Reverse Centaurs, AI, and the Classroom

Cory Doctorow gave us "enshittification" to explain much of what has gone wrong, and he is already moving on to explain much of what we suspect is wrong with the push for AI. There's a book coming, but he has already laid out the basic themes in a presentation that he shared with his on-line audience. It doesn't address teaching and education directly, but the implications are unmistakable.

We start with the automation theory term "centaur." A centaur is a human being assisted by a machine. Doctorow cites as an example driving a car, or using autocomplete. "You're a human head carried around on a tireless robot body." 

A "reverse centaur" is a machine head on a human body, "a person who is serving as a squishy meat appendage for an uncaring machine." Here's his example, in all its painful clarity:

Like an Amazon delivery driver, who sits in a cabin surrounded by AI cameras, that monitor the driver's eyes and take points off if the driver looks in a proscribed direction, and monitors the driver's mouth because singing isn't allowed on the job, and rats the driver out to the boss if they don't make quota.

The driver is in that van because the van can't drive itself and can't get a parcel from the curb to your porch. The driver is a peripheral for a van, and the van drives the driver, at superhuman speed, demanding superhuman endurance. But the driver is human, so the van doesn't just use the driver. The van uses the driver up.

Doctorow explains that tech companies are highly motivated to appear to be growth industries, and then explains how they're selling AI as a growth story, and not a pretty one. AI is going to disrupt labor.  

The promise of AI – the promise AI companies make to investors – is that there will be AIs that can do your job, and when your boss fires you and replaces you with AI, he will keep half of your salary for himself, and give the other half to the AI company.

The thing is-- AI can't do your job. So the radiology department can't fire all the radiologists and replace them with AI to read scans-- they have to hire someone to sit and check the AI's work, to be the "human in the loop" whose job is to catch the rare-but-disastrous case where the AI screws up. 

That last radiologist is a reverse-centaur, and Doctorow cites Dan Davis' coinage for the specific type-- the Last Radiologist is an "accountability sink." Says Doctorow, "The radiologist's job isn't really to oversee the AI's work, it's to take the blame for the AI's mistakes."

In education, there is potential for AI to create centaurs and reverse centaurs, and I think the distinction is useful for parsing just how horrible a particular AI application can be. 

The most extreme version of a reverse centaur is any of the bullshit AI-driven charter or mini-schools, like the absurd Alpha school chain that promises two hours on a screen will give your child all the education they need. Just let the AI teach your child! All of these models offer a "school" that doesn't need teachers at all--just a "guide" or a "coach" there to be make sure nothing goes wrong, like an AI that offers instruction on white racial superiority or students who zone out entirely. The guide is a reverse centaur, an accountability sink whose function is to be responsible for everything the AI screws up, while allowing the investors in these businesses (and they are always businesses, usually run by business people and not educators) to save all sorts of costs on high-priced teachers by hiring a few low-cost guides.

For teachers, AI promises to make you a high-powered centaur. Let the AI write your lessons, correct your papers, design your teaching materials. Except that AI can't do any of those things very reliably, so the teacher ends up checking all of the AI's work to make sure it's accurate. Or at least they should, providing the human in the loop. So the teacher ends up as either a reverse centaur or, I suppose, a really incompetent reverse centaur who just passes along whatever mistakes the AI makes. 

Almost nobody is sales-arguing that AI can make teaching better, that an AI can reach students better than another human; virtually all arguments are centered on speed and efficiency and time-saving, and while that is appealing to teachers, who never have enough time for the work, the speed and efficiency argument is appealing to management because to them speed and efficiency mean fewer meat widgets to hire, and in a field where the main expense is personnel, that's appealing. 

Public schools don't have investors to make money from cutting teachers (though private and charter schools sure do), but for AI businesses (as with all other ed tech businesses before them) cannot help but salivate at just how huge the education market could be, a $6 billion mountain just waiting to be chewed up. So education gets an endless barrage of encouragements to join the AI revolution. Don't miss out! It's inevitable! It's shiny! To teachers, the promise that it will convert them into powerful cybernetic centaurs. To managers, the promise that it will convert teachers into more compliant and manageable reverse centaurs, controlled by a panel on the screen in your office. 

And both snookered, because an AI can't do a teacher's job. "Don't worry," the boosters say. "There will always be a human in the loop." Of course there will be--because AI can't do a teacher's job. The important question is whether the AI will serve the teachers or be served by them. As a teacher in the classroom being pushed to incorporate AI ("C'mon! It's so shiny!!"), you should be asking whether the tech will be empowering you and giving you new teacher arms of steel, or will it be converting you to some fleshy support for a piece of tech. 

