Crypto-Education

I have put off trying to educate myself about cryptocurrency, but finally gave in, read a book, and golly bob howdy, if it isn't the same guys, the same grift, and the same bullshit as education privatization.

The book was Easy Money: Cryptocurrencym Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud, written by Ben McKenzie and Jacob Silverman, and if McKenzie's name sounds vaguely familiar, that's because you used to watch The OC on which he played Ryan. But before he was an actor, McKenzie graduated from the University of Virginia magna cum laude with a degree in economics and foreign affairs. Silverman is a journalist who covers tech, crypto and politics. 

The book is tied together by the narrative of McKenzie's growing interest and his concurrent growing sense that crypto was an emperor with no clothes, a burning building for which nobody was pulling the alarm. It's clear, compelling, and easy to understand even for those of us with no economics background. 

It is also, if you've been deep in the education debates, oddly familiar, sometimes in ways that I found illuminating. Familiar themes include--

Techbro awesomeness

The techbros driving the movement are absolutely certain that they Know How It Is, that they possess all the wisdom and know-how to engineer a complete replacement for the system already in place. People who stick up for that system are just showing that they aren't as smart as the bros. See also: Bill Gates on education. 

Ignorance of the past. 

If you're smarter than everyone, you don't have to listen to anyone, including people who know the history of the field you want to disrupt. The techbros driving the movement are sure they are pioneering bold new uncharted territory. "Behold! I have invented a new piece of technology! I shall call it [drum roll] The Wheel!!" 

But as the authors point out, the idea of launching a "decentralized" currency backed by nothing but charm and big brass balls has been tried in this country back in the mid-19th century. Spoiler alert: it did not work. See also: Mr. Lancaster's System by Adam Laats.

Frauds and scamsters

McKenzie and Silverman mention several times that having been scammed is seen as a regular and normal part of the crypto landscape. It is so pervasive that most of the folks they talked to freely talked about their own losses as if being scammed was a rite of passage. The underlying assumption-- that scammers and fraudsters are just part of the price of "freedom" and that it's up to the marketplace to do their homework and avoid getting fleeced. Fraud is how we know we're really free, I guess.  See also: complaints that school choice must not be hampered by regulation or oversight.

Lies about Decentralization and Power

Crypto is supposed to do away with the idea of money controlled by some central authority-- "government money," if you will. The power will be decentralized, declare crypto stans. Except that it isn't so much decentralized as simply moved. And it's not moved to the people who will supposedly benefit, but to a new, small set of people. And unlike a government, these people do not have to answer to anyone. They do, however, use the power and money they accumulate to make sure that elected officials and legislators stay friendly. 

But the notion that this disruption is somehow creating more freedom and opportunity for the ordinary citizen is a fiction. Instead, by removing a trusted third party, they create an unregulated marketplace where the real power is in the hands of a few rich folks, and the average person is a sheep ripe for shearing--and no recourse should such a shearing happen. Without a trusted third party in the mix, the rich and powerful are free to set rules that serve them. See also: the entire school voucher biz.

Some of the stories are just astounding, like the folks who lost millions of dollars because when market fluctuations became extreme and investors went to cash in, the exchange simply shut down so that they couldn't until the moment had passed. Yes, crypto shares certain folks' naive faith in tech. 

McKenzie and Silverman travel through many of the halls of crypto-land and talk to many of the major players (some of whom are remarkably willing to reveal to talk). In the end, you have to conclude that however bad, scammy, and fraudulent you thought crypto might be, it is probably way worse than that. And many of its worst features echo the school privatization movement. 

Crypto uses the language of known, trusted stuff-- it's "currency" and "coin"-- to get folks to offer trust to something that has no basis in anything other than its creators' will to make something out of thin air that can be used as a foundation for grift. Sure, there are some people involved in good faith, but the whole edifice is built on smoke and mirrors. 

Radical Solution to NAEP Score Drop

Some real outside the box thinking here.

The NAEP results have been a big talking point, a way to trumpet the "failure" of the public school system. Will changes in US schools raise the scores? 

We may never know, because the NAEP is now one more victim of Trusk spending cuts.

