will be unnecessary as long as the computer hub at its heart is preserved.

Leaders and Ed Tech companies will survey the empty building, buzzing with electricity whizzing up and down the wiring in the hollow walls, and congratulate themselves on its modern efficiency.

The school year will last about a half an hour, depending on how many AI are enrolled. 

You can say that this is extreme hyperbole, that of course things will never progress this far. My question is then, where will the line be drawn? At what point will Important People step up and say, "This has gone far enough." 

At what point will Important People say that we can't remove any more human element from the process.

Maybe at this point we're just too overwhelmed by the gee whizzakers of it all, like the guy who showed up on Bluesky "So excited to publicly launch All Day TA," a teaching assistant that would work 24/7 and coincidentally free a college from having to hire one more live human. 

Maybe some of us are just so amazed that we aren't ready to ask questions like "What problem is this supposed to solve" or "Does it actually solve that problem" or even "Are the costs worth the results?" 

I can remember the days decades ago when my students discovered personal computers and printers. They were so amazed that they could print their work in any font in any size in any color that they absolutely never stopped to ask if printing their paper in, say, 8 point French Scrip rendered in yellow ink, might not be a great choice. 

That's the initial moment of technological exuberance--so excited you can do it that you don't stop to ask if you should.

For the current AI irrational exuberance, add-- so excited at what you've been promised you can do that you don't stop to check if you can really do it.

As with the pandemic, we are being challenged to think about what, exactly, we think the point of education and schools is supposed to be and make deliberate choices to build schools around that vision and not some higgledy piggledy attempt to incorporate every shiny thing that attracts our attention, whether it furthers the actual purpose of school or not (and whether it can deliver its promised product or not).

Too many AI-in-education seem to think that the whole purpose of school is to produce and assess school work, resulting in grades that lead to a credential, and if you think the purpose of school is to crank out these various products, then sure--computerizing these processes makes perfect sense.

But if you think the purpose of education is something like helping each individual human being become their best self, to be fully themselves, to grasp what it means to be fully human in the world-- well, then, we need at a minimum to remember that it is AI, and not the humans in the loop, that is the tool.  

ICYMI: 10 Shopping Days Left Edition (12/15)

Well, maybe just nine. What are you doing sitting there looking at your screen?? You have responsibilities as a consumer to go consume stuff. Go on. 

We've got newbies around here, so let me review the idea behind this weekly digest. I have a platform--not a huge one, but a platform--only because people once upon a time boosted my signal. Folks like Anthony Cody and Nancy Flanagan and Jennifer Berkshire and especially Diane Ravitch, plus lots of other folks, too. I started out not really knowing what I was doing other than venting a great deal of frustration. I was at the time a long-standing classroom teacher in a small town with bot a single direction to the wider world of education policy and practices, but people found what I wrote useful at times and shared it and amplified it and here I am, still at it.

I'm here with more than three readers because folks helped boost my signal, and so I feel a powerful obligation to boost other signals. Yes, I also always have an urge in life to point at interesting things and say, "Look at that!" Hence the teaching career. But the one thing we can all do is boost the signals of people who are saying things that are important, useful, helpful, recognizable as True. So I have a blogroll on the side column of my regular blog, and I have this weekly digest that lets me say, "Look at all these smart people saying smart things. Maybe you missed it, but I don't think you should." 

So when you see something here that speaks to you, go to the original source and share it on your social mediums. Boost that signal. We have an extraordinary infrastructure in place for spreading ideas and words, even if it is a pipeline that delivers toxic waste as easily as lifegiving water. But when I think of the kind of trouble it took for someone like Thomas Paine to get his word out in a country just a smidgeon the size of ours today, I think how lucky we are to be alive right now, and how we have such a powerful chance to spread whatever good words we see.

So do that. Some of the people who appear here don't really need my boost--they have strong audiences of their own. That's okay-- an expanding audience is always a good thing, and this is one of the ways we move forward in 2025--by amplifying what is good and right. So join me every Sunday, and share what you find that speaks to you. 

So here we go.

Who’s afraid of a public library?

Colbert King in the Washington Post commenting on the loss of one more library to culture panic actors.

Billionaire Ideas: Andrew, Bill and Elon

Speaking of libraries, Nancy Flanagan looks at how the very wealthy used to spend their money.

Why being forced to precisely follow a curriculum harms teachers and students

Yeah, you already know why, but Cara Elizabeth Furman in The Conversation really makes it clear. Like this:

The term “fidelity” comes from the sciences and refers to the precise execution of a protocol in an experiment to ensure results are reliable. However, a classroom is not a lab, and students are not experiments.

