Artificial What Now?

Adam Becker's More Everything Forever is a sobering look at our tech overlords, their crazypants dreams, and the reasons that those dreams are less likely than an actual autonomous automobile. It's a pretty depressing books because two things come through. 

One is the enormous power these folks wield over the world we all have to live in; it's power they absolutely believe they should have, based on their certainty that some people are better than others and they are the best of all. 

The other is just how dopey these guys are, how enbubbled and disconnected from-- and even hostile to-- the lives of regular humans. These masters of the universe have all sorts of big dreams, like immortality (really) and not many solid ideas about how to achieve these dreams, even as they ignore many of the counter-ideas (Elon Musk's colonization of Mars? Not going to happen ). 

But what is extra astonishing in the book is that even as they are all-in on a future of AI, especially Artificial General Intelligence, they really don't seem to know what, exactly, that means. AGI? Maybe it means roughly "an artificial machine that can do everything a typical human adult can do" but holy smokes is that vague. 

As a species, we are generally pretty fuzzy on what "intelligence" actually means, with a whole variety of theories about what it is and how it can be measured. And the thing is that these silicon valley overlords seem to know way less about it than people who make even a half-hearted attempt to study this stuff.

Many experts, Becker points out, are certain that the path to AGI does not lie along increased capabilities to current models. They can keep making ChatGPT "smarter," but it will never get any closer to AGI, because that is a difference of kind, not of degree. Check out this piece from Ben Riley in which an AI insider explains that LLMs can't reason like humans. 

I find the continued attempts to "resurrect" the dead via AI particularly telling. The latest example come in The Atlantic, with multiple attempts to resurrect the dead compared to a sort of Frankenstein complex. It's an apt comparison, as Frankenstein arguably made the mistake of not considering the internal life, the motivations and intents, of his creation. Failing to understand or anticipate those aspects, the doctor rejects the creature that embodies them and creates disaster.

AI creates a variation on that problem. Your dead loved one is not there, the AI completely empty of any motivations or intentions. But for some of these folks, that doesn't seem to matter-- the other "person" is only real to the extent that we experience them. They have no life or existence beyond providing input for our senses; they literally turn off and cease to exist when they are not performing for their maker. 

It is deeply reminiscent of a sociopath's belief that other people are not real, that they exist only as props in a story that is all about MMEEEEEE! And that leads me to wonder if these overlords that Becker describes do not perhaps view actually flesh and blood humans in the same way, and that's why AI seems so human to them-- not because of the depth of humanity in the bots, but the meager view with which they view other humans.

I don't mean to suggest that everyone who gets suckered by a chatbot is a sociopath. But I do think AI moves most easily into places where humanity has been hollowed out, and I wonder if peoples' willingness to imagine that the bot is intelligent, to fill in the blanks of its internal life, isn't one more sign that connection and humanity have been hollowed out in our society in ways that are not good for us.

The quest for Artificial General Intelligence is a chance for us to reflect on what Organic General Intelligence might be. We're often sloppy about our judgment ("People who don't know what I know are dumb") and it's that same sloppiness that leads some folks to assume the AI has any I in it at all, even though AI has no reflection, no intent, no social reconfiguring, no wisdom, no actual knowledge, but just a capability of imitating what an answer to your prompt would, statistically, look like. 

I recommend Becker's book because even though these guys are terrifying in their power and entitlement, it is also useful to understand that they are also clueless about critical factors in their imagined future. It's a reminder that we need not follow these wealthy dopes into their empty, hollow future. 

"Reinventing Education for the Age of AI" (or Building a Better MOOC)

There are just so many, many bad things being written about AI and the education world. So many unserious bits of advice being taken seriously. So many people who appear to be intelligent and well-educated who are harboring fantasy-based ideas about what AI is and what it does. 

We need to keep talking about them, because right now we are living through a moment in which the emperor has new clothes, but a new horse, a new castle, and a new inclination to make everyone share his sartorial choices (and winter is coming). But the fantasy is so huge, the invisible baloney stacked so high, that people are concluding that they must just be losing their minds.

So let's look at this one, with the inspiring title "The AI Tsunami Is Here: Reinventing Education for the Age of AI." Published at Educause ("the Voice of the Higher Education Technology Community"), this monstrosity lists six authors even though it's a seven-minute read. Two authors-- Tanya Gamby and Rachel Koblic-- are mucky mucks at Matter and Space, a Manchester, NH company that promises "human-centered learning for the age of AI." Furthermore "By combining cutting-edge AI with a holistic focus on personal growth, we’re creating an entirely new way for your people to learn, evolve, and thrive." The emperor may have a new thesaurus, too. Matter and Space are central to this article.

Also authoring this article we get David Kil, entrepreneur and data scientist; Paul LeBlanc, president of Southern New Hampshire University, a university big in the online learning biz, also based in Manchester, and the board chair at Matter and Space; Georg Siemens, a figure in the Massive Online Open Course (MOOC) world (the one that was going to replace regular universities but then, you know, didn't) and is a co-founder and Chief Science Officer of Matter and Space.

So what did this sextet of luminaries come up with? Well, the pitch is for "interactionalism—a human-centered approach to learning that fosters collaboration, creativity, adaptability, feedback, and well-being."