“The U.S. Department of Education has decided not to fund the NAEP 2024-2025 Long-Term Trend Age 17 assessment,” Marcie Hickman, project director of the NAEP Support and Service Center, said in an email to state officials. “All field operations and activities will end today, February 19, 2025.”

I would have expected more squawking, but so far only The74 and Education Week have reported on this. 

The test is federally mandated, which means President Musk shouldn't be able to legally cut it off, but we all know how much that means these days. Ed Week reports that "the decision appears to have been made without the approval of the National Assessment Governing Board," which seems about par for the course. 

What has actually been canceled at this point is the test for 17-year-olds that was supposed to happen in the near future. Nobody seems to really know whether this cancellation will also affect all other future NAEP testing, but since Musk has gutted financing for the Institute of Education Sciences, the data wing of the education department, it sure doesn't look good.

So much for all those fun conversations folks were going to have while parsing the test scores and arguing about what they meant for public schools in a post[sic] pandemic world. 

Regular readers know that I have no deep love for Big Standardized Tests, but the whole School Criticism Industry has depended on these scores, and I don't know what the heck they're going to do with themselves without the data.

Perhaps the next phase will involve the Musk Method that has been used so expansively in the DOGE process. Never mind talking to experts, don't try to look at actual data, but just kind of eyeball things and make declarations based on how you personally feel about it, unhampered by any actually reality. Boy, those are going to be some fun times. 

AI Techno-Bullshit

Like most folks, I can no longer complete the simplest written objective without some degenerate descendant of Clippy trying to butt in. Want to wish a friend a Happy Birthday on Facebook? There's already a draft completed. Did someone just email you? Here's a selection of replies you can send. Writing a document? Sure you don't want some help with that?

No, no, and no. In fact, now I'm going to craft a Happy Birthday wish that not only says "Happy Birthday," but also "I took the trouble to do more than just click on the pre-written wish."

Words matter, and how we use them matters. The deepest existential challenge of being human is that we are consciousness, ideas, feelings, memories and grasping comprehensions, all trapped in a singular isolated body with no way to directly communicate or share any of what we are to any of the other meat-trapped spirits in the world. Over millennia we have crafted art, music, movement and, most of all, language to try to bridge that unfathomable gulf between human beings. 

So, yeah. Language is a big deal to me. It is how we are our best selves, how we are fully human in the world. It is how we access love and trust and the impossible beauty of connection with creation. 

And like any powerful tool, it can be misused. A hammer can build a house or break a window. Language can be used to lie. 

There are plenty of shades and shapes and definitions of lying (omission, commission, white, dark, etc) but for me, it comes down to this-- communicating things you don't believe are true in order to control somebody else's behavior. I like the wikipedia definition of bullshit-- "statements made by people concerned with the response of the audience rather than with truth and accuracy."

Our country is used to being awash in bullshit, from the casual lies of marketing to political lies-of-all-size. No, my congressperson did not personally send me an e-mail because they are alarmed and want to hear form me, and no, the US wasn't winning the Vietnam War, and no, Donald Trump did not win the 2020 election. No, that's not what that famous person really looks like. 

The explosion of technology has given us whole new gushing rivers of communication, and that turns out to mean bullshit with an intensity, frequency, and quantity unlike anything ever seen before. Use tech to collect tons of data that reveals where peoples' buttons are, then craft some techno-bullshit to push those buttons. It looks like communication, like human beings trying to bridge the gap between them, but it is not. It is something else, something morally empty. It's a lie.

It becomes most obvious when we consider that most modern form of lying-- trolling.

Trolling is anti-communication. It is a simple observation-- when I say or do X, people jump. Somebody throws up a white power ok symbol or, hell, an actual Nazi salute, and a host of people mistake this for an attempt to communicate. Is this guy really a fascist? Is he not really a fascist? The question is beside the point--he's a guy who has figured out that if he makes this symbol, a whole bunch of folks freak out and react and he has some by God power over them. He can make the puppets dance, and feel powerful inside his sad little isolated meat sack. 

It's an exhilarating lesson-- your words don't have to mean anything exactly in order to get reactions out of people. Or they can mean many things. Or they can mean what you decide they mean. Language isn't a means of bridging the gap between yourself and others; it's a tool for manipulating those others. It's a weapon for exerting control. Once you let go of the idea that words are supposed to mean something, that language is supposed to be anchored within you on your own truth and intention, you are ride the Nihilism Express all the way to the Land of Do As You Please.

