Trump Ends "Book Ban Hoax"

Amidst all the other slashing and burning of the new regime, we find a press release from the U.S. Department of Education, "U.S. Department of Education Ends Biden’s Book Ban Hoax." Sure.

There are several things going on here, all worth noting.

On the surface, the action is mostly about dismissing 11 complaints filed with the Ed Department Office for Civil Rights, rejecting the notion that anyone can sue over the removal of certain books. If you're gay and your school district decides to eliminate every trace of other gay people from the district, it's an indefensible and hostile act, but is it a violation of your civil rights? That may be open to debate, but it barely scratches the surface of what's going on here.

The press release opens with reference to "so-called 'book bans'" underlining one of the banner points which is that it's not really a ban because you can probably buy the book somewhere if you really want to, and unless every copy of the book that exists has been thrown into the sun and anyone who tries to reproduce it is jailed, it's not really a ban. By the book banner definition of book ban, no book has been banned ever

But if instead of using a new definition of the word "ban," we stick with what native English speakers have generally understood the word to mean (a person in authority stands at the door and says "you can't bring that in here"), then book bans are what we have, from schools where the book has been barred from libraries and classrooms all the way up to Utah, where students are forbidden to bring even their own personal copy to school. 

So, yes, these are book bans.

The announcement also covers the elimination of the "book ban coordinator" who was to handle all these various cases.

The release also repeatedly describes book bans as a process of removing "age-inappropriate books" or even "age-inappropriate materials." 

That's a hell of a leap beyond the usual demand to remove a book because of "sexual content" or other Naughty Stuff. "Age-inappropriate" is a broad term that can be used to cover anything that authorities want to ban from schools. Anything you don't want children to hear about can be tagged "age-inappropriate."

All of this, of course, in the service of "the deeply rooted American principle that local control over public education best allows parents and teachers alike to assess the educational needs of their children and communities." Because the regime really believes in parental rights, unless those parents are LGBTQ or have LGBTQ kids or want their kids to learn about historic racism or support diversity, equality and inclusion or opposing banning books from the school or--well, they support just the parental right to agree with the administration. Otherwise, just hush. You don't need the right to disagree with the administration, just like your kid doesn't need the right to read anything that the People In Charge say they shouldn't read.

AI Is For The Ignorant

Well, here's a fun piece of research about AI and who is inclined to use it.

The title for this article in the Journal of Marketing-- "Lower Artificial Intelligence Literacy Predicts Greater AI Receptivity"-- gives away the game, and the abstract tells us more than enough about what the research found.

You may think that familiarity with technology leads to more willingness to use it, but AI runs the opposite direction.

Contrary to expectations revealed in four surveys, cross country data and six additional studies find that people with lower AI literacy are typically more receptive to AI.

That linkage is explained simply enough. People who don't really understand what AI is or what it actually does "are more likely to perceive AI as magical and experience feelings of awe in the face of AI’s execution of tasks that seem to require uniquely human attributes." 

The researchers are Stephanie Tully (USC Marshall School of Business), Chiara Longoni (Bocconi University), and Gil Appel (GW School of Business) are all academics in the world of business and marketing, and while I wish they were using their power for Good here, that's not entirely the case.

Having determined that people with "lower AI literacy" are more likely to fork over money for AI products, they reach this conclusion:

These findings suggest that companies may benefit from shifting their marketing efforts and product development towards consumers with lower AI literacy. Additionally, efforts to demystify AI may inadvertently reduce its appeal, indicating that maintaining an aura of magic around AI could be beneficial for adoption.

To sell more of this non-magical product, make sure not to actually educate consumers. Emphasize the magic, and go after the low-information folks. Well, why not. It's a marketing approach that has worked in certain other areas of American life. In a piece about their own research, the authors suggest a tiny bit of nuance, but the idea is the same. If you show AI doing stuff that "only humans can do" without explaining too clearly how the illusion is created, you can successfully "develop and deploy" new AI-based products "without causing a loss of the awe that inspires many people to embrace this new technology." Gotta keep the customers just ignorant enough to make the sale.

