No, AI Should Not Write Your Outline

When folks go casting about for some use for AI in schools, the two items that frequently come up are brainstorming and outlining. This is a lousy idea.

You can convince me that AI brainstorming is no worse than handing a student a list of possible topics for an assignment, though not as good as a suggestion or two from a teacher who is familiar with the student's interests and strengths. 

But outlining the work? No, no, a thousand times, no.

Part of demonstrating understanding of complex ideas is showing that you have a grasp of how they fit together, how one connects to another. That structure and connection is what drives the organization of a piece of work. The structure and organization also reflect the process of deciding what to include and what to leave out. Without selection and structure of ideas, you end up with a pile of unvariegated details in a paper best entitled (as I often told me students) "A Bunch of Stuff About This Topic."

This has been my eternal beef with the traditional shake and bake "research" assignment in schools. You know the one-- go find some sources about your topic, then write a paper in which you re-state what they say, but in such a way that you aren't technically plagiarizing. 

What is always taken from sources (usually just one) is not simply facts and data, but organization and structure. When an author goes to write, say, the sixty gazillionth biography of Abraham Lincoln, the author's most important work is to first decide what the point, the thesis, of their book will be, then to use that filter to select which details and source materials from Lincoln's life to include (a process that is often looplike-- search through materials, develop a thesis, look at more materials, modify the thesis, and on and on) and then figure out how to best arrange the details to support that thesis. There may be more looping back; in the writing, the author may decide that Source Material X doesn't really fit, so it's rejected. The author may also decide that to build a bridge between Point A and Point C they need to do additional research to find material out of which that bridge can be built.

When some high school student grabs the resulting biography for their own paper about Lincoln, they are taking not just facts from the book, but the thesis, the organization, all the decisions about what to leave in and what to take out. And that student is unaware of it all, because if the author did the job well, the book will seem like it just had to be the way it is, that there could be no other way to write about Lincoln. 

Except that, of course, it is the result of deliberate choices made by the author, including uncountable choices that all other Lincoln biographers chose to make differently. It's not just the bricks you collect, but how you choose to put them together. 

The foundation one builds decides much of what house can be built atop it. To imagine that AI can build the foundation and that leaves the student free to make any sorts of choices about the structure built atop it is just silly. The notion that structuring the product is a minor part of the job, and the actual marking of words on a page is the major portion is just wrong. If the writer has been thorough with the selection and structure of the work, the actual writing portion is a smaller part of the labor or creation. 

Most writing problems are thinking problems, and a major portion of the thinking takes place before the actual placing of words on the page begins. To outsource that to a machine that doesn't even think is a recipe for bad writing, and worse, for a product that cannot be reasonably used as an assessment of the student. Which takes us back to the post I was writing when I started writing this one.

The Push To End Public Schools

Despite the fact that the words "school choice" still get tossed around, most of the noisiest figures in the school choice movement have no actual interest in choice, no desire to see traditional public education existing side by side with a variety of different education options. Instead they're pushing for institutional capture, a system of taxpayer-funded private schools that push right wing christianism and christian nationalism alongside a public system that has been largely dismantled even as it has been brought into line with that same right wing ideology.

If you want to see this laid out, I cannot recommend enough a new ProPublica piece by Megan O'Matz and Jennifer Smith Richards. What they make exceptionally clear is that Linda McMahon did not go to Washington to shut down the Department of Education, but to dismantle public education entirely.

You should read the article. Really. And let me tempt you with some highlights that show where McMahon and her crew of joyful vandals are headed.

O'Matz and Richards note that McMahon has brought on at least 20 appointees from way out in right field including, as we have noted before, Lindsey Burke, the education chief at the Heritage Foundation who's serving as Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy and Programs (even though she's still listed in her Heritage Foundation post). She was the author of Project 2025's education plan, which (spoiler alert) looks a lot like what is happening. 

Burke remains a huge fan of voucher programs; O'Matz and Richards correctly describe a recurring theme of getting more families to leave public school. Quoting Burke in a speech last year, "I'm optimistic that, you know, five years from now a majority of kids are going to be in a private school choice program."