The authors yadda yadda their way through "AI will do big and we are on the cusp of huge changes etc" before launching into their actual pitch for changing the model. Higher education, they argue, still uses a "broadcast-era model." Instructor delivers, students receive, exams assess. Feedback is sparse. They arguably have a point, but we are in familiar ed reform territory here-- present a problem, and then, rather than searching for the best solution, start insisting that whatever you're promoting is a solution.

They want to beat up the old model a bunch. The downlink aka delivery of stuff is one size fits all and broad. The uplink aka assessment is narrow. The feedback loop is narrower still. This was designed "for an industrial economy that prized efficiency and standardization over curiosity, adaptability, and genuine thinking." What about the "vision of truly personalized learning"? Welll.... You can't realistically talk about personalized learning if you aren't going to balance it with recognition that learning, particularly for younger humans, is a social activity. And they're going to head further into the weeds:

The world in which this system was built no longer exists. Knowledge is everywhere, and it's instantly accessible. Memorization as a primary skill makes little sense when any fact is a click away. Modern work demands collaboration, adaptability, and the ability to navigate uncertainty—skills developed in interaction, not isolation. And now AI has entered the room—not simply as a tool for automating tasks, but as a co-creator: asking questions, raising objections, and refining ideas. It is already better than most of us at delivering content. Which forces us to ask: If AI can do that part, what should we be doing?

That is a lot of stuff to get wrong in just one paragraph.

"We don't need to know stuff because we can look it up on the internet" is one of the dumbest ideas to come out of the internet era. You cannot have thoughts regarding things you know nothing about. The notion here is that somehow some historically illiterate shmoe with an internet connection could be as functionally great a historian as David McCullough. 

"Modern work demands..." a bunch of social skills which will be hard to develop sitting in front of a computer screen--but I have a sick feeling they have a "solution" for that. And sure enough--instead of a social process involving other humans, you can get the "social" element from AI as a "co-creator." AI creates nothing. It can ask questions, but it can't raise meaningful objections and it can't refine ideas because it does not think. And this next line--

"It is already better than most of us at delivering content." How? First of all, it's not a great sign that these folks are using "content" instead of "information" or "learning." Content is the mulch of the internet, the fodder used to fill click-hungry eyeball-collecting ad-clogged websites. Content is not meant to engage or inform or launch an inquiry for greater understanding; it's just bulk meant to take up space and keep things moving, roughage for the internet's bowels. Second, AI delivers content along the same "broadcast-era model" the authors were disparaging mere paragraphs ago. And finally, AI can't even deliver "content" that is reliably accurate. AI's closest human analog is not a scholar, but a bullshit artist--and one that doesn't know anything about the topic at hand.

So we are not off to a great start here. And we have yet to define "interactionalism," which we are assured is "more than a teaching method" but "a set of principles for designing the skills and knowledge learners need—and the mechanisms by which they acquire them—in a world where human and machine intelligence work together." What does "designing knowledge" even mean?

Well, here come the three pillars of interactionalism. Buckle up:

Dialogical learning. Learners and AI agents engage in two-way conversational exchanges. There are no one-way lectures. Every presentation invites questions; every explanation invites challenges. Learners' questions inform the assessment of competence just as much as their answers. Feedback is continuous, as it is in the workplace.

I'm going to skip over the glib assumption that feedback is continuous in the workplace. Instead, I want to know why a computer makes a better partner for the Socratic method than an actual human, whose knowledge of the topic being dialogically learninated might produce some more useful and pointed questions than one can expect from a chatbot.

Interactive skill building. As AI takes over more routine tasks, uniquely human skills—such as questioning, adapting models to context, and exercising judgment—become central. These are practiced continuously and in conversation with AI tools long before students face similar exercises in the real world.

What do you mean "long before students face similar exercises in the real world"? Are you seriously suggesting we bubble up some young humans and have them practice humaning with an empty stochastic parrot rather than with other humans? Do you imagine that young humans--including very young humans-- do not practice "questioning, adapting models to context, and exercising judgment" on a regular daily basis? Have you met some young humans? 

Meta-human skills. Beyond subject mastery, students develop metacognition (thinking about their thinking) and meta-emotional skills (managing their emotions), as well as the ability to design and refine AI agents. Proficiency in these skills enables learners to shift from being passive users to active shapers of their digital collaborators.

A bicycle, because a vest has no sleeves. Meta-cognition, emotional management, and refining AI "agents" do not become related skills just because you put those words in the same sentence. Is the suggestion here that learning to be humans has utility because it help you help the AI better fake being a human, because that would be some seriously backward twisted shit that confuses who is supposed to be serving whom.

So those are the pillars. But this new approach requires a new kind of curriculum that is "dynamic, learner-adaptive, and co-created." It's going to have the following features:

Dynamic, adaptive content. The curriculum is a living entity, updated in response to new discoveries, industry changes, and students' needs. It is modular in design and can be easily revised.

Yes, this again. Fully adaptive course content has always been out of reach because it costs money, but perhaps if AI ever becomes anything less than grossly expensive, maybe the chatbot will do it instead. Of course, someone will have to check every last bit for accuracy so that students aren't learning, say, an entirely made-up bibliography. 

Co-creation of learning pathways. Students collaborate with instructors to set goals and choose content. Peer-to-peer design, shared decision-making, and ongoing negotiation over scope and depth are the norm.

We see a pattern developing here. Not the worst idea in the world (at least on the college level, where students know enough to reasonably "choose content"), but what reason is there to believe that involving AI would make this work any better than just using human beings?

