Margaret Spellings Still Doesn't Get It

Why would David Frum (or anyone else) bother to interview Margaret Spellings? But he did, and a friend told me to go look at the result (thanks a lot, Jennifer), and it's a celebration of many of the worst, most failed ideas of 21st century ed reform.

Who's that now?

You can skip this if you remember her, but for those who don't--

Spellings is a career politician, but her career has often intersected with education, and it has generally intersected with it in the same way that a passing motorist once intersected with my open car door, changing it for the worse. She was Bush's domestic policy advisor from 2001 to 2004, then most notably the Secretary of Education from 2005-2009, where she got to lead the charge on No Child Left Behind. She had been with George Bush since he deposed Ann Richards as governor of Texas, brought into the Bush fold by Karl Rove.

Spellings has worked in everything from lobbying to political consulting. Some of her opponents view her as a culture wars combatant; she infamously called PBS to demand that they yank a children's show episode that included a lesbian couple. (Also, fun fact: back in 2007 she went toe-to-toe with NY Attorney General Andrew Cuomo over student loans).

While there are occasional attempts to portray her as some sort of complicated centrist, but mostly she has been a consistent source of nonsense about NCLB. She likes the narrative of test scores as part of national defense ("The success of every student in reading and doing math on grade level is vital to the future success of our nation") and she is another reformster to claim that, prior to NCLB's testing requirements, nobody knew if their schools were failing or not. Spellings has remained all in, loving not only national standards, but national standardized tests.

A decade ago she was in the Wall Street Journal, peering into the future, and what she sees is education as a consumer good:

Parents, for one, will have access to the flow of data, allowing them to help their children find the education that best fits them. Buyers, meaning the parents and students, will be in control of the education, selecting from an à la carte menu of options. Gone will be the fixed-price menu, where a student attends a school based upon geography and is offered few alternatives. Students and their parents can take their state and federal dollars and find an education that best suits them.

Like much of what Spellings has to say, this reveals a narrow and stunted view of education. In Spellings' world, education is not a public trust, helping to bind the communities that provide it and benefit from it. The social and civic growth of children, the learning about how to be their best selves and how to be in the world-- all of that will, I guess, happen somewhere else, because school is just about collecting the right modules of pre-employment training. Her dream of unleashing the foxes of market forces in the henhouse of education is not good news, and like many of Spellings' pet ideas encased in NCLB, long since proven to be bunk.

Spellings also has a checkered past with connections to predatory for-profit schools and the college loan collection industry. Or you can watch her do this little spot with the Boston Consulting Group (one of the four investment horsemen of reformsterism) arguing how more data and more information will help us "wring out efficiencies" so we can do "more with less." We've poured money into education and gotten no returns in "student achievement."

She landed a gig running the University of North Carolina a decade ago as part of a program to bring the university to heel, and she promptly threw LGBTQ students under the bus. She teamed up with fellow Very Wrong Former Secretary Arne Duncan for a Washington Post op-ed. And she was right there, post-pandemic to argue that the sacred Big Standardized Test must be brought back immediately. 

That Margaret Spellings.

The interview runs the greatest hits

After musing about MAGA sycophancy and the lack of self-respect, Frum, somehow connects that to his "dialogue" with Spellings, who he will introduce by harkening back to how her initials on White House speeches "struck awe in the hearts of all who saw them." Then "And she continues to strike awe..." in case the irony-o-meter hasn't yet registered for the problem of sycophancy.

Frum launches right into the old saw that at first, "steady consistent improvements in the performance" of students, by which they mean test scores went up, until they didn't. There are a variety of explanations for the 2010s test score stagnation; as someone who was in the classroom at the time, I would point directly to test prep having reached the point of diminishing returns. Those "gains" were about teaching students how to take the Big Standardized Test, and by the 2010s, we'd gotten as much return from that as we were ever going to.

But that's not the Spellings explanation. "We took our foot off the gas," by which she means we "allowed the states to really walk back on the muscle of accountability, the muscle of assessment, the transparency, and the consequence for failure." There's a lot of nothing in those terms, though she seems mostly to mean that more test and punish is what we need.

