AI Is Coming To Evaluate You

The unending tide of AI used for stupid things just keeps on coming, and as widely predicted, the major accomplices are managers and employers, sucked in with promises  that AI will make their work faster and easier and less have-to-deal-with-humans-y. Take the ars technica piece "The résumé is dying, and AI is holding the smoking gun." This strikes me as a parallel to teacher letters of recommendation, which are about fifteen minutes away from being wiped out by a mountain of near-identical and completely useless AI-extruded letters.

So it's no surprise when Technological Horizons in Education Journal is happy to pass along a PR release from Edthena about a tech tool that will do some of your principal's job for him. 

Edthena, mind you, is a company straight from AI hell. They've been around peddling old tech types of teacher coaching (watch yourself on video!) They have all your favorite PD buzzwords-- High Impact Feedback!! Amplify Coaching Capacity!! Scale Effectively!! Some of their marketing language feels... careful. "Evidence from video feels objective" they say, without addressing whether or not it actually is. 

And they're an approved platform provider for edTPA.

So they are a perfect business for AI-ing teacher observations into a useless stupor. 

Meet Observation Copilot! Your principal can feed it a half page of loose notes about what he saw in your classroom, and Observation Pilot will pad it with a bunch of professional and framework-aligned bullshit until you have pages of mind-numbing argle bargle in mere seconds. (No kidding-- the "demo" is below). The program will even generate suggestions for the teacher to implement, including all the approved soulless jargon, though unfortunately it does not appear that the program generates a suggestion to the principal that he either do his damned job or get the hell out of the profession. 

And you know that this "tool" is only about five minutes away from the concept of letting a video-cam collect the "observation notes" and thereby reducing the human principal's contribution to zero.

Sadly, there are actual testimonials here, like Brent Perdue, principal at Jefferson Elementary in Spokane, Washington. Brent says, "Observation Copilot has been a true game changer for me. It took that piece of the wordsmithing, of having the language flow, where I could really go down and just put in the facts of what I'm seeing." 

Or Juliana Addi, a school principal in Hoboken, who says, "Observation Copilot has changed my teacher feedback process. The writing that goes into it, it just expedites that pace - much quicker." Because speed is the important thing.

I can't begin to express the rage I would feel if a principal used this plagiarism machine to flood my evaluation with mounds of bullshit. I can only hope that the teachers who are subjected to this admin-o-bot respond by having ChatGPT write their response, or perhaps sitting in the post-observation conference and asking, "So what exactly did you mean when you write [insert quote here]." They should definitely do this while holding their copy so that the principal cannot see where the quote comes from in the fake evaluation.

This is of a piece with one through line of the LLM-in-education attack, which is the assertion that the business of turning a rough idea into a coherent sentence is an unimportant technicality that can easily be outsourced to a bot without any loss to whatever task is being completed, because human expression is no big deal. Just imagine.

Abraham Lincoln: "ChatGPT, just write me something about how this war is important to democracy and stuff."

Ernest Hemmingway: "Give me something booklength about how the Great European War made a lot of people sad."

Martin Luther King, Jr.: "As long as I'm sitting in this Birmingham jail, can ChatGPT just whip up some stuff about ignoring bad laws?"

Me, several years ago: "ChatGPT, please whip up something about love and getting married and stuff."

Yeah, stringing together the actual words-- that scary "wordsmithing"-- isn't all that important. Just have the bot do it.

AI most easily moves into places where the humanity has already been hollowed out. If you are a principal looking at this and thinking it seems like a super great idea, at a bare minimum, I hope you sit and have a hard think about your concept of your job. But maybe you should just think about alternate careers, because this kind of disregard for the human teachers who work for you is truly, deeply discouraging.

This is a terrible idea. Teachers need support from actual humans, not pages of jargonated filler from a bot that knows nothing about actual teaching. Teachers need to work in buildings where lines of communication are open, not ones where communication comes from a bot and not a human. Teachers need suggestions and ideas that come from a knowledgeable educator, not bot scrapings from the bottom of the internet bird cage. Useful assessment is a conversation between teacher and administrator, but to have that, both parties have to show up personally. For a principal to use this kind of tool (because I'm sure there are more out there) is unethical and disrespectful.