Noah Pollack was a co-founder of Jewish Voices for Trump and an "advisor" to multiple right wing groups; he's now a senior advisor of the Ed Department. O'Matz and Richards found this quote from a 2024 podcast appearance, at which he bemoaned what he sees as progressive control of schools:

And so the work that I do is trying to come up with creative policy ideas to stop that, to turn back the tide, to figure out ways that conservatives can protect these institutions or build new institutions.

The writers also track McMahon back to her work with the America First Policy Institute, an advocacy outfit formed in 2020 as a sort of holding pen for Trump admin folks and other MAGA. AFPI produced a paper in 2023 that rejects the notion of any sort of collective responsibility for educating all children argues that “the Bible makes it clear that it is parents alone who shoulder the responsibility for their children.” That message is very much at the heart of the dismantling movement, which is all about a policy of "I'll take of my own kids and what Those People do is not my problem." This aspect of vouchers is not discussed nearly enough-- when you accept a voucher for your child, everyone else gets to wash their hands of you. You are on your own and your child's education is your problem, and not the government's or anyone else's.

There's lots more-- did I mention that you should read this piece-- but I want to highlight one more. One of the few figures in the story that was willing to talk to O'Matz and Richards was Tiffany Justice, co-founder of Moms for America who was featured prominently in the department's "End DEI" initiative and is hooked up with Heritage these days. 

Asked what percentage of children she imagines should be in public schools going forward, Justice, who is now with The Heritage Foundation’s political advocacy arm, told ProPublica: “I hope zero. I hope to get to zero.”

“If America’s public schools cease to exist tomorrow, America would be a better place.” 

That's what they want. Not choice. Not diversity. Not a broad expanse of many educational approaches and ideas. Just one choice. Theirs. And an end to public schools.  

Liberal Redneck - School Voucher Scams

This is from a year ago, but comedian Trae Crowder captures the reality of taxpayer-funded vouchers. Some salty language, but it's always nice when someone outside the education world gets it. 

Saving Time With AI

As AI-mongers continue their full court press to crack the education market, we keep hearing the same pitch over and over again--

AI will help save teachers time. 

Here are a few things to keep in mind the next time you hear this pitch.

Automation and time saving

If you have been in the classroom for more than a couple of weeks, you know this scenario, which has been running since the first teaching aid was created.

"Here's some new stuff," declares your administration. "Use this. It will save you lots of time." Then, under their breath as they head out the door, "Once you get it set up." Getting the tech set up and ready to use? A zillion hours. Time to get the bugs out and establish comfort using the tech. Another zillion hours. Time saved once it's up and running? Fifteen minutes a week. Only that's not really saved, because admins figure that since you have this new time-saving tech, you can pick up this additional work that will only take a zillion hours out of your week.

Now comes AI, which will save you all this time doing things like creating lesson plans, once you get better at creating prompts. Except that you will need to double check every single thing it extrudes, because all it will do is make stuff up, and some of that stuff will be real and some will not. Because, no, ChatGPT will not go examine a bunch of material on your chosen topic, determine which materials are most sound and accurate, study up on what would be most developmentally appropriate for your students, and run this past a comprehensive examination of the best pedagogical techniques. No, it will show you what a possible lesson plan would look like, based on probably word strings. It will not "care" about any of that other stuff. Just saying.\

A solution on the prowl

When you have a solution in search of a problem, you always have the same tell. Instead of starting by asking, "What would be the best way to solve this problem," we get the question, "How would our piece of tech solve this problem?"

In the sales biz, this is called assuming the sale. We've skipped right over the question of whether or not we should buy this "solution" and skipped ahead to the attempt to show the benefits of this tech we'll assume you've already adopted. 

If we are so concerned about teacher burnout and teacher's need for more time to do the work (a problem since forever), then let's start by asking, "How could we help teachers have more time to do the work, and maybe not get so crispy around the edges doing it?"

And the thing is, we know the best answers, and they aren't "an unreliable plagiarism machine." The answers are to reduce class size, hire more teachers, have administrators or aides take over non-teaching jobs, and, in some schools, all the little things that would occur to you if you considered teachers trustworthy professionals deserving of support and respect and not serfs who must be micromanaged. 

The fact that we didn't have any of that conversation around any version of that question tells me that "AI will save teacher time" is a baloney sales pitch, which suggests something else...