When NCLB and its unachievable goal of All Children Score Above Average By 2014 was finally rewritten in 2015, Spellings claims that states loosened things up too much. "Schools and states started manipulating their cut scores," she argues, failing to note that states had set cut scores every year since this dance started. The Spellings Theory of Action has always seemed to be that you set the cut scores real high, fail a lot of students, punish the schools for having those failing students and then... something that happens so that students don't fail in the following years. This is a lousy plan of action, and the failure of NCLB ought to be proof of its lousiness, but Spellings belongs to that family of single-minded reformsters whose argument is always, "If that idea failed, then we should get back in there and fail harder."

Covid, she argues, just made everything worse, combined with the fact "that we sort of didn't care as much in the accountability system," and Spellings again demonstrates the reformster unfailing belief that the "accountability system" aka The Big Standardized Test actually provides useful data. From the classroom perspective, test and punish was a lousy system that did not help with the work--especially since the test part was mediocre at best and toxic at worst. 

She will stop to genuflect at the altar of the Mississippi miracle (we're not going to get into the debunking of that here) and will quote Joel Klein, another classic reformstery neo-lib and the old "you can't say poverty affects education because education is supposed to cure poverty." Again, I don't want to go back down that rabbit hole other than to point out that Spellings is ignoring twenty years of nuanced and pointed criticism of these ideas.

Oh, but then we get this:

Frum: Why do so many professional educators dislike testing so much?

Spellings: Well, because it leads to accountability for grown-ups, and none of us like that particularly, I guess; it’s just a reality of being an adult and being responsible.

I think I speak for many professional educators when I say that Spellings can go straight to hell. Also, if you want to bring up accountability for grownups, how about discussing the leaders of NCLB and their unwillingness to accept feedback from professional educators about the issues with the test (which were not about objecting to being held accountable), or maybe just accepting accountability for the many failures of the whole NCLB test and punish program. But no-- it's 2025 and folks like Spellings are still refusing to say, "Maybe we made some mistakes there" and still lean on "Well, those dopey teachers weren't doing it right." Honestly, just right straight to hell.

But no, this woman can't take responsibility for anything. She brings up the criticism that test and punish narrowed curriculum to block out subjects like science and social studies because they aren't on the test, which was absolutely a real thing. In my school, 7th and 8th graders who were at risk of low scores on the BS Test were denied science and history so they could be jammed into double reading and double math. But Spellings--

And my response to that is it’s hard to learn science or social studies or history or anything else if you can’t read.

Frum decides that what the interview really needs is some racism, so he asks if maybe the rise of "a new kind of illegal immigration after 2014" that includes more families-- maybe that was dragging scores down? Spellings doesn't offer an appropriate response like, "David, what the hell" but she does dance around to avoid agreeing with him, eventually circling back to expectations. Then there's this--

No Child Left Behind—those words say it simply—was essentially an expectation that virtually every kid ought to have an expectation that they can get what they need in our public schools. And I’m not sure that people believe that anymore. And then our strategy now is: Get a voucher. Get the hell out. See about yourself. And this idea that it’s in our national interest for an institution called American public education to attempt to do something no other country does is important.

No. NCLB was the idea that if the feds squeezed teachers and schools hard enough, they would magically fix achievement issues and the federal and state governments would be off the hook for providing any kind of assistance or support. But for people whose idea was always to get to issuing vouchers, NCLB was a godsend because, by creating a task that schools could not possibly accomplish, it helped erode trust in public education. 

Spellings makes a good point about accountability for tax dollars being spent on vouchers and charters, but it's clear that she hasn't really paid attention to how that's going these days. 

Frum points out that lots of BS Tests are out of favor these days and Spellings thinks that's a shame. She likes the idea that Trump's extortion attempt "compact" includes a standardized test requirement. Frum acknowledges that there's a racial element to testing, but he and Spellings agree that the only alternative to a BS Test is word of mouth, and you know how racist that is. Mind boggling that these are the only two ways they can think of to evaluate students.

About the unions

Frum wonders if the punishments and rewards under NCLB should have applied to the unions somehow, since they opposed testing. Because, you know, that was just because the union's main thing is to protect their worst members. Not, mind you, because using test scores was like rolling dice with a teacher's career, or because all the teachers who didn't teach reading and math ended up on the short end of twisty evaluations shticks. And I don't entirely follow her response, but I think she's saying the people who oppose testing are semi-responsible for the elimination of the federal department because they wanted no accountability. Because in Spellings' mind, the BS Test only and always provides accountability, because it is magical and perfect.