This little toxic AI menace is current available free of charge, because of course it is. The charging money part comes later, after you're so used to this crutch that you'd really hate to give it up. But with a dollar price of $0.00, using this tool will carry a higher cost than a school can afford to pay. 

ICYMI: Local Donuts Edition (11/16)

Apparently it is now our routine; Saturday mornings the Board of Directors and I go uptown to a local donut shop. Like most local donut shops, they make donuts way better than commercial ones because they are local and the donuts are not designed to travel cross-country and sit in packaging for days and days. You may remember the lesson of Krispy Kreme donuts, a once much-sought-after delicacy that was bought up and stripped of everything that made them desirable in order to market them at scale. There's a lesson there somewhere. In the meantime, if you're in my neighborhood, grab some Clark's Donuts. And in your own neighborhood, support a local business.

Okay, let's get to the list for this week.

"I Hope I'm Alive to See the Rebuilding Begin"

Scholar and writer Josh Cowen interviews Diane Ravitch about her new memoir, a book that you really ought to read.

Rigid Federal Rules May Block Efforts by Dem. States to Redirect New Federal Vouchers for Pro-Public School Uses

Jan Resseger points out that rosy predictions designed to convince Democratic governors to sign up for federal vouchers are--well, just not rooted in reality. Sorry, Arne.

The So-Called Science of Reading’s New Focus on Babies

Nancy Bailey explains the latest bad idea from the start-them-at-birth crowd. 

"Understanding" Shouldn't Be Vague or Mysterious

Michael Pershan looks at the idea of conceptual understanding and how to build it in a classroom. He's mostly talking math, but the ideas that he lays out here work just as well for other content.

How Pa.’s largest public cyber charter school discourages public participation

Oliver Morrison and the folks at PennLive have been doing an absolutely top notch series about cyber charters in PA. This is one of the best, and if I've done it right, this is a gift link (which will expire in six days). 

The Myth of the Anti-American Teacher

Nancy Flanagan covered these survey results last week, but here's the view from the other side of the education debates, via Robert Pondiscio.

Colorado’s 2025 election hints at future of state’s public education

Colorado is another state where outsiders spent a mountain of money on education issues-- and lost. Paula Noonan breaks it down.

How Much Screen Time Is Your Child Getting at School? We Asked 350 Teachers.

The New York Times talked to some teachers about screen time in schools. Some interesting data here, particularly as leaders are trying to jam AI into every corner of education.

Girl, 13, expelled for hitting classmate who made a deepfake porn image of her, lawyers say

Speaking of technology problems in school. This story comes from Louisiana, where I think they have some catching up to do.

California Charter Schools Heading for 2026

Thomas Ultican  looks at attempts in California to avoid more charter school fiascos, and the history of pro-fiasco rich folks. 

Sticker Shock: Hillsdale’s Constitution (Propaganda) Revealed

Anchorage Alaska school district got in a Libs of TikTok-powered flap over disclaimers on Hillsdale free pocket Constitutions. Mathew Beck explains why it was bunk, and as a bonus, takes us inside one of those "free" handouts for students from the right-wing college.

Absence Makes the Smart Go Wander

Nancy Flanagan wins headline of the year contest with this piece about school absences (including the differences between public and charter schools).

What is Your Theory of Change?

Steve Nuzum looks at theories of change (or the absence thereof) in the education world.

“Good” Doctors and Teachers (Part 2)

Larry Cuban asks some pointed questions about "good" teachers.

Nov. 6th Local Election Returns Show Ohio Voters Out of Sync with Legislature’s Attack on Public Schools

Jan Resseger looks at the many ways that the election showed Ohio's legislature out of step with the voters.

Every Child Known… But Are They Valued?

TC Weber continues to dissect the policy that Nashville leaders claim, and finds his way to this poster-worthy principle-- Leadership that avoids accountability always protects systems that avoid responsibility.

Fallout from shutdown could be lengthy, school leaders say

At EdSource, Zaidee Stavely and Lasherica Thornton explain why even though the shutdown may be over, the mess it made in schools is not.

School Privatizers Cost Public School Kids $1.6 billion, or a fully funded public school system

Stephen Dyer corrects some deliberately misleading math.