Multiple perspectives and sources. Moving beyond single textbooks or single voices, learners explore diverse viewpoints, open resources, real-world data, and contributions from experts across fields.

Again, why is AI needed to pursue these goals that have been commonplace for the last sixty years?

Formative, responsive assessments. Evaluation is integrated into the learning process through self-assessment, peer review, and authentic tasks that reflect real-world applications.

In the K-12 world, we were all training to do this stuff in the 90s. Without AI.

Cultivation of self-directed learning. Students learn to chart their own learning journeys, gradually assuming more responsibility for outcomes while building skills for lifelong learning.

See also: open schools of the 1960s.

For instructors, this shift is profound. They move from being content deliverers to facilitators, mentors, and curators of learning communities.

Good lord in heaven. Is there anyone in education who has not heard a discussion of relative merits of "the sage on the stage" versus "the guide on the side." But the authors promise that classrooms will focus on "what humans do best: discussion, debate, simulation and collaboration." Students will shut their laptops and work together "on challenging applications of their learning, supported by peers and guided by faculty who know them not just as learners, but as people."

These promises have been made and remade, debated and implemented for decades. What do these folks think they have that somehow makes this "profound" shift possible?

AI-- an enabler of scale!

"Intelligent agents" will provide personalized, support, feedback and intervention at scale. 

The most revealing form of assessment—a probing, ten-minute conversation—can now be conducted by dialogic agents for hundreds of students, surfacing the depth (or shallowness) of understanding in ways multiple-choice tests never could.

No. I mean, wise choice, comparing chatbots to the worst form of assessment known to humans, but still-- no. The dialogic agent can assess whether the student has strung together a highly probably string of words that falls within the parameters of the strings of words in its training bank (including whatever biases are included in its "training"). It certainly can't probe. 

And even if it could, how would this help the human instructor better know the students as learners or people? What is lost when the AI reduces a ten minute "conversation" to a 30 second summary?

And how the hell are students supposed to feel about being required to get their grade by chatting with a bot? What would they learn beyond how to talk to the bots to get the best assessment? Why should any student make a good faith attempt to speak about their learning when no responsible human is making a good faith attempt to listen to them?

The goal, they declare, is to move education from content acquisition to the "cultivation of thinking, problem-solving, self-reflection and human traits that cannot be automated," capabilities that enhance not just employability but well-being. Like these are bold new goals for education that nobody ever thought of repeatedly for more than half a century. And then one last declaration:

AI doesn't diminish this mission—it sharpens it. The future of teaching and learning is not about keeping up with machines, but about using them to become more deeply and distinctively human.

How does AI sharpen the mission? Seven minutes later we still don't have an answer, because there isn't one. The secret of better, deeper humaning is not getting young humans to spend more time with simulated imitation humans. 

It's fitting that a co-founder of Matter and Space is a veteran of the MOOC bubble, a "brilliant" idea that was going to get education to everyone with relatively low overhead costs. MOOCs failed hard, quickly. They turned out to be, as Derek Newton wrote at Forbes, mainly "marketing tools and revenue sources for “certificate” sellers." Post-mortems of MOOCs focused on the stunningly low completion and retention rate, and many analysts blamed that one the fact that MOOCs were free. I think it's just as likely that the problem was that MOOC students were isolated, sitting and watching videos on a screen and completing work on their own. Education is a social process. If nobody cares if you show up or try, why should you show up or try?

An AI study buddy does not solve that problem. In education, AI still only solves one problem--"How can I increase revenue by simultaneously lowering personnel costs and increasing number of customers served?"

The authors of this piece have, on one level, described an educational approach that is sound (and popular for decades). What they have not done is to make a compelling case for why automated edu-bots are the best way to pursue their educational vision-- they haven't even made a case for why edu-bots would be an okay way to pursue it. Wrapping a whole lot of argle bargle and edu-fluff language around the same old idea-- we'll put your kid on a computer with a bot-- does not make it a good idea, and you are not crazy for thinking it isn't. 

FL: Anti-Woke College Not Working Out So Well

You will recall that a couple of years ago, his head filled with fantasies about running for President as a smarter, more stable Trump, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis decided to take over small, liberalish New College and make it proof of concept for Unwoke Higher Ed. He put former Speaker of the House and then education chief Richard Corcoran in charge and sat back to watch the antiwokeness flourish.

Now Inside Higher Ed reports that the flourishing isn't quite happening. 

The gutting of anything woke-ish happened, with things like gender studies being trashcanned. Corcoran got it into his head that maybe they could beef up the athletic program (from scratch), which resulted in some aggressive recruiting of athletes who were not exactly the cream of the academic crop. In the process, New College even reinvented affirmative action. New College trustee and culture panic manufacturer Chris Rufo explained in the New York Times: 

In the past, about two-thirds of New College’s students were women. “This is a wildly out-of-balance student population, and it caused all sorts of cultural problems,” said Rufo. Having so many more women than men, he said, turned New College into “what many have called a social justice ghetto.” The new leadership, he said, is “rebalancing the ratio of students” in the hopes of ultimately achieving gender parity.

Too many women equals too much liberal stuff (because for MAGA, the problem with liberalism is that it's not manly enough, and if all of this seems to imply some misogynist ideas about the relative merits of male and female thought, well, yes) so affirmative action for dudes is more important than, say, admission based on merit.