And lord knows lots of AI fans are already on the case. Lord knows we've been subjected to an unending parade of lazy journalism of the "Wow! This computer can totally write limericks like a human" variety. For a recent example, Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn, Microsoft board member, and early funder of OpenAI, unleashed a warm, fuzzy, magical woo-woo invocation of AI in the New York Times that is all magic and zero information.

Hoffman opens with an anecdote about someone asking ChatGPT "based on everything you know about me, draw a picture of what you think my current life looks like." This is Grade A magical AI puffery; ChatGPT does not "know" anything about you, nor does it have thoughts or an imagination to be used to create a visual image of your life. "Like any capable carnival mind reader," continues Hoffman, comparing computer software not just to a person, but to a magical person. And when ChatGPT gets something wrong, like putting a head of broccoli on your desk, Hoffman paints that "quirky charm" as a chance for the human to reflect and achieve a flash of epiphany. 

But what Hoffman envisions is way more magical than that-- a world in which the AI knows you better than you know yourself, that could record the details of your life and analyze them for you. 

Decades from now, as you try to remember exactly what sequence of events and life circumstances made you finally decide to go all-in on Bitcoin, your A.I. could develop an informed hypothesis based on a detailed record of your status updates, invites, DMs, and other potentially enduring ephemera that we’re often barely aware of as we create them, much less days, months or years after the fact.

When you’re trying to decide if it’s time to move to a new city, your A.I. will help you understand how your feelings about home have evolved through thousands of small moments — everything from frustrated tweets about your commute to subtle shifts in how often you’ve started clicking on job listings 100 miles away from your current residence.

The research trio suggested that the more AI imitates humanity, the better it sells to those low-information humans. Hoffman suggests that the AI can be more human than the user. But with science!

Do we lose something of our essential human nature if we start basing our decisions less on hunches, gut reactions, emotional immediacy, faulty mental shortcuts, fate, faith and mysticism? Or do we risk something even more fundamental by constraining or even dismissing our instinctive appetite for rationalism and enlightenment?

 Software will make us more human than humans?

So imagine a world in which an A.I. knows your stress levels tend to drop more after playing World of Warcraft than after a walk in nature. Imagine a world in which an A.I. can analyze your reading patterns and alert you that you’re about to buy a book where there’s only a 10 percent chance you’ll get past Page 6.

Instead of functioning as a means of top-down compliance and control, A.I. can help us understand ourselves, act on our preferences and realize our aspirations.

I am reminded of Knewton, a big ed tech ball of whiz-bangery that was predicting it would collect so much information about students that it would be able to tell students what they should eat for breakfast on test day. It did not do that; instead it went out of business. Even though it did its very best to market itself via magic.

If I pretend that I think Hoffman's magical AI will ever exist, I still have other questions, not the least of which is why would someone listen to an AI saying "You should go play World of Warcraft" or "You won't be able to finish Ulysses" when people tend to ignore other actual humans with similar advice. And where do we land if Being Human is best demonstrated by software rather than actual humans? What would it do to humans to offload the business of managing and understanding their own lives? 

We have a hint. Research from Michael Gerlich (Head of Center for Strategic Corporate Foresight and Sustainability, SBS Swiss Business School) has published "AI Tools in Society: Impacts on Cognitive Offloading and the Future of Critical Thinking"* and while there's a lot of scholaring going on here, the result is actually unsurprising.

Let's say you were really tired of walking everywhere, so you outsourced the walking to someone else, and you sat on the couch every waking hour. Can we predict what would happen to the muscles in your legs? Sure--when someone else bears the load, your own load-bearing members get weaker.

Gerlich finds the same holds true for outsourcing your thinking to AI. "The correlation between AI tool usage and critical thinking was found to be strongly negative." There are data and charts and academic talk, but bottom line is that "cognitive offloading" damages critical thinking. That makes sense several ways. Critical thinking is not a free-floating skill; you have to think about something, so content knowledge is necessary, and if you are using AI to know things and store your knowledge for you, your thinking isn't in play. Nor is it working when the AI writes topic sentences and spits out other work for you.

In the end, it's just like your high school English teacher told you-- if someone else does your homework for you, you won't learn anything.

You can sell the magic and try to preserve the mystery and maybe move a few more units of whatever AI widget you're marketing this week, but if you're selling something that people have to be ignorant to want so that they can offload some human activity then what are you doing? To have more time for World of Warcraft? 