Maybe Don’t Talk to the New York Times About Zohran Mamdani

This piece from Peter Coviello, former chair of Africana studies at Bowdoin College, is a great piece of prose and a fun read that along the way offers a dissection of New York Times failing style. From Literary Hub.

Can you really talk to the dead using AI? We tried out ‘deathbots’ so you don’t have to

So creepy. So very creepy. For The Conversation, by Eve Nieto McAvoy and Jenny Kidd.

A Pair of Billionaire Preachers Built the Most Powerful Political Machine in Texas. That’s Just the Start.

An important part of understanding Why Stuff Happens the way it does in Texas is understanding these two guys-- Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks. Excellent profile from Ava Kofman at ProPublica.

Sports Analytics: How Data Informs Preparation and Play

Unabashed plug. My nephew is a sports writer and his wife is an assistant professor of statistics at Carleton College, and I think it is beyond cool that they are teaching a course about sports analytics next summer. It's a non-credit course, and I think if you're anywhere around Northfield, Minnesota and have a love for wonky sports stuff, you should find a way to get into this. 

This week at Forbes.com, I wrote about a Florida book ban court decision that seems neither smart nor promising, and about the new set of Pennsylvania laws that will now rein cyber charters in a bit. 

Jimmie Lunceford deserves to be more remembered than he is. A seminal big band leader and an influence on guys like Glenn Miller, but under-represented in the video record. These guys could really cook. 

I'm hoping to crack the 3,000 mark for subscribers some day. It's quick and simple to subscribe, it's always free, and it's the easiest way to get my stuff regularly.

What Really Really Limits School Choice

EdChoice, formerly named for its patron saint, Milton Friedman, in a recent post tackles a real question-- What Really Limits School Choice? They do not, however, come up with real answers.

Martin Lueken and Nathan Sanders tip off from a Michigan study that looked at a study of Michigan's Tuition Incentive Program, a program that was supposed to make college scholarships available to students who grew up in low-income households-- and yet only 14% of eligible students used the scholarship. Lueken and Sanders (who do not link to the actual study) blame "bureaucratic friction, unclear rules, and poor communication," and from there jump to the idea that these same "implementation challenges" also get in the way of K-12 choice programs.

Bureaucracy, they argue, makes it hard for folks to take advantage of choice programs. It's the friction of all the confusing processes, informational missing links, and missed communications. They are not wrong, although they would do well to look at the number of choice schools that deliberately use that kind of bureaucratic friction to keep Certain People from getting into their school. Success Academy is a well-documented example of a school that uses bureaucratic friction to filter out families that they don't want to serve. They sort of get the idea:

Administrative hurdles can quietly limit who benefits from choice. Complicated application forms, documentation requirements, narrow enrollment windows, or poor outreach can all dampen participation—especially among families with less experience navigating state programs.

Yes-- but it's the schools themselves creating most of these hurdles, and they're doing it deliberately. And that's before we even get to the business of voucher school tuition inflation, where the school bumps up tuition costs enough that the school is no more affordable to Certain Families than it ever was.  

The authors point to an "awareness gap" for choice programs, a problem of marketing and PR that keeps parents from knowing that the program even exists. So part of their fix is essentially better marketing. Advocacy groups, think tanks, private schools and churches could do more "outreach" to get the word out. 

States could also follow the lead of Florida by allowing funds to be spent on a "choice navigator" to help you find your way through the education marketplace. They also want more timely payments, clearer lists of allowable expenses, and more certainty about the program's future. 

Most of this bumps up against the real factors that limit school choice, but Leuken and Sanders either don't see it or want to say it. I give them credit for skipping the classic arguments, which claimed that "entrenched interests" and those terrible teacher unions and misguided legislators are creating all the barriers to choice. 

No, when it comes to limits on school choice, the same thing has always been true-- the call is coming from inside the house.

It is charter and private schools the erect bureaucratic barriers, economic barriers, and "we'll reject your child if we feel like it" barriers, and "pro-choice" legislators who pass the laws that allow them to do it. School choice-- the idea of every child having a selection of schools from which they can pick the one that best suits them-- is pushed by a whole lot of people who don't really want to see it happen. Some of these folks are only interested in finding a way to get taxpayer dollars funneled to private Christian schools, and some would prefer a system in which everyone was responsible for their own kid's education and nobody else had to pay to educate Those People's Children. 