DeSantis wanted this all to work so badly that New College got a blank check from the legislature, and Josh Moody at Inside Higher Ed reports that the school has been using that check and loading it with zeros. Annual cost per student at other Florida state system schools = $10,000. At New College it's more like $134,000. No, that is not one my typos.

Part of the expense appears to be related to retention and graduation problems. Enrollment dipped, and New College offered guaranteed admissions to certain local students. Moody quotes a faculty member:

“It’s kind of like a Ponzi scheme: Students keep leaving, so they have to recruit bigger and bigger cohorts of students, and then they say, ‘Biggest class ever’ because they have to backfill all the students who have left,” they said.

Nathan Allen, who was VP of strategy at New College for 18 months after the takeover told Moody that he thinks legislators may be running out of patience:

“I think that the Senate and the House are increasingly sensitive to the costs and the outcomes,” Allen said. “Academically, Richard’s running a Motel 6 on a Ritz-Carlton budget, and it makes no sense.”

Costs are up, ranking is down, they can't hold onto students, and the Mighty Banyans (really) still don't have a winning basketball team. And nobody wanted to talk to Moody to say nice things about the school. It would appear that going woke might not be the only way to go broke. 

ICYMI: Reunion Edition (9/28)

It's my high school graduating class's 50th reunion this weekend, and a class reunion is always something.  I suppose some day, when the education "system" is a loose free market where people switch back and forth, the idea of a special event to get together with the people you spent your youth with-- I suppose that will be quaint and unusual. But for right now, it's fun. I missed out on part of the fun because I am also conducting the pit orchestra for a local production of "Singin' in the Rain" so it's been a busy week. Well, who wants to be bored.

Here's the reading list for the week. Read and share.

What schools stand to lose in the battle over the next federal education budget

Cory Turner at NPR with an explainer about the three budget proposals in DC and what schools could be hit by.

Why Teaching Math for Test Results Is Not Enough

Jose Luis Vilson reminds of us some important factors that need to be discussed in the math instruction world.

Just one regret: Sarah Inama reflects on year of controversy

For Idaho Ed News, Emma Epperly reports on the teacher who caused all sorts of trouble by putting up a poster that said everyone is welcome.

School Privatizers Fundamentally Change Public Schools

Stephen Dyer looks at how a voucher program actually changes the fundamental nature of the public schools that are left with students the private schools don't want.

What the Right Gets Right About What's Gone Wrong with Public Education

Jennifer Berkshire notes that many on the right have decided that schools need to provide more than job training-- and they're correct.

Breaking Up Public Schools Dangerously Divided the Nation!

Nancy Bailey points out that if you take away what was once the shared experience of all students and break it into silos, the nation pays a price.

On schools and social media

Vermont just passed a law limiting social media for schools, and it's a reminder of the many ways that students and social media don't mix well. Tracy Novick has some thoughts.

A Publicly Funded School System, With Zero Accountability To the Public

David Pepper explains why Ohio's voucher system is a guaranteed source for bad behavior.

School choice doesn’t need federal funding

Kevin Garcia-Galindo in the Carolina Journal provides the conservative argument against opting into the federal voucher program.

“A Third of Teachers Are Terrorists”

That's a Steve Bannon quote, and John Merrow is here to break down the foolishness (with a side of voucher debunking).

From Kindergarten to Kimmel

Anne Lutz Fernandez points out that MAGA has been warming up its censorship routines on K-12 teachers long before they went after Jimmy Kimmel.

Trump Attack on Fair Housing Will Impact Public School Integration

Going after fair housing is a more wonky pursuit for the Trump regime, but Jan Resseger explains how that will cause problems for schools.

James Kirylo: America’s Peculiar Love Affair

The indispensable Mercedes Schneider provides a guest post looking at America's love affair with guns and the price children pay for it.

Waiting for the Unraveling

TC Weber gets into the picture on the ground in Tennessee, and this week it's a grab bag of various education shenanigans, from vouchers to test results.

It's official. I'm taking Crazy Pills.

Stephen Dyer again. As the feds decide to drop some more charter money on Ohio, he points out the sad, failed history of the last federal attempt to goose Ohio's charter industry.

The Chatbot in the Classroom, the Forklift at the Gym

Alfie Kohn dives into the world of school AI and finds it more disturbing than impressive. Great compendium of writing about the topic.

Video Shows GOP Education Official Bolt From Reporter After Announcing His Resignation

Ryan Walters borrowed a TV studio to announce his resignation, then ran away from that station's reporter afterwards. The video of him swiftly escaping questions is a fitting image with which to end his reign of incompetence.

Over at Forbes.com, I wrote about an important book of teacher voices from the culture wars, and new data showing the teacher pay penalty is at an all-time high. At the Bucks County Beacon, I looked at Pennsylvania's problems in filling teaching positions. 

This week's clip defies categories, but it's still fun.

Sign up for my substack. It's free and makes it easy to stay caught up with whatever I'm cranking out.

Bring Back Broad Education

 

Yeah, the term they're searching for is "liberal arts."

I graduated from little Allegheny College, a school that used to proudly advertise itself as a liberal arts college. Students were required to meet distribution requirements by taking courses outside of their major, and every department offered courses for non-majors, which is why I graduated with a degree in English but courses in astronomy, geology, computer science, sociology, music, and theater. 

I never doubted the value of a liberal arts approach for me as a future teacher; teaching is all about showing connections between stuff, and you can't really connect dots if you aren't familiar with more than one or two dots. 