Right now, far more pressure is being put on the Be A Fleshy Appendage side of the discussion. Here's hoping teachers find the strength to stand up to that pressure.

Oh, and a side point that I learned in Doctorow's article that's worth remembering the next time a company wants to offer AI-generated materials--  the courts have repeatedly ruled that AI-generated materials cannot be copyrighted (because they aren't human-made). 

OK: That Anti-Trans Essay and OU's Shame

Samantha Fulnecky tried to bullshit her way through an assignment and got called out on it. Now she would like to raise the holiest of hells.

Discussion about the University of Oklahoma junior's failing grade has exploded in one more wave of right wingers complaining that they are the victims of oppression. Here's the break down of what actually happened in this bullshit flap, plus all the distractions that have been tossed into the mix.

University of Oklahoma graduate teaching assistant Mel Curth gave the assignment. Curth’s assignment asked students to write 650-word reaction papers “demonstrating that you read the assigned article, and [including] a thoughtful reaction to the material presented in the article,” according to the assignment instructions circulating online. “Possible approaches to reaction papers include: 1. A discussion of why you feel the topic is important and worthy of study (or not). 2. An application of the study or results to your own experiences.”

As a long time English teacher, I recognize the critical part of this assignment-- "demonstrating that you read the assigned article." We have all done this; you want the student to actually do the assigned reading, so you assign some sort of response requiring the student to show that they actually read the article.

Fulnecky didn't meet that requirement (her text is included in this article). Teachers will recognize the sort of constructions she used. "This article is very thought-provoking and caused me to thoroughly evaluate the idea of gender and the role it plays in our society." Later she refers to "articles like this," but the only specific reference is to a mention of peer teasing. There is no direct reference to the piece she was supposed to have read. 

When giving my students an assignment to write in response to a work, I would tell them to be specific. "If I could not guess what work you are writing about based on the references in your essay, then you have not been specific enough." Fulnecky utterly fails on that count. Nor does she offer any sorts of support for her statements. That's not strictly a requirement of the assignment, but it is a reasonable expectation of a college junior majoring in psychology. 

The bulk of the essay is anti-trans screed and assertion that right-wing christianist Biblical conservatism. It includes charges of being "demonic" and the assertion that bullying is actually a good thing. 

Curth told Fulnecky, "Please note that I am not deducting points because you have certain beliefs, but instead I am deducting points for you posting a reaction paper that does not answer the questions for this assignment, contradicts itself, heavily uses personal ideology over empirical evidence in a scientific class, and is at times offensive" and goes on to push back on some of Fulnecky's assertions about gender, and while I get the desire to correct someone who has wandered way out past the weeds in a science-based course, life would have been simpler for Curth to simply say, "You didn't address the assignment at all. F."

Curth is trans, and we will probably never know if Fulnecky was simply trying to bait Curth in order to create a narrative about evil college professors oppressing poor christianists. But Fulnecky immediately looped in Turning Point USA. Governor Kevin Stitt, and former education dudebro Ryan Walters.

Oh, and also her mother, Kristi Fulnecky. Mom is an attorney who has, among other things, defended two January 6 insurrectionists. She's a right wing podcaster who served in politics, including a stint in combat with local government when they went after her for taxes owed because she operated a business without a license; just a political witch hunt, she claimed. During the height of the pandemic, she sued over mask mandates and sued Springfield Public Schools over their hybrid re-opening plan. As a local councilwoman, she regularly blocked anyone who corrected her. She apparently is also good at threatening legal-ish letters. 

In other words, Mom has fully mastered the art of aggressive victimhood.

So maybe Samantha Fulnecky is really upset about her grade. Or maybe she is launching a career in the moral panic industry (she's already made it to Fox).

But meanwhile, the University of Oklahoma has shamed itself by benching Curth and ensuring "no academic harm to the student from the graded assignments." Meanwhile, all the usuals are praising Fulnecky's armor of God and touting this is as an example of evil professors oppressing conservatives and Governor Stitt found it all "deeply concerning."

Lord knows what Fulnecky plans to do with her degree, but maybe she won't need it if she cashes in on the right wing outrage circuit. Maybe she's just an apple that fell right next to the tree. In the meantime, I know the University of Oklahoma is in Oklahoma, but surely they can do better than bending to this kind of baloney. 

Glenn Beck's Patriotic AI Zombie

Well, something like this was inevitable.