Generative AI, chatbots, Large Language Models make excellent tools for bullshit. Where most humans have to work to disconnect their language from anything in their actual consciousness, LLMs arrive fully unmoored from any such baggage, making them excellent tools for creating language-shaped sticks with which to poke other humans. Computers and technology have a useful place, but it's up to humans to decide where to find the limits.

Language disconnected from a human intent or consciousness is a morally empty exercise. I don't mean to suggest that everyone who disconnects in this way is evil or even terrible, but I do think they've lost the plot. For people who have lost that plot, who have drifted over to thinking that language is mostly a tool one uses to prod other humans in a particular direction, LLMs will seem like a perfectly natural next step. If you're not using language for personal, conscious, intentional expression, then why not outsource the job?

For those who think our human task is not to communicate with other humans, but to dominate and subjugate them, language generated by algorithm must seem like the ultimate refinement of language-as-tool. When Mike Johnson excitedly tells us that Elon has "cracked the code" and algorithms will crawl through the data and "transform the way the federal government works," these must be exciting times. "Data," he says Elon told him, "doesn't lie." But automated language does, and easily, at that. 

Automated language production is by its nature disconnected from human intent and consciousness, and as such is not a means of communication, but a tool for other things, like various forms of bullshittery, manipulation, and trolling. Maybe there's a non-zero number of times that this is okay. Maybe. At a point in our history when bad actors have shown a willingness to reduce language to a tool for separating rather than connecting humans, quick and easy morally empty mimicry of human communication is worrisome.

The undermining starts early. On social media, a teacher opined that since her students have trouble coming up with ideas, she just has them ask ChatGPT for essay ideas, as if the actual thinking part of writing is a minor feature barely worth considering. The calls to incorporate AI into the classroom is loud and relentless, a cacophony of marketing bullshit marketing marketing bullshit.

Maybe some of it is Not So Bad, like the miles of AI-generated marketing bullshit that is replacing and outpacing old fashioned human-generated marketing bullshit. Maybe there are social conventions that merely require an exchange of language-adjacent artifacts. maybe some folks really want to be governed by AI instead of other humans. 

But it's both scary and sad. Here we are, vibrating spirits in our isolated fleshy vessels, trying so hard to connect with other humans because it helps us understand the world and it helps us understand ourselves and it fulfills a basic human need to see and be seen. How shitty to grab one of those bridges of language and discover at the other end... nothing. Not a consciousness to be seen and heard, nothing but dead empty eyes staring not at you, but at nothing, and no connection to make at all. I can't help thinking it is a misuse of a fundamental human feature. 

I often describe education as the process of becoming your best self, discovering what it means to be fully human in the world. It seems, to me, to be the most foundational human activity, and yet so much of what surrounds us seems designed to thwart it, from authoritarian mock versions of leaders to empty technological mock humans. 

What to do? Be human. Search for your truth and then put it out into the world, aimed at other humans. Make real connections. When you see bullshit, point and laugh. Try to stay true; I know that's not always easy, but as I used to tell my students, life is too short to sign your name to a lie. This is not woo-woo fuzzy advice, but a down-in-the-dirt practical goal-- more practical than believing in magical algorithms that create the illusion of human interaction with no humanity attached.

ICYMI: George's Birthday Edition (2/23)

Okay, George Washington's birthday was yesterday (or actually the 11th by the old calendar), but it seems like a good time to remember the guy who, for all his faults, argued that he should not be crowned king and not allowed to serve more than two terms as President. Just saying. George would be 293 today.

Here's your list for the week. Remember, you can be an amplifier. Share posts. Subscribe to folks-- even if it's a free subscription, you increase their digital footprint. 

The White House said book bans aren’t happening. Now JD Vance’s memoir is a target.

Hillbilly Elegy, besides being poverty porn, has plenty of naughty words and even recognizes that LGBTQ persons exist. Cue the Department of Defense purge.