A liberal arts approach makes double sense to me in K-12 education. The more stuff you know about, the more choices you have. The more stuff you try, the better chance you'll find what you are in tune with.

But one of the pressures of reformsterism has been to turn schools into vocational training centers. Back in 2013, Allan Golston at the Gates Foundation wrote "Businesses are the primary consumers of the output of our schools." That was endemic in Common Core support. Take this other example from Rex Tillerson, Exxon CEO, also pitching the Core:

“I’m not sure public schools understand that we’re their customer—that we, the business community, are your customer,” said Tillerson during the panel discussion. “What they don’t understand is they are producing a product at the end of that high school graduation.”

Get those meat widgets ready to be useful and employable by corporations. There has been bipartisan support for the idea of measuring college swellness based on the quality of job that graduates get. 

And with this focus on education as vocational training, folks have embraced the idea that education, even from early years, should be singularly focused on that future job. Come on, fifth graders-- pick your career!

The problem with this was always that it serves employers far batter than it serves students. Sure, it's great for Widget Corp with a need for 20 new widget makers annually if the local K-12 district cranks out 100 widget makers every year. Widget Corp gets to pick the best 20 of the 100-- great for them. But what are the other 80 supposed to do?

As described in the clip above, the situation can be even worse. Four years ago, going to college to be a computer programmer seemed like a no-brainer, and now it's suddenly a huge mistake. The employment landscape is shifting and changing, sometimes with catastrophic speed, and a person who trained for one particular career path can find himself in a real bind.

So we have this "new" wisdom-- instead of focusing all your energies on one particular deep pursuit, maybe broaden your education so that you are familiar with a whole bunch of stuff. Gives you flexibility (and maybe even makes you better at whatever job you end up with and maybe even also enriches your life). 

This all dovetails nicely with the returning idea that reading proficiency is best built through teaching lots and lots of content, that students best learn to read by building a body of content knowledge. 

So by all means-- let's bring back a fully rounded education aimed at fostering broadly educated complete human beings who have a fuller knowledge of being fully human in the world, because that not only gives them a better shot at living full and rich lives, but because it's also better protection against the wide swings of economy and business than, say, chasing whatever corporations demand for their meat widget supply. 

 

OK: Ryan Walters has Resigned For Cushy Anti-Union Gig

Ryan Walters announced Wednesday night that he was resigning as Oklahoma's Dudebro-in-chief for Education. He made the announcement, of course, on Fox. 

His new gig is right in line with his work over the past couple of years. He will be the new CEO of Teacher Freedom Alliance, whose aim, Walters says, is to dismantle teachers’ unions and align school curriculum with “American exceptionalism.”

Teacher Freedom Alliance is yet another of those anti-union groups for teachers. They just launched in March of this year, and the special guest was Ryan Walters himself. 

TFA (they really should have checked to see if the acronym was taken) is a project of the Freedom Foundation. Who are they? Well, their website gives us a good introduction to them:

The Freedom Foundation is more than a think tank. We’re more than an action tank. We’re a battle tank that’s battering the entrenched power of left-wing government union bosses who represent a permanent lobby for bigger government, higher taxes, and radical social agendas.

Their language when approaching teachers and other members of public sector unions is a lot about liberating public employees from political exploitation. Their language in spaces like fundraising letters is a bit more blunt:

The Freedom Foundation has a proven plan for bankrupting and defeating government unions through education, litigation, legislation and community activation ... we won’t be satisfied with anything short of total victory against the government union thugs.

Destroy unions and defund the political left. And they work hard at it, too. They have put an army of foot soldiers out there going door to door in hopes of turning an entire state blue. In one example, they sent activists dressed as Santa Claus to stand outside government buildings, where they told workers they could give themselves a holiday gift by exercising their right not to pay that portion of union dues that goes to political activity.

The foundation was launched in 1991 as the Evergreen Freedom Foundation by Lynn Harsh and Bob Williams. These days Harsh is VP of Strategy for the State Policy Network, the national network of right wing thinky tanks and advocacy groups founded in 1992 (it appears that the foundation may have helped with that launch). Her bio says she started out as a teacher and went on to found two private schools. Williams was a Washington state politician and failed gubernatorial candidate. He went on to work with SPN and ALEC, the conservative corporate legislation mill before passing away in 2022. SPN started giving out an award in his name in 2017.

The foundation is not small potatoes operation-- the staff itself is huge, and the foundation operates out of offices in five states (Washington, Oregon, California, Ohio, and Pennsylvania).

Longtime CEO Tom McCabe is now the Chairman of the Board, and he has been pretty clear in his aims. “Labor bosses are the single greatest threat to freedom and opportunity in America today,” he wrote in one fundraising letter. The current CEO is Aaron Withe, the guy who headed up the door-to-door campaign the get Oregon union members to quit their unions. Presumably he didn't go door to door with the same smarm evident in his company bio pic.

The foundation gets money from a variety of the usual suspects, including the Koch family foundations, Sarah Scaife Foundation, Donors Trust, Ed Uihlein Family Foundation, the Richard and Helen DeVos Foundation, and the State Policy Network. The have gotten small mountains of money from the Bradley Foundation, which also heavily funds the anti-union Center for Union Facts.

Many of these same folks helped fund the Janus lawsuit that did away with Fair Share, and the Freedom Foundation was one of the groups that immediately started to work to get teachers to leave their unions.