Frum mentions that a major anti-test group offers the argument that testing makes teaching less fun. Spellings replies with another false dichotomy:

That might be true, and here’s why: There is a way—the word regiment comes to mind—but direct instruction prescribed in a sequential, serious way, where there’s fidelity of implementation and hewing to the research, is the path to success. Now, we have gotten into this idea that every teacher should go into their own classroom and create and invent and student-led and all of this kind of stuff, and it sounds like a blast, but does it work? And the answer has largely been no. So it’s just like, we wouldn’t want your physician making up the protocols for cancer treatment; neither should our teachers make up stuff and hope that it works, just the spray-and-pray method of teaching. And so, yeah, might that be less fun? Yeah, maybe. And I think one of the things I’m encouraged about is: What can technology do and media do and tools that are available through technology to make teaching more fun, to better engage students? But to get results, sometimes you gotta eat your broccoli.

Are there other options besides "serious" sequences aimed at getting results or "spray and pray"? Of course there are, and there need to be, because school is where students live most of their lives, and where they learn about how the world works, so maybe "the world is a dull dreary place where your focus stays on the dull business of producing results for someone else" isn't great. Neither is the anarchy of teachers pulling things out of their butts. I'll bet smart people can think of other options. Also, I note that Spellings is my age, and "technology will make school more fun" is exactly the kind of thing that makes us look like fossilized boomers.

Also, she agrees with cell phone bans. We're loaded with irony today.

There's a nice side trip in which Frum notes that Silicon Valley types are demonstrating a willingness or even zeal to write off vast stretches of the American population and say "Who needs them," which is a valid observation about that crowd. But he also asks why schools don't teach foreign languages and I'm wondering what the heck schools he is talking about. 

We end with some "what can parents do," to which Spellings observes that "we still have pretty significantly rich data about the quality of your schools," and no, no we do not. Test scores are strikingly meager and narrow, but no, she thinks that tiny slice of data is a big deal. It's that unexamined view and her resistance to any contradiction of it, that remains at the heart of all her bad ideas about education, and yet somehow, here she is, still one of the leading unexpert experts in the education policy world. These days she's CEO of the Bipartisan Policy Center, which has no policy tab for K-12 education, so maybe we can hope her attention will be focused elsewhere. Please.

ICYMI: No Kings Edition (10/19)

Well, that was a day yesterday. May we all live to enjoy less interesting times, but not less patriotic ones.. 

A reminder that amplifying voices, particularly in these days of AI slop choking the interwebs, is a helpful thing. There are many voices in the world these days, and some of them are full of it, and some of them aren't even actual voices, so when you find something that speaks to you, amplify it. Share it. Like it. Give it a little push out into the world.

Here's the list for the week.

Beyond Resilience Katrina at 20

Thomas Ultican provides a look at Ashana Bigard's excellent account of the charterizing of New Orleans, and how it turned out for the families and students.

Forgotten Mercy: Those Who Want Christianity in Public Schools

Nancy Bailey takes a look at the folks who want to shove christianiam into schools, and the particular brand of religion they favor, and the parts of Christianity they tend to forget.

This Week’s Federal Staff Reductions, Now Temporarily Stayed by a Judge, Would Undermine Educational Opportunity Across the States

Jan Resseger looks at how the latest rounds of staffing cuts are likely to hurt education for some folks.

The Legislature Goes to the Bathroom

Nancy Flanagan on the lawmaker obsession with bathroom stuff. 

‘Over my dead body.’ Manatee schools prepare to battle charter takeover plans

In Florida, a bunch of charter schools would like to just go ahead and take possession of taxpayer-owned school buildings. Some school districts are not happy.

Fact Checking "The Reading Wars Are Ending. Phonics Won" (Washington Post Editorial Board)

Paul Thomas debunks the latest bunch of bunk from the Washington Post bunkhouse.

Nearly all state funding for Missouri school vouchers used for religious schools

Completely unsurprising news from Missouri, where the voucher program turns out to be a make-taxpayers-fund-religious-schools program. Annelise Hanshaw reports for Missouri Independent.