Sixth period horseback riding lessons

Meg White looks at the state of education in Arkansas, and it's not pretty. But it does come with riding lessons.

What Should We Be Watching For if Linda Mahon Is Confirmed as Education Secretary?

Jan Resseger looks at the possible treats we might get under McMahan's leadership.

Secretary Cardona Was a Huge Disappointment

If you read me, you probably already read Diane Ravitch regularly, but I don't want you to miss this one. A reminder of how much Joe Biden disappointed us in education, and the tale of how NPE dug up evidence of costly charter shenanigans, and the ed department just waved it on by.

Measure Once, Cut Twice...or Something

Andrew Ordover writes a thoughtful post about the nature of assessment and the ways we have been led into the weeds on the subject.

Is calculus an addiction that college admissions officers can’t shake?

At Hechinger Report, Jill Barshay looks at debate over calculus and the question of whether or not there's reason to cram it into high school senior's heads and/or transcripts.

Where Have All the Plumbers Gone (long time passing)?

John Merrow is a long-time top education reporter, now sort of retired. He addresses one of my favorite issues--the importance of blue-collar vocational training in a world that keeps telling students they must go to college.

An Open Letter to the Listeners

Writer, scholar and teacher Jose Luis Vilson writes about the power of listening. While you're going to look at this, you should be subscribing to his blog.

12 Years and 60 Minutes Later

Audrey Watters watched 60 Minutes fawn over Sal Khan, and she hasn't forgotten when they previously fawned over his predictions about changing the face of education-- twelve years ago. Not to mention all the crap in between.

How Assessment and Data are Used to Stigmatize Children as Failing

Nancy Bailey on some standardized assessments that collect data, label students, and generate income--but not much else of use.

Yule Time Education Policy News from the Volunteer State

Nobody does better at capturing the grit and detail of Tennessee education shenanigans than TC Weber, and the beauty of it is that even if you aren't in Tennessee, you can see and recognize the patterns of how these things work. Like, say, a school board that fails to hold its superintendent's feet to the heating grate, let alone the fire...

To the Victors Go the Spoils, Part III: School Vouchers

Nate Bowling continues a post-election series with a look at school vouchers, and what they mean to those who already have privilege.

Will The Real Wackadoodle Please Stand Up.

How messed up are you when even a Moms for Liberty chapter says you are in the wrong. In Florida, a Conservative School Board Association member got caught at the M4L summit talking smack about everyone in the district where she sits on the board. Sue Kingery Woltanski has the run down on Jessie Thompson.

Dubuque private school raises tuition by 58% after voucher expansion

Once again, the advent of vouchers is treated like a windfall by private schools who just jack up prices. Reported by Zachary Oren Smith for the Iowa Starting Line.

Behind the Curtain: The Boston Foundation Is Underwriting that “Science of Reading” Lawsuit

Maurice Cunningham does the work the Globe won't. Who's actually bankrolling that Science of Reading lawsuit.

Pedagogy of the Depressed

I did talk about this post from Benjamin Riley already this week, but it is too hilarious/sad to miss. A quick scan of some of the AI for education "training" out there.

The Pennsylvania Society is Decadent and Depraved

What do rich folks like Jeff Yass do in Pennsylvania to figure out how they're going to handle their lessers? Turns out there's a whole organization for that. Lance Haver reports for the Philadelphia Hall Monitor.

How Christian extremists are co-opting the book of Esther

Not strictly about education, but an interesting explication of one thread of far-right christinism that's on the march these days.

Don't Bite the Hand That Feeds You

Jess Piper looks at some of the myths on the left about rural Americans, and boy do I feel her. 

At Bucks County Beacon this week I added to the copious literature on the subject of What Trump Might Mean for Education.

At Forbes.com I wrote about Ohio's place in the march on cell phones.

I also wrote about the federal voucher bill and, frankly, am a bit concerned to see low readership numbers on the piece, not on my own account, but because this bill could turn out to be a major issue, and I'm afraid people aren't paying attention to just how bad it could be. 

If you are moving over to Bluesky, you can find me there at @palan57.bsky.social

And of course, subscribe to my newsletter to get everything I crank out in an easy-to-put-off-till-later email form. Free now and free forever.

Stock Trading Naughtiness With Stride

You may have heard about Senator Markwayne Mullin lately because he's been a big ole MAGA cheerleader for unqualified cabinet nominee Pete Hegseth and indeed the whole misbegotten cabinet. 