The Freedom Foundation has tried various pr stunts to get teachers to quit the union, like the time they sent out Halloween mailers exhorting teachers to "Stop these money-sucking vampires and TAKE BACK YOUR PAYCHECK TODAY"

So what is TFA offering? For one thing, culture panic:

We are a group for teachers and by teachers, ready to change the direction of public education, returning us to traditional, American values. Excellence, not ideology.

On the website, that's in all caps. I spared you the shouting.

Turns out the "by teachers" part is a stretch. In addition to Withe as "president" the three members of "the team" include Rachel Maiorana is the Director of Marketing and Advocacy; she is also the former Deputy National Director of the Freedom Foundation after serving as California Outreach director since 2021. She was also a Campus Coordinator for Turning Point USA, after doing "brand ambassador work for Coke and serving as a cheerleading coach. Coms degree from Cal State Fullerton.

Director of Member Programs Ali Abshire joined the program in December 2024. Before that she was a Behavioral Health Specialist at Cincinatti Children's, a program officer at the Reagan Ranch, a nanny, a kitchen team member at Chick-fil-A in Lynchburg, and a manager at Zoup! Eatery! Her BS in psychology is from Liberty University in 2022.

Executive Director Eloise Branch came from the Director of Teacher Engagement post at Freedom Foundation, after a couple of years as curator at Young America's Foundation (a campus conservatives outfit) and teaching for two non-consecutive years at The Classical Academy. She got her BA in History from Grove City College in 2017. GCC is about 30 minutes away from me, and it has fashioned itself into a small Hillsdale College of PA.

So not exactly a deep bench of seasoned and experienced educators here. What benefits do they offer?

Well, there's "dignifying professional development." And when it comes to that Big Deal that everyone frets about-- liability insurance-- their offer is novel. You get a chance to piggy back on the liability coverage offered to two other "alternative" teacher unions. You can choose the Christian Education Association (you can read their story here) or the Association of American Educators (more about them here). Both are longstanding non-union unions, with CEA very Christ-in-the-classroom emphasis and AAE more aligned with the Fordham-AEI axis of reformsterdom. Neither is large enough to provide credible support for a teacher in a big-time lawsuit, nor am I sure how hard they'd try to defend someone accused of reading Naughty Books or doing socialist DEI things.

There's a third benefit offered, and that's "alternative curricula" which includes "alternative curriculums and teaching pedagogies ranging from the science of reading to classical mathematics to explicit instruction to the Socratic Method" which may lead one to ask "alternative to what?"

If you can't already guess based on the source of these folks, the website drops more hints about what these folks consider "alternative."

We exist to develop free, moral, and upright American citizens.

The launch party was attended by 50 whole educators and a bunch of Freedom Foundation staffers.

Also worth noting-- the Center for Media and Democracy reports that Freedom Foundation tried this on a smaller scale in the Miami-Dade district, where they backed another faux union and, aided by Governor Ron DeSantis-backed anti-union legislation. They promised that they would "bring the nation's third-largest teachers union to the brink of extinction." They did not-- teachers voted 83% to 17% to stick with their existing AFT affiliate.

TFA is mum on one other union function-- negotiating contracts. At the launch party, Withe promised that TFA would “provide benefits and resources that are far superior to anything that the teachers unions do.” He even made an emphatic gesture on "far." That's another piece of the free market fairy tale-- the free market will just pay teachers a whole lot. This is a silly argument. First of all, the free market doesn't work quite the same when you're talking about people paid with tax dollars. Second of all, the notion that people are just dying for the chance to pay great teachers a whole lot more, but that darned union is holding them back is unsupported by any reality-based evidence. You'll occasionally find young teachers declaring that left to their own devices, they could negotiate a far better deal than the union, and, oh, honey. What kind of leverage do you think you have. But even if you could, the finite pot of money that schools work with means that you would be negotiating against all the other teachers. Maybe teaching Thunderdome would be fun, but I doubt it.

People don't pay teachers much because A) they can't afford to and B) they don't want to. And C) they especially don't want to spend a lot on education for Those Peoples' Children. And this is especially true of folks like the Freedom Foundation, who do not want to end unions for the teachers own good but because A) ending the unions would hurt the Democratic party and B) without unions, it would be even easier to pay teachers bottom dollar.

At that same launch party, Ryan Walters said, "The Freedom Foundation-- it sounds too good to be true. I promise you it's not." I suspect he's right both times-- it's not too good, and it's not true.

But now he gets to steer this anti-union cultural warboat. 

Meanwhile, Gentner Drummond, the conservative GOP state attorney general who has been a thorn in Walters' side has offered his own "don't let the door hit you" thoughts on the departure:

Ever since Gov. Stitt appointed Ryan Walters to serve as Secretary of Education, we have witnessed a stream of never-ending scandal and political drama. From the mishandling of pandemic relief funds that resulted in families buying Xboxes and refrigerators to the latest squabbling with board members over what was or wasn't showing on TV [porn, probably], the Stitt-Waters era has been an embarrassment to our state...

It's time for a State Superintendent of Public Instruction who will actually focus on quality instruction in our public schools. Gov. Stitt used to say he would make us Top Ten, but after seven years we are ranked 50th in education. Our families, our students and our teachers deserve so much more.

Spoken like a man who A) has found Walters a constant pain in the ass and B) is running for governor.