If AI is going to be any use at all, it will not be because it hid itself behind a mask of faux human magical baloney, but because it can do something useful and be clear and honest about what it is actually, really doing, and not because it used an imitation of magic to capitalize on the ignorance of consumers. 

*I found this article thanks to Audrey Watters

OK: Walters Continues To Be The Worst

I have tried to stay away from Ryan Walters news, mostly because he is just so damned thirsty, and it's not just that he wants Donald Trump to tell him he's a special boy, but he seems to want his name on everyone's lips. But he's just so awful, and awful in ways that illuminate the moment we're living through. This education dudebro-in-chief for the state is one sad story.

Walters is under investigation by the ethics commission for so many bits of misbehavior, but they all fall under the same category--using his office and the resources of the state department of education to push political positions. He tweets under his official-not-personal account were MAGA electioneering and promotion of himself campaigning for Trump. There's also an ethics investigation under way concerning his use of campaign funds. 

And he's drawn criticism from many sides:

Honestly, with everything that’s transpired in the past several months, I’m not surprised. In 2024, we saw time after time where Superintendent Walters was focused on trying to increase his name I.D. Many of the provocative instances were to generate headlines… When it comes to a matter of one’s ethics, we should be held to a high standard.

That's State Representative Daniel Pae-- a Republican-- quoted by KFOR. In the same report, a former Assistant Oklahoma Attorney General points out that if the state's under-resourced, under-staffed ethics commission is bothering to open two investigations on Walters, that's a big deal.

But Walters is still a busy guy. He has proposed rules that would require parents to provide proof of citizenship or legal immigration status when registering students. The law still says (so far) that students who are undocumented must still be given an education, but Walters rule would essentially require each school to keep a list of undocumented families. That list would be super-handy when ICE comes to mount raids in schools, a prospect that Walters enthusiastically supports. 

His stated justification is a special brand of--well...

“For years the liberal media has been vilifying Republicans for separating illegal immigrant children from their parents,” Walters said in a news release Friday afternoon. “Now they want us to explain why we’d let ICE agents into schools. The answer is simple: we want to ensure that deported parents are reconnected with their children and keep families together.”

Apologies to my mother, but this is a special brand of bullshit. It captures the petulant own-the-libs neenerism of the MAGA faithful-- "You want to keep the families of These People together, so we'll just throw their kids out of the country, too. Howzabout that?" What elevates it to bullshit levels is the complete lack of honesty, without even the pretense that he's trying to come up with a plausible fig leaf for the policy. He doesn't believe this, and he doesn't expect anyone else to believe it, either. Nor does it have the MAGA troll deniability factor, the chance to say, "Haw! You really believed that I was doing a fascist thing. You sure look stupid now!" There's nothing here but a guy who doesn't quite have the guts to come out and say, "I want brown kids out of my state, and I want all the brown people we throw out to be so miserable and hurt by the whole experience that they tell all their brown friends and brown family to stay away from Oklahoma." 

How any of the MAGA faithful manage to hold onto such anger and meanness without burning up, and still manage to convince themselves that they are following Jesus-- it's a mystery. But Oklahomans voted for this guy and the governor who thinks he's just swell. Maybe Walters will wear out how welcome, or maybe Dear Leader will finally notice him and call him up to do damage on a national scale.

 

Taxation On Education

On the laundry list of ways the Trump administration is thinking of making life more unpleasant and difficult, add counting scholarships as taxable income. Yup-- that college scholarship your child landed could come with a big tax bite.

Like many of the actions being taken and under consideration, there is no particular theory of action to explain why we're supposed to think this would be a good idea. 

It's not clear yet what scholarships would count. Grants for students who show need? Those "scholarships" that involve the university reducing its sticker price?  But the National Center for Education Statistics says that 64% of undergraduate students get some sort of grant or scholarship. That's a few hundred thousand shy of 10 million students who would get hit with a new tax bill, and in some cases that could be pretty hefty. 

Common sense tells us that the students who most need the scholarships would be the ones getting the biggest tax bite.