Trump's Education Agenda is Unpopular

Jennifer Berkshire must have calluses from beating this drum so hard, but she's right-- look at conditions on the ground and you find that even the people who love Trump don't love his ideas about education.

Trump Is Not Taking the State Out of Public Schools, He Is Putting Christianity In

Anne Lutz Fernandez looks at the MAGA religious agenda for K-12. 

The SC House Debates Education and School Vouchers

Steve Nuzum reports on education debates in the South Carolina House, which include the usual unsubstantiated slander of teachers--but also people on the far right who oppose the universal voucher bill.

It Is Fun to Pretend That Hard Things Are Easy!

Dan Meyers on an online platform that promises to teach you math 4x faster. Yay, miracles!

Why Education Reformers Will Find a Home in the Trump Administration

Jeff Bryant takes a look at continued upward fail that is Penny Schwin's career. Seasoned reformster or common grifter, Schwinn shows what kind of ideas are running Dear Leader's education policy.

Strange Science of Reading Law Suit

Thomas Ultican pulls up the background on the first-of-its-kind lawsuit meant to support the Science [sic] of Reading folks. 

Bad Words in Schools

Do you subscribe to Nancy Flanagan's blog yet? Because you should. Here's her musing about what words are or are not okay in school these days.

Automated Contempt

It is a mistake to call Audrey Watters simply the ed tech Cassandra. She has an outstanding ability to connect the dots between many different pieces of history, technology, and culture. Her posts are also full of excellent links, like this one, that mulls on how well the inhumanity of AI fits the inhumanity of the political moment.

Elon Musk’s DOGE cuts at the Department of Education are already harming North Carolina’s most vulnerable students

Justin Parmenter reports from North Carolina on some of the real effects of President Musk's chainsaw work. 

What Did We Learn from Linda McMahon’s Confirmation Hearing?

Jan Resseger provides an excellent digest of observations from Linda McMahon's confirmation hearing for the Secretary of Education post. No good news here, but forewarned and all that.

The War on Learning: How Politicians Are Dismantling Education—And How We Fight Back

Julian Vasquez Heilig on fighting for academic freedom and inclusive education.

There IS Proof Knowledge Works. And It's Overwhelming.

Yes, this is from Robert Pondiscio, a long time part of the AEI/Fordham axis of reforminess. He and I disagree on some stuff, and agree on some other stuff, and one part of the other stuff is the idea that content knowledge matters when it comes to reading (and learning). 

The Josiah Bartlett Center takes a beating.

New Hampshire libertarians have had a rough couple of weeks. Andru Volinsky explains some of what's actually going on.

Senator Simon’s SB166: Administrative Efficiency in Public Schools

Could Florida actually do something to help public schools? Anything is possible. Sue Kingery Woltanski explains what the bill could do.

Parents at Army base in Stuttgart say students grappling with new school rules

Stars and Stripes has been covering the effects of federal anti-diversity measures on Department of Defense schools. John Vandiver takes a look at Stuttgart, where nobody is sure what the rules are, but some students are pretty sure they're being erased.

Educators calculate their risks in class as states escalate anti-DEI pressure

The Southern Poverty Law Center looks at some teachers who are navigating the new racist restrictions on education. Can you teach Black history and keep your job?

Who is a cognitive scientist?

Benjamin Riley considers what cognition is, and who counts as a scientist studying it.

Boston Herald, Pioneer Institute, and Massachusetts Opportunity Alliance Push Great Replacement Theory

You know what's not great for education? Treating Those Peoples' Children as interlopers who are out to replace proper white folks. And yet here's The Boston Globe, a major newspaper, pushing the Great Replacement Theory. Maurice Cunningham has the story.

“I’m Afraid We Are Automating This Work Without Really Understanding It”

Gretchen Gravatt talks to Allison Pugh about using AI to replace human connective labor.

The Department of Government Exploitation

The current administration's rush to privatize everything is, of course, pretty familiar to folks in the education world. Conor Lynch at Truthdig explains what's up here. For instance, the federal workforce actually hasn't increased since the 1950s. The number of private subcontracts on the other hand...

If the ultra-rich want to escape from reality — good riddance

Troy Farah's Salon piece can get a little harsh for my tastes, but it does include this Douglas Rushkoff  quote--

they have succumbed to a mindset where “winning” means earning enough money to insulate themselves from the damage they are creating by earning money in that way. It’s as if they want to build a car that goes fast enough to escape from its own exhaust.