Your best foot

You're trying to sell your product as a solution to some problem in education, and the best you can come up with is "It will save time"? Besides the whole "quickie lesson plans" argument, I've seen a smattering of "help with differentiation" and "whip up some very pointed worksheets," but for something that is supposed to be the Swiss Army Knife of ed tech, AI just doesn't seem to have found very many excuses to be shoved into school problems to solve. 

You could use it to grade student writing, but it's pretty hard to pretend that isn't simple dereliction of duty. Anecdotally, I'm hearing about plenty of spectacularly lazy administrators using it to write emails, and in that case, it really would be a time saver to have your chatbot read and respond to the administrator's chatbot, creating a closed loop that causes a big time suck to vanish into its own nether regions.  

Look, here's how ed tech adoption really works in the field. New tech is introduced. Maybe with no training, so it falls into instant disuse. Maybe it piques teacher curiosity and she trains herself (which involves hours playing with it instead of dealing with that huge stack of papers on her desk). Maybe there's enough training that she has a handle on it.

But ultimately the school year is grinding away, and as a teacher has to perform a zillion different tasks and either A) she reaches for the tech because it would be helpful or B) she doesn't, because it wouldn't. 

There is another ed tech adoption scenario, which is the one where someone comes to run a training and explains that this tech would be really useful if you just changed the entire way you do your job. "Our new hammer is a chisel, and if you just change how you build houses, the chisel will be really helpful." AI hasn't been pitched this way because the folks selling it can't come up with any alternate school universe scenarios, either. 

Mostly AI for schools is being pitched by people who don't appear to know enough about teaching to know how an AI could be helpful and so are left to vaguely gesture in the direction of "saving time by doing stuff that, you know, teachers could be not doing." If people really wanted to give teachers more time to do the work, they could talk about staffing or class size or human support staff, but none of that is going to move product.

MS: Pushing for Privatization

Douglas Carswell at the Mississippi Center for Public Policy is excited about all the great privatization pushing that's been going on in the state lately.

MCPP is one more right wing thinky tank connected to and funded by all the usual folks; extra points for having taken on Carswell, a leader of the Brexit movement, as their president and CEO. 

This guy

Mississippi is a state that really aligns certain right wing priorities-- get rid of taxes, get rid of public schools, and just generally get rid of government, all of which is, I'm sure, fully disconnected from the state's past as a place where a lot of white folks really don't want to be told that they have to provide certain public services for those not-white folks. With all that in mind, they would really like to move to universal taxpayer funded vouchers and, really, a pure voucher system where no schools are funded at all and parents get a couple of bucks to go out and do who knows what for their children. 

Carswell sent out his weekly update, declaring that "school choice is our top focus" and "remains our north star." 

The House Education Freedom Committee heard some folks talk about choice, including Mississippi Center for Justice Director of Education Equity Dr. Kim Wiley, who described how Arizona's voucher system has become a budget-eating monster. 

But Carswell wants to underline an appearance from Erika Donalds, Florida's big-time money-making school choice advocate, who apparently appeared on this occasion wearing her Moms for Liberty hat. Donalds certainly earned that hat, who knew and worked with that crew even before they started the M4L shtick. It's just that you don't see her waving the M4L hat around very often. They also heard from Patrick Wolf, Arkansas's go-to guy for shoveling privatization baloney (sometimes he even writes up some "research"). Lindsey Burke, the education chief at the Heritage Foundation (where she authored the education parts of Project 2025) and now Deputy Assistant Secretary-- she has also stopped by.

Caswell explains how choice would work, and provides some specific answers. Particularly notable is his explanation of how choice wouldn't lead to overcrowding:

Under our proposal, schools would get to set capacity limits and decline additional students if full. Schools could also reject students with significant disciplinary issues, maintaining safe and focused learning environments.

This is remarkably frank; school choice would be the school's choice. "We're just too full," they could say. Or "We think your child would be detrimental to our school's learning environment." Which seems fine, because exclusionary education has never been a problem in Mississippi in the past, right? Not that I should pick on Mississippi-- virtually every taxpayer-funded voucher program includes provisions that allow private schools to exclude whatever students they want to exclude. School choice is school's choice. That right of the school to discriminate is, in practice, given far more weight than any supposed "parent power." But Caswell is a bit unusual in laying it out so plainly.