But he's also in the news for some stock trading shenanigans, specifically shenanigans involving Strife (formerly K-12) the 800 pound gorilla of cyber-charter schooling. Mullin sits on the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, so trading involving stock in an education firm smells a little fishy. 

Still, the whole scene is on brand for Stride, which was never so much about education as it is about profiteering. Stride's history isn't nearly as well known as it deserves to be; let me pick some details from my own coverage.

It was founded in 2000 by Ron Packard, former banker and Mckinsey consultant. One of its first big investors was Michal Milken. That investment came a decade after he pled guilty to six felonies in the “biggest fraud case in the securities industry” ending his reign as the “junk bond king.” Milken was sentenced to ten years, served two, and was barred from ever securities investment. In 1996, he had established Knowledge Universe, an organization he created with his brother Lowell and Larry Elison, who both kicked in money for K12.

K12 was frequently in the news for one shady deal after another. Packard was himself sued for misleading investors with overly positive public statements, and then selling 43% of his own K12 stock ahead of a bad news-fueled stock dip. Shortly thereafter, in 2014, he stepped down from leading K12. 

The New York Times had quoted Packard as calling lobbying a “core competency” of the company, and the company has spread plenty of money around doing just that. And despite all its troubles, Stride is still beloved on Wall Street for its ability to make money.

So maybe it's no surprise that a big (quiet) investor in Stride is the investment behemoth Blackrock. BlackRock is the largest money management company in the world, founded and led by Larry Fink. Larry's brother Steve is on the Stride board. Steve was also, starting in 1984, Michael Milken's next door neighbor and "trusted confidant." It was 1988 when Larry Fink started BlackRock under the umbrella of Steve Schwarzman’s Blackstone Group. In 2000, Steve Fink was heading up Nextera, part of Milken’s Knowledge Universe web. Additionally, according to a 2011 Seattle Times article, Milken graduated from the same public high school as Larry Fink.

In short, Stride has always been about getting investors a return for their money, and not so much about providing an actual education to students.

So in that setting, how unexpected can it be that a senator might decide to dip in for a little insider trading. This is all just part and parcel of unleashing market forced in a human service sector. Just another day with the invisible suggesting that folks grease its invisible palm. 

GA: Voucher Program Blowing Up Real Fast

Boom! Georgia's taxpayer-funded school voucher program turns out to be not so much "generous" as "huge." And all because reading is hard.

Georgia passed a law to create vouchers and a whole government agency to watch over them. Rural Republicans fought back hard, but in the end it was signed into law last March. 

It turns out that a whole lot of people either didn't read the words in the law, or they just misrepresented them to other folks. The widespread belief was that, as many news reports put it, the education savings account style vouchers were for "students at low-performing schools who want to transfer to private schools." 

Any student who attended a school in the lowest 25% of schools were going to get an ESA taxpayer-funded stack of money that they could spend on whatever edu-thing they wished. 

Only it turns out that when the Georgia Education Savings Authority went to set up the rules for the Georgia Promise voucher, they read the actual language of the bill, and what it says right there in line 
344 in the eligibility requirements is:

The student resides in the attendance zone of a public school that is included on the list of public schools provided for in Code Section 20-2B-29

See the difference? Not just attending the low-achieving school, but in the attendance zone for that school. So if an elementary school is on the naughty list, every middle and high school student who lives in that attendance zone is also eligible for a taxpayer-funded voucher.

The Associated Press is reporting this as if the GESA changed something. "Georgia makes many more students than expected eligible for school vouchers" says the headline. Like GESA pulled a fast one, or something was "changed." But the only fast one pulled here is by the people who knew exactly what the law said and let stand (or promoted) the idea that only those at low-scoring schools were eligible.

But here's House GOP Speaker Pro Temp Jan Jones saying that the "authority's interpretation" needs to be reined in. This, she says, is not what she advocated for. "That wasn't my understanding," she told the AP.

The House Education Committee chair, Republican Representative Chris Erwin has also announced that this needs to be fixed. “The scholarships are specifically designed for children in an individual school that meets the eligibility requirements, and are not intended to be provided to every student in a district where the qualifying school is located,” Erwin wrote in a text to the AP.

Look, I agree with the goal of reducing voucher damage to the school system of the state, and I'm even inclined to believe their current statements of protest, but come on, lawmakers-- the language is right there in the bill in plain English. Did nobody read it? Did everyone just accept the word of whatever lobbyist pushed the bill? 

The law is set up to fund about 22,000 vouchers. The AP figures that about 400,000 students are eligible.