This week at Forbes.com I wrote about the Texas conservatives who hate hate hate Greg Abbott's voucher bill.

Sign up for my newsletter--always free.

Rest Well, Dr. Zolbrod

Word came this morning that Paul Zolbrod passed away yesterday. May his memory be a blessing.

Dr. Zolbrod first taught me when I was a freshman at Allegheny College. It was one of those survey course that English majors, even English majors at a liberal arts school, must take--the first half of a survey of British Literature. 

That was fifty-ish years ago. I dug out some musty folders of old college papers this morning, and it is amazing how many of my professors I have forgotten, past even the point of look-at-the-name-and-oh-now-I-remember. But I never forgot Dr. Zolbrod. He was one of the teachers who shaped my entire career.

Dr. Zolbrod had several rare gifts as a teacher. There was the more typical gift of helping you see why the material was interesting and compelling. He challenged you to really think through stuff, which was a welcome new challenge. College was the first time I understood that there were two basic flavors of literature teachers-- those who would listen to any interpretation as long as you could back it up with evidence and reason, and those who knew the One True Interpretation and expected you to spit that back. Dr. Zolbrod was the former, and sitting in his class solidified for me which kind I wanted to be.

Dr. Zolbrod was no pushover when it came to grading papers, but somehow, when I left his office after talking about the crappy paper I'd just gotten back, I felt good about myself. I could see where I'd missed the boat, but I also could see the strengths that I was going to carry into the next one.

As Facebook has filled up with tributes to him, I see multiple versions of what I wrote-- He could see possibilities in you that you could not see in yourself. It was so energizing and empowering. It would have been easy for him to make me feel stupid; instead, he made me feel smart and capable and I promised myself that I would try to do that for the students I hoped to teach some day. 

Dr. Zolbrod gave us a choice-- write a final paper, or go teach a unit about one of the works in the middle school down the hill from the college. I jumped on that opportunity, and later he set me up with the chance to teach several weeks' worth of Beowulf to gifted third graders. It was exciting to get a taste of the work, and he made that happen.

He retired from Allegheny in 1996 and moved to New Mexico where he kept teaching and focused on the work he had been doing for years with the Navajo Creation Story. He had started out in Pittsburgh, served in the military, looked at the student radicalism of the 60s, published a variety of works, and really never stopped displaying curiosity and engagement with life (here's a remarkable interview he gave when he turned 90). As his daughter wrote, 

He looked so closely at what was around him , whether it was the sun rising over the mesa, the woods on a morning walk on Rogers Ferry, the arches of the churches in Tuscany, the weave of the Navajo rugs he studied. And he paid such careful attention to the people he interacted with, especially to working people, with whom he closely identified. And of course, he read so deeply, and listened so intently to oral recountings and to music. He was so engaged with history of places, including Crawford County, where my brother and I grew up, and with ideas, and the way they intersected. He wanted to capture all of it. The soundtrack of my childhood was the clackety clack of his manual typewriter coming from his basement office.

I connected with him, like many of his former students, on Facebook, where he shared personal recollections as well as thoughts and insights about the world unfolding. It was miraculous to me that he remembered me, had followed some of my teaching career, and read some of my writing about education. 

Dr. Zolbrod is one of a handful of people who were an inspiration and a model for me as a teacher; I was a better teacher because of him. The world is a better place because he was in it. Condolences to his family. May his memory continue to be a blessing. 

Trump Okays More Charter Waste

At this point, we have more than a few examples of how President Musk's DOGEry is most certainly not about reducing federal waste and fraud. But if you would like a very clear, specific example, let's take a look at the latest decree about charter schools.

The federal Charter School Program has been shelling out grants to launch and expand charter schools since 1994. Analysis of the program by the Network for Public Education shows that one out of every four taxpayer dollars handed out by CSP has been wasted on fraud and/or failure. That means of the roughly 4 Billion-with-a-B dollars handed out by the feds, roughly 1 Billion-with-a-B dollars have gone to charters that closed swiftly, or never even opened in the first place.