Lying In Lansing: Republicans Manufactured a Sex Ed Crisis

In Michigan, some folks needed a reason for citizens to mobilize against new sex ed standards. So they made one up. Reported at Distill Social.

Data-driven Schools Are Not Child-Centered Schools

Lisa Haver, looking at Philly schools, wonders about the actual focus of schools that are data-driven.

Why Not Give Students What They Really Need?

John Warner is playing my song again. Why not aim for humanistic education? From Inside Higher Ed.

How Privilege Shapes the Children We Raise

This is a Facebook reel from an Oxford Union debate about meritocracy, and it explains how wealth brings privilege as well as anything I've ever seen, and it does it in just three minutes.

Georgia House approves budget with cuts to school voucher program lawmakers say reflect its need

The predictable next stage of vouchers-- declare "Damn, this is expensive" and start choking them off. Want to go back to your public school? Sure hope it's still there.

Indiana University fires student media director after he refused directive to censor newspaper

How not to operate your college newspaper program. And this wasn't even over a particular scandalous story. 

Long Covid Is Real-- And It's Changing an Entire Generation

Eli Cahan at Rolling Stone looks at long covid and kids. 

Appeals court backs Michigan school in banning 'Let's Go Brandon' shirts

The court agrees that it's not okay to parade obscenities even if you find cute ways to hide them. Honestly, I'm not sure how I feel about this one, but the AP reports what happened.

Don't Stop Believin' in OpenAI

Ben Riley on the continued insistence that we must think that AI is an inevitable wave and not a huge bubble.

What Machines Don't Know

Eryk Salvaggio with a little explainer of LLMs as well as some clarity about what they cannot do, including this line: 

For the same reason that a dog can go to church but a dog cannot be Catholic, an LLM can have a conversation but cannot participate in the conversation.

Caro Emerald is part of the little niche genre of electro-swing. Years ago I was out shopping with my wife in a mall and this was playing and got my immediate attention.

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OK: A New Edu-wind Blowing

It may be an overstatement that Ryan Walters damaged the Christian Nationalist brand in Oklahoma, but his successor does seem to be putting energy into cleaning up after the previous state school superintendent. 

The Waters departure was a much of a messy amateur hour as his tenure in office. He left to run an anti-union union called Teacher Freedom Alliance (read more about them here). He made a deal with KOKH, the Oklahoma City Fox affiliate-- let him use their studio to announce his resignation (because of course he needed to do it on the tv), and in return he would answer questions. He immediately reneged on the deal, stomping out while silently ignoring the questions from reporter Wendy Suares. There's video of his departure, complete with Suares pointing the camera person after MAGA dudebro's walk of shame (see below).

The very next day, Walters's old buddy Gentner Drummond called for an investigation into spending at the Department of Education under Walters' leadership. That may be because Drummond repeatedly disagreed with some of Walters's policies and choices, or it may be because Drummond is gearing up for a run at the governor's seat. 

Current Governor Kevin Stitt, who was once a big Walters booster, had also backed away in recent months, including replacing members of the state board with some less-friendly-to-Walters options and expressing a wish for less drama. Walters, in keeping with his general attempts to be a sort of third-generation xerox of Dear Leader, responded by calling names and slinging accusations. The relationship (outlined here by Matt McCabe of News9) was over. 

It's worth noting that Stitt and Drummond are both conservative Republicans, so it will be interesting to see how much they're willing to distance themselves from Walters' brand of MAGA-fied numbskullery. Walters' shadow certainly fell all over the selection of his replacement.

"In my last seven years, it has been clear that the operation of this agency and the well-being of Oklahoma’s students have taken a back seat to the political ambitions of the individual who holds this position,” Stitt said in a statement when naming that replacement.

That replacement is Lindel Fields. Fields is an Oklahoma educator whose online footprint "appears strictly professional and highly focused on education and leadership" says KJRH reporter Erin Christy. Fields is a former superintendent and CEO Tri County Tech, one of the state's technology centers; Fields was at Tri County from 1999 through 2021, when he left to start Your Culture Coach. ("Elevating education leaders and transforming cultures to recruit and retain passionate, loyal team members through world class training.") He has volunteered for The United Way and is a Rotarian. 

He inherits a department that has been hollowed out under Walters's fiery reign, and with that, some lawsuits. The Oklahoma Supreme Court already put a big fat hold on the Walters social studies curriculum, which was loaded with christianist nationalism and election denialism.