Walters was a culture warrior for christianist nationalism who could be found more often trying to raise his national profile than in his office actually doing his job. His departure is good news for Oklahoma (though it's Oklahoma, so I expect a pretty conservative replacement). As for TFA, their website proudly boasts a whopping 2,733 teachers signed up for their anti-union union, so if they're meant to be a big national player, Walters has his work cut out for him, but he may just be the unserious man for this unserious job. 

Can We Stop Pushing Primal Fear On Students?

Jeremy Clifton has some ideas about how to understand human understanding of the world. Maybe they could be useful for how we teach students.

Stay with me. This will take a bit.

Who is Jeremy Clifton?

Jeremy Clifton is an academic researchy guy. He's working at UPenn, where he's currently Senior Research Scientist at the UPenn Positive Psychology Center where he directs the Primals Project. Before getting back into academia, he worked for Habitat for Humanity, including in Sri Lanka. He earned a Bachelors in Philosophy in 2007 (Houghton University) and a Masters in Applied Positive Psychology in 2013 (UPenn). He started on his PhD in 2014 and founded the whole, well, field of Prinals. Also, while he was an undergrad, he worked as a firefighter with the Houghton Fire Department.

He is not an educator, and he has not set out to connect his primals research to education. We'll get to that part.

So what is this Primal stuff?

Everyone walks around with their own internal map of the world, their own ideas about how the world works. We don't always think about them or take them out and look at them, but we couldn't function without them. What kind of world do we live in? Our answer to that question dives a lot of our behavior.

What Clifton has done is to break down and quantify the answer to that big What Kind Of World Do We Live In question, and he calls them primal world beliefs. His team has sifted through a mountain of statements about the nature of the world, and boiled it down to three central questions--

Is the world safe or dangerous? Is the world enticing or dull? Is the world alive (with some sort of animating intelligence or direction) or mechanistic? Each of those three is an umbrella for several more specific primal beliefs. The 26 primals add up to how "good" or "bad" you think the world is. If you want to read a very academic paper that gets into this work and also addresses the overlap with philosophy, try this. For laypeople, there's a whole web site about this primals stuff, but here is the actual list:




I don't think Clifton has come up with anything profoundly earthshattering here, but I do think it's a very useful tool for breaking down how we talk about how we understand the world, and I find that really interesting for reasons I'll get to in a minute.

Some of what we can observe here is not hard to figure out. Psychologists know that if you enter a space that you see as dangerous and combative, you will enter that place on high alert. Clifton is talking about a matter of scale; iow, what if you think the entire world is a dangerous and combative place?

Here's a good brief explainer:

 


The line that resonates with me is "my job is not to say which one is true but I can give you insight as to how your answer might affect your life."

Clifton and his team are psychology folks, interested in how to get a handle on the levers and switches that explain and, maybe, help human behavior. But if you're a regular reader here, you already know who else deals with questions of what drives human behavior and how that might be shaped.

Generation Scared and the Mental Health Crisis

For most of the 21st century, when civilians asked me "What are students like these days," my answer was, "They are scared." I've written about it in one of my more widely read pieces. We've heard plenty about a mental health crisis among young people. We are collectively stuck on the question of why and what and who and how? Who is scaring our kids? How are they getting the idea that the world is a bad, scary place?

I've had tabs about Clifton's works open for months, since I first came across it in a post by Robert Pondiscio, "Stop Telling Kids the World Is A Terrible Place." Pondiscio points out

Clifton and his colleague Peter Meindl found that negative primals—seeing the world as dangerous, barren, unjust—“were almost never associated with better life outcomes. Instead, they predicted less success, less life satisfaction, worse health, more depression, and increased suicide attempts.”

Pondiscio argues that schools that we "marinate children in bleak narratives" about social injustice and democracy in trouble.

From trauma-informed pedagogy to social justice curricula, many well-meaning educators have embraced a mission of radical truth-telling—foregrounding systemic injustice, historical oppression, and future threats in the name of equity and authenticity.

Pondiscio argues that the well-intentioned idea of exposing students to themes of suicide, depression, abuse, suicide, and systemic injustice are having the unfortunate effect of developing a set of primals, a world view, that is bleak and potentially damaging.

I'll disagree on a couple of counts here. First, there are far more bleak factors influencing student world views than the mostly-lefty influences that he cites. Active shooter drills and the daily practice of various forms of security theater practiced in school send a constant message that violent attacks are a constant danger. Virtually all students in school right now cannot remember a time when a major political figure/sometimes President has not been announcing that this country is, in part or in whole, a terrible hellhole. Fear has been woven into all political rhetoric, 24/7, and if we don't think that isn't trickling down to young humans who lack the ability to distance themselves from political posturing, we are kidding ourselves-- and it's only worse for those exposed to an electronic anger-and-fear algorithm for their media intake. That's before they start to absorb all the information about how hard it is to find a decent job or buy a house or hopeless to try to pay for a college degree that may not even help. And by the way kids, the new NAEP scores say you are the worst ever. Yes, young humans witness a great deal of negative world-building these days, but I don't think we can pin the blame on any single political, cultural, or educational sector. Hell, name five major prominent cultural figures who consistently present a positive, encouraging, beauty-appreciating view of the world.

Second, Clifton's own work says that our experience does not shape our primals so much as our primals shape how we view our experience. Which is very human. We tend to seek confirmation of our pre-existing views, and find that confirmation whether it's really there or not. Ultimately, an awful lot of those primals are developed at home and are unlikely to be budged by school. I haven't found it anywhere yet, but I'd love to know what Clifton has to say about differences between those whose primals are shiftable and those whose primals are set in concrete.