The Biden administration (with no small amount of prodding) eventually put some additional rules in place for CSP-- crazy stuff like "find out whether there's any need or desire for the charter school before you open it up"-- and that was followed by howls of outrage from folks in the charter biz. The rules were modest and sensible, but still could have saved a bit of taxpayer money from a program that was wasting a huge pile of money.

So, the current administration could have said, "Cool! You got some fraud and waste spotted and targeted before we even got here. Excellent. Thanks for the help in fighting federal fraud and waste."

That is not what happened.

Instead, yesterday the Department of Education issued an edict saying that the "unnecessary conditions and overly bureaucratic requests for information" would be stopped and that CPS would start handing out money more easily. 

It is certainly within the scope of an administration to "adjust" the rules for CSP-- they've been doing that for thirty years. There's just an extra level of irony from an administration whose signature claim is that they are going to protect taxpayer dollars from being wasted, As far as charter schools go, the Trusk administration declares Christmas every day. Take all the taxpayer dollars you want! Some waste is bad, but other waste is fully approved. 

IN: Governor Says No To Dolly Parton's Book Program

Here at the Institute, we love Dolly Parton's Imagination Library very much. It is one of the best, most effective philanthropic and educational programs in the country. And Governor Mike Braun of Indiana has decided the children of his state can just do without it.

This program started with the simplest idea in the world-- putting books in the homes of small children. It began, once again, in her home county, and her proposal was simple-- sign your newborn child up, and once a month from birth through Kindergarten, the child will receive a book. On the program's website, Parton writes

When I was growing up in the hills of East Tennessee, I knew my dreams would come true. I know there are children in your community with their own dreams. They dream of becoming a doctor or an inventor or a minister. Who knows, maybe there is a little girl whose dream is to be a writer and singer. The seeds of these dreams are often found in books and the seeds you help plant in your community can grow across the world.

The program launched in 1995 in Sevier County (Parton's home), and it grew quickly. By 2006, when the Washington Post wrote about it, the program had spread to 471 communities in 41 states. In 2011 it launched in Scotland, and it can now be found in the UK, Australia, and Canada. In February of 2018, the Imagination Library presented its 100 millionth book to the Library of Congress. There are currently more than 3.1 million children registered under the program, and the foundation has gifted over 270 million books.

Indiana came late to the party, with the Previous Governor Holcomb announcing a statewide expansion in 2023, committing $6 million over two years. Is that a bunch of money? Sure, but it got every child age 0-5 and under a brand new book of their own every single month. And now that budget item stands at $0.00. 

Let me tell you first hand that these books have an impact. The Board of Directors got a book every month, and it was always a point of excitement. The books were well curated, an awesome collection of old classics and modern books, beautiful and diverse (so of course politicians occasionally tried to push the culture panic button). Even the very last book felt like a personal message to the young readers in my house. 

Neither Braun nor the lawmakers who actually drafted the proposed budget have explained their reasoning behind zeroing out the state contribution, nor have they responded to requests for comment. Braun made some noises about "efficiencies" and the budget. Meanwhile, the United Way and other charitable groups may scrape up the money needed.

Braun ran last fall on culture panic and parental rights (for some), along with a call to increase academic standards and prepare students for success. You know what helps with academic success? Exposing children to reading early and often-- so early and often that they think of reading as a natural and normal and desirable part of life.

I am stumped. Dolly Parton and her people say, "Look, we'll carry half the cost and all of the legwork for putting books in the hands of every pre-school kid in your state every month from ages 0-5" and your reaction to that is "No, thanks"??!! Sorry, Indiana-- apparently your leaders are not all that interested in either children or reading. They can pass a snazzy "science of reading" law, but they can't get behind the idea of giving children actual books to read. 

“We are hopeful that Governor Braun and the Indiana Legislature will continue this vital investment by restoring the state’s funding match for local Imagination Library programs,“ Parton’s rep said in a statement.

”The beauty of the Imagination Library is that it unites us all—regardless of politics—because every child deserves the chance to dream big and succeed."

The arrival of those books each month, addressed directly to the child, delivers two messages to that child-- reading is important, and you are important. Indiana's governor and lawmakers would apparently like to deliver another message entirely.