I retired after 39 years in the classroom as an English teacher, so it always saddens when people just don't bother to read (it has been a long year), and heaven knows that legislative bills are especially hard to wade through, but that's part of a legislator's job (or at least that of their staff). Georgia is now facing the result of some combination of ineptitude and turpitude. We'll see if they get anything changed in the next session. 

AI in Ed: The Unanswered Question

It is just absolutely positively necessary to get AI into education. I know this because on social media and in my email, people tell me this dozens of times every day. 

Just two examples. UCLA is excited to announce that a comparative literature course next semester will be "built around" UCLA's Kudu artificial intelligence platform. Meanwhile, Philadelphia schools and the University of Pennsylvania are teaming up to make Philadelphia a national AI in education model. The AI-in-education list goes on and on, and there are soooo many questions. Ethical questions. Questions about the actual capabilities of AI? Questions of resource use?

But here's the question I wish more --well, all, actually-- of these folks would ask.

What problem does it solve?

This is the oldest ed tech problem of them all, an issue that every teacher has encountered-- someone introduces a new piece of tech starting from the premise, "We must use this. Now let's figure out how." This often leads to the next step of, "If you just change your whole conception of your job, then this tech will be really useful. Will it get the job done better? Hey, shut up." 

This whole process is why so many, many, many, many pieces of ed tech ended up gathering dust, as well as birthing painfully useless sales pitchery masquerading as professional development. And when it comes to terrible PD, AI is right on top of things (see this excellent taxonomy of AI educourses, courtesy of Benjamin Riley)

So all AI adoption should start with that question.

What problem is this supposed to solve? 

Only after we answer that question can we ask the next important question, which is, will it actually solve the problem? Followed closely by asking what other problems it will create.

Sometimes there's a real answer. It turns out that once you dig through the inflated verbiage of the UCLA piece, what's really happening is that AI is whipping up a textbook for the course, using the professors notes and materials from previous iterations of the course. So the problem being solved is "I wish I had a text for this course." Time will tell whether having to meticulously check all of the AI's work for accuracy is less time consuming than just writing the text herself.

[UPdate: Nope, it's more than the text. It's also the assignments and the TA work. What problem can this possibly solve other than "The professor does not know how to do their job" or "The professor thinks work is way too hard." Shame on UCLA.]

On the other hand, Philadelphia's AI solution seems to be aimed at no problem at all. Says dean of Penn's education grad school, Katherine O. Strunk:

Our goal is to leverage AI to foster creativity and critical thinking among students and develop policies to ensure this technology is used effectively and responsibly – while preparing both educators and students for a future where AI and technology will play increasingly central roles.

See, that's a pretty goal, but what's the problem we're solving here. Was it not possible to foster creativity and critical thinking prior to AI? Is the rest of the goal solving the problem of "We have a big fear of missing out"?

Assuaging FOMO is certainly one of the major problems that AI adoption is meant to address. The AI sector makes some huge and shiny predictions, including some that show a fundamental misunderstanding of how education works for real humans (looking at you, Sal Khan and your AI-simulated book characters). Some folks in education leadership are just deathly afraid of being left behind and so default to that old ed tech standard-- "Adopt it now and we'll figure out what we can do with it later."

So if someone in your organization is hollering that you need to pull in this AI large language model Right Now, keep asking that question--

What problem will it help solve?

Acceptable answers do not include: 

* Look at this thing an AI made! Isn't it cool! Shiny!

* I read about a school in West Egg that did some really cool AI thing.

* We could [insert things that you should already be doing].

* I figured once you got your hands on it, you could come up with some ideas.

* We're bringing in someone to do 90 minutes of training that will answer all your questions.

* Just shut up and do it.

The following answers are also not acceptable, but they probably won't be spoken aloud:

* We are going to replace humans and save money.

* It will make it easier to dump work on you that other people don't want to do.

Acceptable answers include:

* We could save time in Task X

* We could do a better job of teaching Content Q and/or Skill Y

Mind you, the proposed AI may still flunk when you move on to the "Can it actually do this, really," but if you don't really know what you want it to do, it's senseless to debate whether or not it can do that.

There's some debate raging currently in the world of AI stuff, and as usual Benjamin Riley has it laid out pretty clearly here. But much of it is set around the questions "Is AI fake" and "Does AI suck," and in the classroom, both of those questions are secondary importance to "What problem is AI supposed to help solve here?" If the person pushing AI can't answer that question, there really isn't any reason to continue the conversation.