The court had also taken up a lawsuit over Walters's plan to stick a Trump Bible in every classroom. The court gave Fields two weeks to decide if he wanted to just withdraw the Bible order and make the whole suit go away. 

Fields took one day. The Bible mandate is over. 

On top of that, Fields appears to be reviewing the rest of Walters's various edicts. Tara Thompson, department spokesperson, talked to KOSU.

There are currently several pending lawsuits against Walters. Thompson said the department is reviewing them and will address them as quickly as possible. They’re also examining several policy statements made by Walters to require action in schools.

“We need to review all of those mandates and provide clarity to schools moving forward,” she said.

In other words, it appears that the department might actually get back to helping teachers do their jobs. It's Oklahoma, so I don't imagine the department is going to turn all squishy liberal any time soon. But it sure seems like the atmosphere has changed considerably.

Walters was on Twitter expressing his big sad that he "could not be more disappointed" in the decision. "The war on Christianity is real," he wrote in his trademark hyperbole disconnected from reality. He's speaking this weekend at the Moms For Liberty summit, on a panel with Aaron Withe (his boss from Freedom Foundation) and Corey DeAngelis about how the evil unions took over schools. That summit is in Florida, putting him far far away from Oklahoma, which seems like what is best for Oklahoma's schools.

67, Nonsense, and the Authoritarian in the Classroom

You may not have heard about 6 7, and if not, your life is not the worse for it. Also, you probably don't have contact with young humans. 

6 7 is just the latest nonsense meatworld meme. You don't need to rush to figure it out because now that Wikipedia has a page about it, Miriam Webster has an entry, and the Wall Street Journal just ran an explainer (calling it "this fall's most obnoxious classmate"), all of which means it's nearly played out. 

But in the meantime, it is one more test of teachers' patience (particularly on the elementary level). 

These tests are always there (skibidi toilet, anyone?) because young humans love them some nonsense. And 6 7 is relatively harmless-- not violent or sexual or intended to offend. As nonsense goes, it's better than average. But this brand of nonsense represents a fundamental challenge for teachers.

Some teachers are not meeting the challenge well, with nonsense behavior being met with nonsense rules. But it's not great for a classroom to model principles like "I don't like that, and I have the power here, so I'm just going to forbid it." That includes silly ideas like "I'm going to fine you fifteen cents every time you say that stupid thing, because I'm fed up." It is tempting, as a teacher, to just get out your big stick; after all, this is just nonsense, and not important talk.

As we live through a time marked by the muscle flexing of a wanna-be authoritarian regime, teachers need to ask themselves what form of governance they want to model in their classroom, and I sure hope they arrive at "non-authoritarian" as the answer.

I am not (as any of my former students would tell you) a fan of classroom anarchy. You can be an authority without being an authoritarian. Teachers are hired to be the responsible adult in a room filled with non-adults. That can mean many different things, but what it should not mean that the classroom is governed by the teacher's personal preferences or whims rather than being governed by actual rules and principles. 

I've seen classrooms run by a teacher's personal edict. I still remember the shock of hearing teacher say, speaking of home room elections for 7th grade student council representatives, "They picked the wrong kid, so I made them elect the right one." What a lesson for students about how elections work. 

If we're going to grow adults who understand the Rule of Law rather than the Rule of Me, then classrooms and schools have to model it.

That means, for instance, the administrators need to follow the actual rulebook for the district rather than a modified version in which different people get different consequences depending on who they are.

And classroom teachers need to set and follow rules based on something other than their mood or the newest irritant of the day. Students need to soak in a subtext other than "People who have power get to make other people do what the powerful wants." 

This was always true, but it's especially true now. You want to push back against authoritarian tyranny? What would be better than helping to raise a generation of humans who understand in their bones that there are other, better ways to be.

So when 6 7 gets on your last nerve, or the next bit of nonsense reveals itself, reach for some reaction other than "I am so sick of this and I have the power to shut this noise down, so I'm going to use all the power at my disposal to stomp it out." Because we know right now what that looks like when applied in the grown up world on a national stage. More than ever, classrooms need to be built to look like the country in which we want to live. If you want No Kings in America, be careful about crowning yourself in your classroom. 