In short, what really limits school choice is that it's a policy pushed, promoted, and instituted by people who don't really want school choice.

If we really really wanted school choice, we would require all schools that wanted to accept public dollars to also accept any and all students who applied. We would fund vouchers so that they covered admission at any school of the student's choice, no matter how expensive. We would make every school that accepted taxpayer dollars accountable to those taxpayers; we would have a certification process that provided the same certainty of quality that we get from the USDA stamp on beef, so that families could exercise their choice with confidence.

But because the choice systems we've got prioritize the interests the owners of these education-flavored businesses over the interests of the actual students, we get a "choice" system with a whole assortment of restraints and obstacles not to the businesses, but to the families.

Would better marketing and PR help? Well, it would give the choice schools a bigger pool to choose from, and I'm sure they'd like the chance to have even more students to box out. 

But if EdChoice wants to get rid of the limits on school choice, they should start by talking to their own people. 

Excerpts or Whole Books?

In a post last week, Timothy Shanahan has some worthwhile points to make about literacy, reading, and excerpts versus whole works. But in the end, we come back to the same old problem (spoiler alert: it's testing).

In "Whole Books or Excerpts? Which Does the Most to Promote Reading Ability," Shanahan notes that the excerpts vs. whole books debate keeps busting out. He starts out by questioning the premise of one side's claims of a "purportedly damaging shift" from books to excerpts.

I say “purported” because the claim seems to be that in the past teachers were teaching their kids to read books, and now they aren’t. I’ve been around quite a while, and I don’t remember the past that way.

That's fair. Shanahan says he's been worked on various textbook reading programs for fifty years, so he would correctly remember that most basal literature texts generally relied heavily on short works, a few excerpts, and probably one full play and one full length work. When my department decided to incorporate more complete works, we had to move outside the basal text. Our AP track required students to read 7 or 8 novels, but even in the "general" track, we covered a couple of books a year. I would expect your mileage may vary depending on your local teachers. Shanahan later argues that the lack of complete books has been particularly true for K-5, though a first grader's "complete book" is a far cry from Moby Dick.

But I think Shanahan is missing part of the concern here. In my last decade of teaching under test-and-punish policies, it's not just that I was directed to use more excerpts, but that the excerpts were of particular low quality. Like innumerable teachers across the country, I was handed a stack of workbooks, typically with a few paragraphs on one page with four or five multiple choice questions on the facing page. To make room for all this drill, something had to go (of course, administrations tend to add items to teachers' plates without any direction on how to make it fit). 

We did all this, of course, for test prep. The Big Standardized Test asks students to read a short, context-free excerpt, and answer some multiple choice questions about it. So that's what we practiced. Shanahan says that "it would be the rare program that presents reading instruction as a series of random excerpts," and I would agree if we were only talking about basal texts-- but that's not what much of the "excerpts are killing us" crowd is talking about.

And the Big Standardized Test hangs over Shanahan's whole discussion.

I’d love to say that “Smith and Jones (1998) found that teaching reading with books increased reading levels by 26 points over what resulted for the excerpts group.” Or vice versa.

The problem is that there is no such research.

This is unsurprisingly correct.  But it's also the heart of the problem with his main question. Shanahan is treating "reading ability" and "scores on a reading test" as synonyms. And no reading test I've ever heard of tests for things like "read an entire novel then reflect and develop and understanding of the major themes and how they are set forth and connected over the entire length of the work. There's a level of literacy that is simply impervious to standardized testing because that level of literacy requires depth and time. It's the level of literacy that, for instance, helps you understand that The Great Gatsby parties are meant as a demonstration of using excess to try to drown out the inner wailing of sad, empty lives and not as an example of the kind of cool party that people should want to imitate. It's the level of literacy that is able to grapple with the ambiguity that enriches rather than demanding that every question about a piece of reading must one and only one correct answer. 