What problem does this solve? The end result is sure to be fewer students attending higher education, which does seem to be a goal of some folks on the right. In terms of funding the government, it seems counter-productive; Uncle Sugar will get more money from a college-educated high-paying job than one more fry cook at Micky D's, but then, defunding the government also seems to be a goal on the right as well.

So maybe this does make sense for folks of a certain bent.

It does raise one question, however, because there is another type of "scholarship" out there-- vouchers for K-12 school, including the national voucher program that's still lurking out there. It's true that most voucher laws specify that the vouchers don't count as income, but we're ripping up the rules right and--well, right-- these days, so why not make school vouchers taxable as well? 

It's not the Most Awful Thing in front of us at the moment, but it's awful enough to use the power of the federal government to raise the cost of college so that fewer people will pursue higher education. Stay tuned.

Join Me At NPE 2025

The Network for Public Education was founded in 2013 by Diane Ravitch and Anthony Cody with a mission "to preserve, promote, improve and strengthen public schools for both current and future generations of students." It's very much a network, connecting folks who are active on the national, regional, state, and local level to work in support of public education in this country. 

As part of that networking, NPE holds national conferences that feature a wide variety of panels and speakers and a wealth of information about what's going on in the world of public education. 

This work can be isolating. I'm a now-retired teacher living in a small town in Northwest Pennsylvania, and in my normal life I would meet pretty much none of the folks I read or who read me. The presentations and panels are great, inspiring, and energizing, but it's meeting folks face to face that really makes the weekend. 

The power of human connection is important, and we don't have many opportunities to build it. This conference is one of them. You can see here just some of the people who will be there, some of the organizations being represented. And beyond those folks you will find rooms full of people who all care about public education.

I will be there, sitting on a panel and mingling and chatting with a host of people doing the work, and I will come home from this conference once again energized and refreshed. This year the gathering is in Columbus, Ohio on the first weekend of April, and I have been registered for, like, nine months, because I look forward to this. And if you've never done a conference kind of thing, this is an easy one. Regsiter, show up, see some panels, hear some speakers, meet a whole lot of cool people, talk about some really important stuff.

You can register at this website. I hope to see you there. 

ICYMI: Cataract Edition (1/26)

I am halfway through the process of cataract surgery (they go one eye at a time) and so far it has been not terrible. It's one of those minor miracles of modern stuff. They slice open your eyeball and replace the lens with a lens-shaped piece of plastic and voila! the world looks less like it's shrouded in a brown cloud. If only improving the view of other things were that relatively easy.

Here's the reading list for the week. 

We Got To Do Better

TC Weber has a one-two punch this week because he's A) way too close to the latest school shooting and B) way too knowledgeable about the new Deputy Secretary of Ed, Penny Schwinn, yet another reformster whose gift seems to be for failing upward.

Trump Nominates Controversial Penny Schwinn for Deputy Ed Sec

If you want some more details of the mess that Schwinn has left behind her in the past, the indispensable Mercedes Schneider has the receipts.

Ensuring Florida Leads And America’s First

Oh, look. Erika Donalds, an important figure in the gutting of Florida's public school system, has landed a job with America First Policy Institute, the thinky tank that Ed Secretary-designate Linda McMahon ran. 

Who is the new CEO of Teach For America?

Gary Rubinstein is a Teach for American vet who grew up to be a real teacher, and he's been the raspberry seed in their wisdom tooth ever since (that's Music Man). This post is lengthy, but manages both to put TFA in its historical context and to introduce the new TFA head honcho, who, it turns out, is loaded with red flags.

Republican Kids in Public Schools Also Lack Mittens

Nancy Bailey with some facts to remind the new administration that Republicans have poor children, too.

Mass. DESE Helps Jeb Bush Sell Out Public Education

Dark money expert Maurice Cunningham points out that Massachusetts education leaders are hanging out with the wrong crowd.

Please Don't Use Generative AI To Mimic Historical Figures

Tom Mullany argues that nobody is well-served by more AI mockeries of real humans. Meeting with an AI Anne Frank? Maybe don't.

'AI-driven' cyber charter school wants to teach Pa. kids core academics in 2 hours per day

I wrote about this last week, and it's great to see other outlets following the story of the Texas couple with a cyber-grift to see the state of Pennsylvania--and, in the meantime, a few other states and nations as well.