Did The Class of '92 Destroy America

The Atlantic has published yet another tale of woe about The Terrible State Of Education, and in it staff writer Idrees Kahloon has played all the hits, yet somehow ignores the most obvious point to make.

Student achievement is down because test scores (an assumption that we absolutely won't examine)! Low expectations are ruining students! Those damned cell phones! Science of reading! Merit pay! School choice! Democrats are on the wrong side and everything might be their fault! And the economist-style assumption that test scores, like stock prices, must go ever upward (three guesses what Kahloon's actual area of reportage expertise is)!

It's a whole lot of baloney, and I would go ahead and address Kahloon's many ill-founded assumptions and assertions, but, you know (gestures in direction of five thousand and some posts on this blog) and I'd rather zero in on one particular set of sentences:

Test scores from NAEP, short for the National Assessment of Educational Progress, released this year show that 33 percent of eighth graders are reading at a level that is “below basic”—meaning that they struggle to follow the order of events in a passage or to even summarize its main idea. That is the highest share of students unable to meaningfully read since 1992.Among fourth graders, 40 percent are below basic in reading, the highest share since 2000.

And...?

I mean, this seems like a perfect chance to do a little research. After all, those low scoring children of 1992 and 2000 are now grown up. Class of 1992 would be about 45 now, and the sad non-readers of 2000 would be about 34. 

So we should be able to see the generational effects of these terrible awful no good very bad scores on the Big Standardized Test. There should be a story here-- "In 1992 the reading scores dipped to the lowest point ever, and so then the Terrible Thing happened." Maybe researchers should have gone out to check on the adult life outcomes of that low-scoring cohort, to see if they had low paying jobs or unhappy lives or unattractive children. If there are consequences to these low scores, then at least two cohorts and at most the whole country have been living with those consequences for decades, so it shouldn't be too hard to track down what they are, rather than simply calling for a panic. 

I don't mean to dismiss the possibility that these low-scoring readers did not in fact suffer consequences. Heck, both cohorts would have been old enough to vote in the 2016 and 2024 elections.

But if you are going to hang an entire panic attack on those low scores and write an entire article about how the current low scores are a sign of an epic crisis of failure in education, shouldn't you be able to finish the sentence "Because the NAEP reading scores have dipped so low, the nation will suffer as a consequence the following..." Particularly when we are absolutely in a position to study exactly what scores of this lowitude produce as a result.

Otherwise, your panic is manufactured baloney. Because the story here might be, "Back in 1992 we had the lowest NAEP reading scores ever and that was followed by life going on as before. Those low scores didn't signal a damned thing."

If you're going to call for panic, at least do some homework. 

 

My Ex-Wife Makes Me Think Of AI

Let me explain.

Sometime in the last few days, an insurance salesperson stopped by my house. I wasn't here, but the salesperson left a note in the door, offering milestone congratulations to--well, let's say "Ethel," because my ex-wife is a perfectly exemplary human being who doesn't deserve to have her name dragged through this.

The thing is, Ethel doesn't live here. We split about thirty years ago. I've changed address twice, and she has changed considerably more often than that. We are both remarried. There is absolutely no reason for sales pitches to come after her at this address.

And yet, they do, with a fair degree of regularity. Sales pitches, calls from her alma mater, and now, salespeople knocking on the door.

I'm not mad about any of this. She's a perfectly lovely person, a great mother to our children, a respect professional in her field. 

But she doesn't live here.

Somewhere in Cyberlandia is some piece of software that today would be called AI that scrapes through records and phone numbers and addresses and follows connection to connection and spits out its conclusions about where marketeers might direct their attention, both commercial and political. And that software is only sort of good at its job. It makes mistakes, and once those mistakes are made, they shamble around the interwebs like a deathless cyberzombie. 

I have successfully corrected this bit of misinformation just once--after the third or fourth time some human being at her alma mater called for her here, at this phone number somehow, and explained to some poor embarrassed work-study underclassperson, some human being at the university fixed it, and I never heard from them again.

But that's because there was a human in the loop. For all the other mistaken organizations, I have no recourse. There's no place to contact, no center to complain, no manager who can be demanded to Get That Crap Out Of There. And as the various AI "agents" keep scraping and gobbling up whatever they find in cyberspace, I'm absolutely guaranteed that this error will exist in perpetuity.