I don't know how you test for that level of literacy, especially the level that pays off throughout one's life as a grown human person. But it is precisely that level of literacy and comprehension that is needed to navigate a complicated modern world, and yet we have engineered a system that focuses schools' energy on Not That. Are we paying a price for it as a country and a culture? Aspects of our current national situation might point to "yes," but can I cite actual testing data? I cannot, because there is no test checking for that kind of reading ability. And as long as we keep treating "reading ability" and "score on a Big Standardized Test" as synonyms, we will not have such evidence.

Shanahan argues that reading a full book to students is not helpful, and I agree (he says that lots of whole book fans think Reading To is fine, and I disagree-- I have certainly met those people, but they were a minority among professionals I have known). 

Shanahan speaks in favor of building "reading stamina" but says we don't need to go whole text to do that. And at some points in his post, I'm not really sure what Shanahan is trying to say:

My point isn’t that there is no cultural benefit to be derived from having read The Scarlet Letter, The Great Gatsby, or Beloved in their entirety. Those are wonderful books and the more kids who know them the better. However, I also think it’s wonderful for kids to get to know Steinbeck, Salinger, Morrison, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Hawthorne, Melville, Lee, Knowles, Crane, Golding, Dickens, Homer, Frank, Bradbury, Wiesel, Twain, Atwood, Doerr, Lowry, Kesey, Keyes, Smith, Hinton, Updike, Orwell, and so on. There are so many fine authors and wonderful books, stories, plays, and essays, that a whole book curriculum is certain to be deficient when it comes to familiarizing students with this range of voices.

 So... full novels are swell but have no benefit? Because we can't full novel our way through a full range of writers, why bother? I'm not sure. I'm pretty sure that there are benefits to reading some of these works, even if the variety is limited. Those benefits would include 1) there are a wide range of rewards and understandings that come from full immersion is a large-scale work and 2) there are many different voices out there and you will like some and not others. 

Shanahan lists five concluding, and his last is his most solid:

There is no reason why schools cannot combine both excerpts and whole books in their English Language Arts instruction – fostering both depth and breadth.

Sure. And I would add that it is helpful if these works have some sort of depth or merit to them. Yes, we will argue until our tongues can no longer wag about what works truly have depth and merit, but as long as we're trying to steer by those values, I'm convinced that we will end up some place more rich and rewarding than we get with somebody's super duper test practice workbook sheets, even if our test scores don't go up on the way. 

NH: Considering School Takeovers

My very first school district is in the news yet again, and this time their troubles may usher in some bad legislative choices by the state of New Hampshire. 

I started out life in Claremont, New Hampshire. The first school I ever attended (Maple Avenue School) is still there and still operating (sadly, North Street School and Bluff Elementary are not). I can still vaguely remember the layout of the playground where I ran around with my friend, fellow country kid Becky Dole, and my first crush, Lanissa Sipitakowski. After third grade, my father's employers sent us to Pennsylvania, and I have almost never made it back to Claremont. Strolling through Google maps, it looks like our old house on the River Road might be gone. The Livingston farm right next door became factory buildings years ago. 

But I still notice when Claremont makes it into the news. 

In the 90s, Claremont was the face of two major lawsuits, among the first to bring the state to task for inadequately funding school districts (you can read about it in Andru Volinsky's book, The Last Bake Sale).

Claremont is in the news again, and it's related to funding, again. It appears that all sorts of accounting screw-ups resulted in a district that believed it was financially healthy, but instead is in a real big empty hole. A deficit of millions of dollars. A deficit so problematic that the district had to get a $4 million loan from the Claremont Savings Bank to insure they could open the schools last fall. The superintendent and business manager have both terminated their employment with the district. 

This is a good example of how some huge school district messes can be the result of local issues and not state policy ideas. But this crisis has opened the door to a state policy idea, and it's a particularly bad one.

A last-minute amendment to a bill in the legislature would give New Hampshire the option of a state takeover of troubled school districts.

This is not a new idea. It has been tried before-- that's how we know it's a bad idea.

Ohio has tried state takeover and it has not gone well (Failure Exhibit A is, oddly enough, the first district that ever hired me to teach) because, among other things, bringing hire guns from outside the district to deal with its issues while simultaneously trying to learn what they are-- not a great plan. In fact, Lorain had local-style financial and accounting problems similar to Claremont's, and the guy who was brought in to fix them was a pretty complete disaster. 