Caswell also argues that all the other states that surround them are doing it, which is quite the argument to make in the Deep South, with its collective history of educational inadequacy.

Caswell offers other weak sauce as well. Folks say that choice programs defund public schools, "but that's misleading." "Misleading" is a great word for when you want to say "Well, they're not wrong, but I'd rather get you to look at something else." Caswell offers the free market argument-- if public schools don't want to get defunded, they should beat the competition. Of course, they're not competing on a level field-- they can't, for instance, reject students for whatever trips their fancy. Caswell also throws in his version of "fund students, not systems" which is an education version of "I want insurance to fund my broken leg, not my doctor" as if the system is not the "how" of serving the student.

This is particularly odd coming from Mississippi, where the public school system has produced the "Mississippi miracle" which conservatives are holding up as proof of the awesomeness of phonics and Science of Reading, and while there may be a mountain of baloney behind that "triumph," it is being touted as an achievement by the system.

Caswell asserts that school choice works. It's pretty to think so, but that's not what the evidence says. But for an outfit that would like to do away from any instruments that require taxpayers to support education for other peoples' children, a voucher system that pays parents to give up their right to a free guaranteed education is just the thing. 

There are education reformsters who pursue choice because they believe in the magical marketplace or the benefits to students, or at least talk the talk. MCPP is not one of those. They barely discuss the educational aspects of their policy plans, which are coming on the heels of their successful drive to eliminate income tax in the state. They keep talking about "access to the educational opportunities that their kids deserve," but of course those opportunities will only be available to certain select children. 

It's worth noting that Mississippi was always a big state for segregation academies, and some private schools that are essentially segregation academies are still thriving in the state. I bet those private schools will be more than happy to get big fat taxpayer subsidies under a universal voucher plan. Like a little mini-brexit with a state payoff. 

ICYMI: Applefest 25 Edition (10/5)

Every year, on the first full weekend of October, my small town turns itself over to Applefest, a small town festival hung on the hook that Johnny Appleseed lived around here for a few years before his big move into the West. There are vendors, food, a race, a car show, music, and just a lot of stuff. For a couple of days we close down the main street and just walk around. I can't honestly argue that we have something other big festivals in small towns lack, but the town makes a fine scenic backdrop and it is a good time. I run into former students who come back for it and just generally enjoy the hubbub before we turn sleepy again. So that's my weekend. Feel free to visit us next year.

Now for this week's reading list. But first, an image. Do with it what you will--

‘Absolutely devastating’: Rural schools say $100K visa fee could make it hard to hire teachers

Remember all those schools using immigrants to fill teaching positions. They might have a problem now. Erica Meltzer reports for Chalkbeat. 

Deep-Blue California Is a National Leader in De Facto Public-School Segregation. Here’s Why…

Surprise. Mark Kreidler at Capital and Main explains the why of this.

PEN America warns of rise in books 'systematically removed from school libraries'

The latest PEN America update isn't very encouraging, but at least we have some idea of what is actually going on.

Oklahoma AG requests investigation of education department, 1 day after Walters resigns

Ryan Walters may be done with Oklahoma, but the attorney general is not done with him. 

Standards-Based Grades Get a C-

Teacher Andrew Barron explains why he lost faith in standards-based grading. 

Federal court tosses Moms For Liberty associate’s case against Lowell Area Schools

It's always encouraging when the Moms lose one, and lose they did with the case of a Mom who wanted the freedom to harass the school endlessly.

Cory Doctorow: Reverse Centaurs

Cory Doctorow offers a useful framework for explaining when AI is hurting and not helping.

SEL by Another Name? Political Pushback Prompts Rebranding

Arianna Prothero at EdWeek looks at how schools are handling the demonization of Social and Emotional Learning, including rebranding it.

Vouchers would hurt rural Idaho students. That's why we're suing

Rep. Stephanie Mickelsen explains why Idaho's voucher program is a threat to rural students, and what she is trying to do about it.

Do ‘Good’ Schools Stay ‘Good’? And Do ‘Bad’ Schools Stay ‘Bad’?

At The74, Chad Aldeman looks at some data about whether or not schools stay in the top or bottom of the rankings over time.

From Wal-Mart Checkout to the Education Industrial Complex

TC Weber finds connections about connections everywhere he looks in the education world.