Billionaires Driving Science of Reading

Thomas Ultican drills down on the recent attack on LAUSD reading instruction. More Science of Reading shenanigans.

No One Wants to Raise a Little A--hole

Teacher Tom argues in favor of teaching more than just academic content, and says that parents want that something else, too.

Civics

Nancy Flanagan posts on the value of civics education, with some surprising facts about which states do or do not require such education.

Trump Endangers and Marginalizes Innocent Children in Executive Order to End Birthright Citizenship

Jan Resseger has been working overtime cataloging the many ways that Trump policies pose a threat to the health and well-being of children in this country. Here's a look at his attempt to rewrite the Constitution to do away with birthright citizenship.

Ryan Walters announces update to OSDE’s history standards to include Gulf of America, Mount McKinley

There is nobody in this country working as hard as Ryan Walter to try to attract the attention of Dear Leader. He was ready to codify these dopey name changes within 24 hours. Now will come from DC please call him up to the Big Leagues? Pleeease?

AI Unleashed

Nobody connects the dots better than Audrey Watters. This post includes a variety of mini-stories about AI in a larger context. Read.

Trump executive orders on immigrants, transgender rights could echo in American schools

Some headline writer at EdWeek is angling for an Understatement Award. Erica Meltzer wrote the story that does a decent of laying out what's on the line (so far).

How To Read The News: A 5 Step Guide

Anya Kamenetz with some useful tips for navigating the ugly times to come.

The Price of Speaking Up in Trump's America

Parker Molloy looks at the MAGA squawking over the message from Episcopal Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde. Here's one of the important parts:

This matters because it's a preview of how the new administration and its media allies plan to handle dissent. They're not just disagreeing with Budde's message—they're trying to destroy her for delivering it.

Trombone Emoji 'Womp Womp' Sound Created By HCPS Students To Go Global

Meanwhile, one major gap in the digital world has been filled.

At Forbes.com this week, I looked at some work from NEPC showing that red states are more dependent on federal education dollars, and an update with context for the Supreme Court's decision to go after a few of the remaining bricks in the wall between church and state by hearing about Oklahoma's proposed Catholic charter school. 

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Immigration Arrests At School?

There's an ugly new twist to Trump's ugly immigration policy, which seems to aimed at getting the maximum number of brown-skinned people out of the country (well, unless they work for one of Trump's billionaire buddies).

It was always going to be awful for children, once the administration decided that breaking up families was on the table, which makes sense-- if he wants to get rid of birthright citizenship, why not put pressure on birthright citizens to leave. I'm seeing teachers talk about new district policies--what if a student gets home from school and discovers that their parents have been deported? Families and school authorities are scrambling to deal with the various possible ugly outcomes of a deliberately cruel policy, meant to be so awful that not only will brown-skinned people get out, but they will not bother to come here at all.

But Tuesday, the administration found a way to make things worse. Historically, authorities have recognized the idea that certain locations are sensitive and protected-- schools, churches, and hospitals.

Well, screw that, says the Trump team. The sensitive location policy has been rescinded. Says a statement from Acting Homeland Security Secretary Benjamine Huffman, “Criminals will no longer be able to hide in America’s schools and churches to avoid arrest." 

You can mock this statement by pointing out that very few criminals in this country have successfully evaded the police by hiding in third grade classrooms, but that would miss the point that to this administration, every undocumented immigrant is a criminal. 

Soi now, on top of every other weight thrown on public schools, districts are now having to figure out how to respond when they are the target of an immigration raid. And that as Trump's Department of Justice plans to go after any state or local officials who get in the way of deportations. Makes you wonder who will be the first building principal of classroom teacher to get thrown in jail for trying to obstruct an attempt to drag a seven year old child out of school for deportation. 

In the meantime, the amount of stress and worry piling on the backs of children will be one more obstacle to learning. And the threat of turning school into a very unsafe space will be one more obstacle to attendance.

And as we move forward, it's worth looking at this Congressional testimony from David Bier, from the Very Libertarian Cato Institute, explaining in some detail just how disastrous Trump policies were on immigration the first time around. That's Trump policy for you-- mean, cruel, and ineffective. It solves nothing, and yet, children are going to suffer because of it.