Or we could look at Tennessee's Achievement School District, a bold school takeover plan that was supposed to take schools at the very bottom of the ratings and catapult them to the top-ish. It failed. It failed a lot, through several leaders and over the course of several years. 

School takeovers mostly fail, and they mostly for a set of reasons, most of all because they assume that the state can find somebody who knows how to run a struggling school district and is, for some reason, available to hire. 

Many of them also fail because their actual goal is not to fix the district, but to dismantle it and charterize the scraps, sometimes because of a childlike belief in the imaginary awesomeness of charters and sometimes because of a grown-up belief in the real power of collecting piles of taxpayer money.

The New Hampshire bill has its own interesting twists. New Hampshire already has a bill that says the state can revoke a charter school's charter or put the school in probation if the school commits any of several listed Naughty Things. So the argument for the new public school law is that public schools should be under the same sort of watch. 

The stated goal is to get audits done and audit results public. However, the proposed amendment is extremely broad. A school district can be put on probation "if the school fails “generally accepted standards” for fiscal management; if it violates state or federal law; if the school materially violates a state administrative rule or standard; if the school does not file an annual report of its finances; if the school does not follow other state or federal reporting requirements; and if the school “fails to remedy” the causes of its probation." 

Right there in the middle of the list you find that violating a state board administrative rule or standard could trigger probation, which is wide enough to drive a small planet through, Basically, the state board would be free to go after pretty much any district it was in the mood to take over. 

If the school fails probation, they get a state-appointed administrator-- a school district tsar with the combined powers of a superintendent and a school board. The very first power listed by the bill is the power to 

Override any decisions of the school district's board or the school district superintendent, or both, concerning the management and operation of the school district, and initiate and make decisions concerning the management and operation of the school district

This kind of super-CEO is what Ohio tried, and the question becomes where the heck do you find someone with this massive assortment of powers and competencies who is not already in a perfectly good job? It's an impossible job, a job that requires someone to be the best super-superintendent ever under the worst possible conditions. I suspect the assumption is that the school district is in trouble because it's being run by bozos, so any reasonably competent bozo can fix it or any barely functional charter can replace it, which mostly tells me that the bozos involved in this particular show are the ones writing laws.

The other problem with school takeover pans is that they never, ever include a part where some collection of wise people look at the troubled district and try to figure out what the problem is and what resources could be best used to fix it. This is the test-and-punish part of No Child left Behind and Race To The Top writ large-- look for a quick and easy way to determine a school is "failing," then target it not for special assistance, but for dismantling, defunding, and/or privatizing.

We could argue all day about the ethics of the takeover approach, but we can skip all that because it's like arguing whether or not it's a good idea to get spiders out of your house by setting fire to building-- it just doesn't work. Here's hoping New Hampshire doesn't turn itself into one more disproving ground for this failed policy. 

ICYMI: Mom's Birthday Edition (11/9)

My mother will be checking off another year around the sun this week. We held a modest celebration yesterday because she doesn't like a fuss. Fair enough. May you have just the amount of fuss you want from the people you love.

Here's your reading list from the week. Remember that sharing is caring.

Education Helped Power the Blue Wave

You won't find a better education-related summary of the election results than this post from Jennifer Berkshire. 

The Ketchup

Audrey Watters comes bearing an excellent assortment of links this week. More to read!

Rigid Federal Rules May Block Efforts by Dem. States to Redirect New Federal Vouchers for Pro-Public School Uses

The feds still haven't written the rules to go with the federal voucher program, but Jan Resseger explains why the idea that this money could benefit public education is looking pretty shaky.

“Every Child Known: The Slogan That Says Everything and Means Nothing”

Exceptional TC Weber post this weeks connects the dots between meaningless school administration sloganeering and the central place of relationships in education.

Consulting Firm with Deep GOP Ties Helps Launch Effort to Fully Privatize Tennessee Schools

Andy Spears takes a look at a new player in Tennessee that has plans to gut public education--and they appear to have some deep GOP ties.

Florida’s State Board Poised to Ratify Heritage’s “Phoenix Declaration”

Florida is ready to sign on with the Heritage Foundation's Phoenix Declaration, and Sue Kingery Woltanski explains why that is bad news. More culture panic school takeover ahead.