And as the dead web disappears down the endlessly interconnected gullet of a bot centipede, all manner of errors, miscalculations, hallucinations, and errant crap will be scooped up, rinsed off, and spat back out into the web, and the live humans who are the butt of this self-perpetuating inaccuracy will have no recourse, no way to correct the record. 

This is one of the scary parts of the AI revolution. Not just that AI gets it wrong far too often, but that those errors become an irretrievable part of the record--and there's not a thing you can do about it. The tide of slop is rising and nobody has even the concept of an idea of a plan for a cyber-shopvac, let alone a reliable way to forward my ex-wife's mail.

Selling The House

It has been eighteen months or so since my mother moved into an assisted living facility, and so this summer we started the prospect of selling the house. 

It is not the house I grew up in. I tell the story as, "Yes, I went off to college, and while I was gone, the family moved." My parents married when they were babies, and we had lived in four different homes before they finally got to build and settle into the home that was what they really wanted, designed to fit on a slice of land in the country. They were, I realize with a bit of a shock, about the same age my grown children are right now. The house they built is now five decades on the planet.

I didn't grow up in this house, but my children did. It was where my daughter led countless cousin parades through the kitchen and around the living room, where my son and his cousins played on an ancient Flash Gordon pinball machine. I played with my nieces and nephews in that living room. Eventually another generation of small children also played there; there was always a collection of books and toys for the littles. The barn held the old cars, the restored 1914 fire engine, the rehabilitated roto-tiller, the riding mowers. There was a garden, a semi-successful blueberry patch (well, the deer enjoyed it, anyway). 

In college, this was where I brought friends to visit and eat Thanksgiving dinner and, at least once, sleep over outside on a large patch of comfy moss. When my first job ended, this house was my home for the year it took to find steady employment again. The house held a collection of oddities-- an old family heirloom grandfather clock, a large ship model, a massive collection of big band and jazz records, large numbers of my father's self-designed bookshelves. 

All of those items have been emptied out, dispersed to family or sold in auction. There are still two dressers left that I have to pick up. My grandfather bought them for my parents at a yard sale almost seventy years ago for some ridiculous price, like five dollars, with the understanding that they could replace them with something better when they were able. They never did. 

It's hard to see the place empty, harder than I thought it would be. A place is just a large physical object, and it gets most of its character from the people who are there, and when the people aren't there, the place isn't the same. When you go back to your old college without your old classmates there, it's just different, even unnerving, like sitting your foot down and unexpectedly finding no step beneath it. 

It's one of those challenges they don't tell you about in teacher school-- every year, your school, your classroom, is a new and different place. And on the flip side, if you stay long enough, you become a familiar part of the building, a thing former students can take familiar comfort from when everything else has changed. But for the teacher, every year the school morphs slowly into some other place entirely, similar physical settings repeatedly recast with new humans to give them life and breath.

The house is currently empty, hollowed out, not actually anyone's home, for much of my family a sort of phantom limb. It looks like it will sell, that it will become a whole other place for a whole other family, and that is how houses work. The house I'm typing this in, my home, was once someone else's home, only the faintest trace of those folks here. That is how houses work. 

We like to think of the large physical pieces of this world as comfortably permanent, and we are periodically reminded that they are not, and that the living people who animate them will come and go and change and grow. I don't want my daughter to be dressed up and commanding her brother and the rest of the tiny troops to line up-- I don't want that to be forever, but I feel a tinge of loss that the physical location of those parades will be scrubbed of their imprint. It's fine. That's what memory is for-- to hold onto the threads and breath of the past. Physical objects, places-- they can promise to hold the imprint of events and people, but their grip never turns out to be as tight as we imagine it will be.

The road back to the house used to be dirt; in wet seasons, there would be three ruts, the middle one to be used by traffic in either direction. Pray you didn't meet one of the neighbors headed the other way. In winter the road would freeze, and if you couldn't quite make it to the top of the hill, you'd have to back out, head craned back over your shouldre, trying not to end up in the ditch. In my '79 Opel I perfected a mid-hill 180 spin. Over the years that road got better, and just a year or two ago the township paved it. So soon I won't be needing to drive back that twisty, treacherous dirt road anymore, but then, that road doesn't exist any more.