The Republican Effort To Remake Schools In God’s Image

Nathalle Baptiste at Huffington Post looks at the continued attempts to jam christianism into the classroom,

How about a Pause on the Race to Embed AI in Schools?

Nancy Flanagan has stayed away from AI commentary, but this time she's leaning into it. And maybe AI-in-school fans should just ease up a bit.

Companion Specious

Audrey Watters looks at some of the more objectionable uses of AI, including the push to use it to save teachers time.

Coalition of Billionaires Masquerades as Mass Reads Coalition

Maurice Cunningham tracks down the people actually behind the Massachusetts push for reading reform, and it's the same old cranky rich guys.

School Reformers’ Pledge of Good Conduct

Larry Cuban has unearthed an old pledge for school reformers, and it's not half bad. Course, I'm not sure many modern reformsters have seen it, let alone signed it.

Ohio’s State Investment in Public School Funding Continues to Decline: Erodes Adequacy and Equity 

Ohio has worked hard to become the Florida of the North when it comes to education. Jan Resseger has some of the receipts from the latest efforts.

Planning to Fail: How HB1’s Flawed Analysis Left Florida Taxpayers Holding the Bag

Sue Kingery Woltanski breaks down the damage being done by Florida's universal voucher expansion.

Hamlet Is the Gen Z Story We Need Right Now

I taught Hamlet for decades, and it was a different play every year. Ted Gioia offers some thoughts about what it has to say right now.

The Concert for George Harrison ended with this rendition of an old standard by Joe Brown. Always gets me right here. 

You can always have my latest stuff clogging up your email by subscribing to the newsletter. Free now and always.

Are Education Savings Accounts Actually Vouchers?

Short answer: Yes.

Long answer to follow.

An Education Savings Account (ESA) may turn up in your state as an Education Freedom Account some kind of Scholarship or some other shiny name. And school choice advocates really, really don't want you to call it a voucher. Why not? Well...

Distinguishing between vouchers and ESAs matters because word choice can introduce misrepresentation of and opposition to a parent empowerment program that would otherwise be well-received.

In other words, there is very little support in this country for vouchers, especially when you call them "vouchers." People appear to understand that a voucher program takes taxpayer dollars away from your public school and hands it instead to some private (probably religious) school. 

Voucher fans do a lot of language testing, determining that lots of folks think that ESAs are vouchers, and Colyn Ritter at EdChoice (formerly the Milton Friedman Foundation) sees that as a problem.

While many of us in the education policy sphere can very succinctly explain the difference between a voucher and an ESA, there is plenty of evidence to show that this distinction is not as easily grasped by various media outlets or skeptics of educational choice programs.

I'm not sure the voucher crowd can explain the distinction all that succinctly. But even if they can, I'm not sure the distinction matters all that much. A classic school voucher allows your student's share of taxpayer dollars for school to go to a private school instead of the public school. An ESA allows your student's share of taxpayer dollars for school to go to a private school or education supplies or a whole list of other allegedly education-related expenses instead of the public school. The truly wonky may also try to describe different pathways that those taxpayer dollars travel. 

It comes down to this-- an ESA is a type of voucher that provides greater flexibility in how the taxpayer dollars can be spent than does a classic voucher. But both are vouchers-- instruments that give a family control of a certain number of taxpayer education dollars. The money follows the student, who could be said to be carrying a backpack full of cash. For the average human, the only distinction is what the family may spend the taxpayer dollars on, and that's simply a difference of degree, not of type. 

It is a bit ironic that voucher fans are concerned about imprecise language here, as an ESA does not really resemble a savings account, isn't an actual scholarship, and doesn't confer any special freedom. 

But charges that voucher opponents are trying to muddy the water or confuse the public are just silly. The public has made the connection mostly on their own, in part with the help of school choice fans who have described vouchers and ESAs with the same language. And if voucher opponents like me had that kind of power, I would have done far more to the public perception of vouchers than just confuse the different varieties. 

We call ESAs vouchers because they are vouchers--instruments for directing taxpayer dollars away from public schools and toward private vendors. If that causes branding problems for supporters, well... you can tell people that a pig is a watermelon, but when slice it up and serve it, they'll still taste pork.