Education Board Reverses Book Ban By Harford County Schools |

In Maryland, the state board of education told a local school board to put a book back on the shelves.

Dear Centennial School Board: We Spoke. Many of You Did Not Listen. And Now We Voted You Out

There is a sequel to the tale of Central Bucks School District in PA. When their far right board lost its majority, their far right superintendent headed for the exit (with a basket of money tucked under his arm). He found a home with another district's far right board, over the vocal objections of taxpayers in the district. Now the board that hired him has been swept out of office. Full story at the Bucks County Beacon with Nancy Pontius reporting.

Mark Zuckerberg Opened an Illegal School at His Palo Alto Compound. His Neighbors Revolted

Zuck's neighbors really don't like him, so when he started running a school out of his home, they were just done and they sicced the law on him. Caroline Haskins in Wired.

The Limits of AI Research for Real Writers

John Warner explaining again that actual writing is not augmented by AI.

Sexbots, students, and schools

Ben Riley suggests that AI is messing with our understanding of what public education is for. He looks at Henry Farrell and the lesson learned from online porn.

Arne Duncan's back in the mix, pushing school vouchers and praising Republicans for their school reform efforts.

I offered my own take on Duncan's op-ed earlier this week. Here's Mike Klonsky's look, including a disturbing possibility-- could Arne be testing waters for a Presidential run by one of the Democrats' griftiest con artists?

In the Trump Presidency, the Rules Are Vague. That Might Be the Point.

Matthew Purdy wrote this essay for the New York Times, and while it's not directly education-related, folks in the ed world will recognize the issue. Make the rules vague and you can just punish whoever you want to punish.

The Lack of Evidence for Ubiquitous Classroom Technology

Larry Cuban and how the desire for evidence based research somehow stops when we talk about ed tech.

How SNAP Funds the Mass Reads Coalition. Or, A Win-Win for the Walton Family

Maurice Cunningham follows the money and figures out that SNAP is tied to advocates for "science of reading."

Jury awards $10 million to teacher who was shot by 6-year-old student

Another sequel to a story covered here. That teacher shot by a sixth grader won a $10 million settlement for the principal's failure to take teacher warnings seriously.

Teachers are Patriots! Who Knew?

Nancy Flanagan points out the obvious-- teachers are not a bunch of crazed America-hating indoctrinators. And there's research to back it up!

This week at Forbes.com, I looked at how the blue wave finished the transformation of Central Bucks School District. Just four years ago, they were the MAGAist GOP board around, a scary harbinger of things to come. Now all nine seats are filled by Democrats. 

Les Paul was a genius and a monster player. This clip is supposed to be from 1951, which would be a year before the first Les Paul guitar was offered commercially. It's also three years after he was in a car accident that shattered his elbow. Rather than accept amputation, Paul had the arm set with a permanent 90 degree angle so he could hold the guitar. 1951 was also the year he and Mary Ford released this hit, one of the first demonstrations of the possibilities of multitrack recording. 

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Arne Duncan Is Now Betsy DeVos

Mind you, on education, Duncan was always the kind of Democrat largely indistinguishable from a Republican, but with his latest print outburst (in the Washington Post, because of course it was), he further reduces the distance between himself and his successor as Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos. 

For this one, he teamed up with Jorge Elorza, head honcho at DFER/Education Reform Now, the hedge fundie group set up to convince Democrats that they should agree with the GOP on education. 

It's yet another example of reformsters popping up to argue that what's really needed in education is a return to all the failed reform policies of fifteen years ago. I don't know what has sparked this nostalgia-- have they forgotten, or do they just think we have forgotten, or do they still just not understand how badly test-and-punish flopped, how useless the Common Core was, and how school choice has had to abandon claims that choice will make education better in this country. 

But here come Duncan and Elorza with variations on the same old baloney.

First up-- chicken littling over NAEP scores. They're dipping! They're low! And they've been dipping ever since 2010s. Whatever shall we do?

Who do Duncan and Elorza think holds the solution? Why, none other than Donald Trump.

Seriously. They are here to pimp for the federal tax credit voucher program, carefully using the language that allows them to pretend that these vouchers aren't vouchers or tax shelters. 