I do agree with Pondiscio that as a society, we have convinced a generation (maybe two) that they are too weak to stand up to the rigors of the world, and they are struggling with that message. He is clear that he doesn't want rose colored glasses, and that's sensible-- one of the things that toxic positivity toxic is the message "Let's just pretend everything's fine, sweetie, because you are too weak and tiny to handle the truth."

I have personal feelings about this: one of my lessons from the meltdown of my first marriage is understanding that one secret of life is not finding ways to avoid Hard Things, but instead finding the strength to deal with the Hard Things that will inevitably come. This lesson never gets old. It's a central irony of MAGA, which is hell-bent on controlling everything so that they never have to deal with stuff outside their tiny-boxed view of the world, thereby broadcasting that they think they're too weak to deal with any outside-the-box stuff.

Pondiscio has become interested in ways to use Clifton's primal research in education, and I can see how that might work, because I kind of did it already.

Primals in the classroom

I'm not stunned by what Clifton has come up with; it's plenty of stuff that we already knew (people who see the world as a bad broken place tend to be kind of miserable). But I do like the framework he and his team have come up with.

In particular, it's interesting to think about how cultural shifts reflect and influence the various primal values that people in those cultures have. And the thing is, we already study that sort of thing.

For most of my career, I taught American Literature with a focus on the different -isms reflected in the culture and the writing. Puritanism, Age of Reason, Romanticism, Realism, Modernism-- each a different way to see and understand how the world works. We studied the ideas behind the isms and then looked for how those beliefs were reflected in the writings of the period. In discussion we often compared the isms by looking at particular beliefs. Who thought that humans were powerful and important, and who thought they were insignificant specks? Who thought that the world was given order and direction by a higher power, and who thought it was just a machine, and who thought that it was random senselessness? Could I chart every one of these isms on Clifton's 26-point frame? I certainly could, and it would be an interesting framework.

But more than that--

One of the subtexts of my year-long ism teaching was that different people could look at the same world and develop a different map of how that world worked. Sometimes their view of how the world works changed in response to changes in the world (e.g. the grit and downbeat darkness of realism was in part a response to growing unpleasantness of urban and industrial growth). Sometimes the changes happened because people chose to see things differently. Every one of these people of various beliefs was sure that their picture of how the world works was the true and accurate one.

My students would recognize my standard spiel before each time I would deliver the new ism. "I am not here to tell you these people were right, or that they were wrong. My job is to make their case as clearly and forcefully as they would make it themselves. Accept or reject it as you wish; I just want you to be able to recognize their beliefs in action." Discussion of the "How could they think X' variety was always met with "What I think they would say to that, and why, is..."

And so my subversive lesson over the course of the year was that people can see the same world and believe different things about it. Or to dig even deeper, there may not be one true way to understand the world (though that is itself just one way to understand the world).

Clifton's work, with its vast catalog of many different primal beliefs, fits perfectly with that.

Now, this whole approach implies a level of pluralism in the classroom that the right wing crowd sure doesn't seem interested in these days. It also assumes that young humans are capable of navigating complicated belief systems. I can absolutely see students enjoying Clifton's primal inventory as a way to put words, a framework, and definitions to their own personal understanding of the world. And I very much like the idea that this frames their map of the world not on how closely it matches "true" reality, but on how they fall on a human spectrum of different ways to understand the world.

Anything that assumes that there's a difference between "how you see the world" and "how the world actually is" strikes me as a good thing. Anything that doesn't sort world views into "right" and "wrong" strikes me as a good thing. And anything that suggests to young humans that they have options in how they understand the world, and that exercising these different options could help them find more positive and productive ways to move through the world-- that's good too.

I generally define education as helping young humans figure out how to be fully themselves and fully human in the world. I don't know that I see Clifton's primals framework as revolutionary, but I see how it can be useful.

As for the grownups in the picture

If educators viewed themselves as building or reinforcing primals in school, would it help?

I can't help noticing that some of the primals, like pleasure and beauty and wonder, involve exactly the sort of things that some administrators and stern conservatives dismiss as not serious or academically rigorous; if you want to reinforce the idea that the world can be beautiful and joyful and filled with wonder, you need to find a way to organize schools and classrooms that reflects those values, and a carefully regimented test-prep grindathon that emphasizes compliance is probably not your best bet. Certainly many of these primal values do not align with the Big Standardized Test (one more reason these tests should go away). In fact, if we really want to do work primals into our educational approaches, step one would have to be taking a cold hard look at what primals are promoted by all current practices, and not just the squishy lefty ones.

There is an undertone of spirituality to all of this (the video above actually comes from the Templeton Religion Trust whose "aim is to improve the well-being of individuals and societies through spiritual growth and an ever-improving understanding of spiritual realities and spiritual information") which means that attempts to incorporate this model into education is liable to raise backlash from folks on both the left (schools shouldn't teach religion) and the right (don't you dare try to indoctrinate my kid).

I can certainly see ways in which this research could be misused, including attempts to get students to understand the world in one particular way. But I can also say that I find Clifton's work interesting, and if I were still in a classroom, I'd be finding ways to get some use out of it. I welcome anything that puts the focus on what it means to be human in the world and not on how to crank deliverables in the form of data or product from a soulless plagiarism machine.