The new federal tax credit scholarship program, passed as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, allows taxpayers to claim a dollar-for-dollar federal tax credit for donations to scholarship-granting organizations, or SGOs. These SGOs can fund a range of services already embraced by blue-state leaders, such as tutoring, transportation, special-education services and learning technology. For both current and incoming governors, it’s a chance to show voters that they’re willing to do what it takes to deliver for students and families, no matter where the ideas originate.

They encourage governors to "unlock these resources" as if these are magic dollars stored in a lockbox somewhere and not dollars that are going to be redirected from the United States treasury to land instead in some private school's bank account. 

Democratic governors are reluctant to get into a program that "could be seen as undermining public schools." But hey-- taking these vouchers "doesn't take a single dollar from state education budgets" says Duncan, sounding exactly like DeVos when she was pushing the same damned thing. And this line of bullshit:

It simply opens the door to new, private donations, at no cost to taxpayers, that can support students in public and nonpublic settings alike.

"At no cost to taxpayers" is absolute baloney. Every dollar is a tax dollar not paid to the government, so the only possible result must be either reduction in services, reduction in subsidies, or increase in the deficit. I guess believing in Free Federal Money is a Democrat thing.

The "support students in public and nonpublic settings" is carefully crafted baloney language as well. Federal voucher fans keep pushing the public school aspect, but then carefully shading it as money spent on tutors or uniforms or transportation and not actual schools. And they are just guessing that any of that will be acceptable because the rules for these federal vouchers aren't written yet.

Duncan and Elorza want to claim that this money will, "in essence," replace the disappearing money from the American Rescue Plan Act. "In essence" is doing Atlas-scale lifting here because, no, it will not. The voucher money will be spent in different ways by different people on different stuff. They are not arguing that this money will help fund public schools-- just that it might fund some stuff that is sort of public education adjacent. 

But how about some "analysis" from Education Reform Now, which claims that the potential scale is significant." They claim that "the federal tax credit scholarship program could generate $3.1 billion in California, nearly $986 million in Illinois and nearly $86 million in Rhode Island each year," drifting ever closer to "flat out lie" territory, because the federal vouchers won't "generate" a damned cent. Pretending these numbers are real, that's $3.1 billion in tax dollars that will go to SGOs in the state instead of the federal government. It's redirected tax revenue, not new money. Will the feds just eat that $3.1 billion shortfall, or cut, say, education funding to California? Next time I get a flat tire, will I generate a new tire from the trunk? I think not.

In classic Duncan, he would like you to know that not following his idea makes you a Bad Person. Saying no to the federal vouchers is a "moral failure." 

Next up: Political advice.

Over the past decade, Democrats have watched our party’s historical advantage on education vanish.

Yeah, Arne, it's more than a decade, and it has happened because you and folks like you have decided that attacking and denigrating the public education system would be a great idea. You and your ilk launched and supported policies based on the assumption that all problems in school were the sole treatable cause of economic and social inequity in this country, and that those problems were the result of really bad teachers, so a program of tests followed by punishment would make things better in schools (and erase poverty, too). 

But now the GOP states are getting higher NAEP scores, so that means... something?

This is Democrats’ chance to regain the educational and moral high ground. To remind the country that Democrats fight to give every child a fair shot and that we’ll do whatever it takes to help kids catch up, especially those left behind for too long.

Yes, Democrats-- you can beat the Republicans by supporting Republican policies. And that "we'll do whatever it takes to help kids catch up" thing? You had a chance to do that, and you totally blew it. Defund, dismantle and privatize public schools was a lousy approach. It's still a lousy approach.

Opting in to the federal tax credit scholarship program isn’t about abandoning Democratic values — it’s about fulfilling them.

When it comes to public education, it's not particularly clear what Democratic values even are these days, and my tolerance for party politics is at an all time low. But I am quite sure that the interests of students, families, teachers, and public education are not served by having the GOP offer a shit sandwich and the Democrats countering with, "We will also offer a shit sandwich, but we will say nice things about it and draw a D on it with mayonnaise." 

We have always heard that Arne Duncan is a nice guy, and I have no reason to believe that's not true. But what would really be nice would be for him to go away and never talk about education ever again. Just go have a nice food truck lunch with Betsy DeVos.