The AI zombie market has been growing steadily. Schoolai caused a stir by unleashing an AI avatar of Anne Frank for classrooms as just one of their offerings of zombie historical figures for schools. In fact, there are now more outfits offering AI avatars for student use than I can even delve into here. Some are especially terrible; Wisdom of the Ages lets you chat (text only) with some big names of history, and within the first sentence, the Einstein avatar was talking about "he" rather than "I." Their "Adolph Hitler" also lapsed quickly into third person. Humy offers a Hello History app that promises all sorts of "engaging historical simulations" and an "in-depth and personal interaction with the historical figure of your choice." And don't forget the company that offers you the chance to take a writing class taught by a dead author. 

Then there's this horrifying ad from 2wai that promises to keep zombie Grandma around so that generations of your family can enjoy her. 

Good lord. And that's just one of many examples of the AI of Dead Relatives. I'm not sure what is worse-- the idea of dragging Grandma out of the grave or the idea that a few lines of code and some scanned letters and (2wai promises) a three minute conversation are all that's needed to capture a person's essence. No, actually, the worst part is that this encourages to understand that other people are only "real" to the extent that we perceive them and they reflect our expectations of them. These are simulations that amount to us speaking to our own reflections, empty images with no inner lives of their own. Simulacrums that exist only to provide us with an experience; voices that are silent except to speak to us. What the heck does that say about how we related to Grandma while she was alive?

Into this field of the damned comes Glenn Beck. 

Beck claims to have the "largest private collection of American founding documents in the world, surpassed only by the Library of Congress and the National Archives in Washington, D.C." And now Beck has plans for those documents, and they don't involve handing them over to a museum. Instead, on January 5, 2026, he will launch the Glenn and Tania Beck Foundation for American History, a privately funded trust, to make his collection of over a million documents accessible to everyone. 

It's the "next phase" of his career (post The Blaze), his "next disruption" and "creative venture." His foundation has created "the first independent, proprietary, AI-driven American historical library." It will come complete with its own AI zombie librarian named George, "built from the writings of George Washington himself. The writings of the Founders. The thousands of sermons that they heard from their church pulpits. The books that they -- they read. And the principles they lived by."

George is going to teach you the Real Truth, Beck promises. In fact, he guarantees that his AI will generate everything without hallucination or bias, which you might think is absolutely impossible for an AI (because it is), but Beck assures us that George is "contained within a secure, isolated server, where every document is memorized verbatim." Is there any other way that documents are stored on a hard drive?

This is not ChatGPT. This is not Wikipedia. This is verified, factual, memorized, first source truth.

Beck says that George will teach the Constitution, the Federalist papers, the civics. Beck says this project "will change EVERYTHING about education." George will counteract all those lies your teacher taught you. It's a proprietary AI database that will permanently preserve "the physical evidence of America's soul." 

There are at least two possibilities. One is that George will be a Washington-lite AI zombie that will, in fact, hallucinate and spew bias just like any other AI because Beck doesn't know what he's talking about. The other is that George has taken an old version of Jeeves and slapped a tri-corner hat on him, and that this is just a digital library with a search function because Beck doesn't understand AI, but he knows that it's a hot marketing term right now.

At least three outfits claim to have worked on an AI Zombie George Washington (here, here, and here) and they are all pretty much baloney. It makes sense that AI hucksters are going to go after the low-hanging fruit of public domain persons for zombiefication, and it makes sense that Beck, a seasoned patriotic grifter, would follow that path.

But boy is this shit a bummer, because Beck is going to wave his Giant Library around and convince a bunch of suckers that he can tell them the Real Truth about our nation's founders with even more unearned authority than he already deploys. But if AI zombies are good for anything, it's grift, and we had better steel ourselves for more of it. And please, God, keep it out of our children's classrooms.

School Sports

I am not a sports guy. I played some playground league softball way back in the day, and that's about it for competitive team sports. I'm married to a former collegiate swimmer who used to do triathlons and marathons, and the board of directors really loves cross country. For years, one of my extra jobs at my school was announcing football games, and I was a big supporter of all our teams, especially those in which my own students were involved.

NW PA is sports territory. We start them early and take them seriously (and not always in a developmentally appropriate way). We've had arguably disproportionate success for a district our size-- state-level contending teams, players who went on to college and pro success. My school loved a good pep rally, and I nudged even my most non-sporty students toward approaching these gatherings with an open mind. I've always thought school spirit (which around here is mostly focused through sports) is a way to practice being part of something bigger than yourself.

These days, I have concerns.

High school sports have been transforming for the past couple of decades, driven by parents who see sports as a service provided for them to get their child a scholarship (and maybe fame and fortune). You can see the effects in the trouble getting officials to work events and in how few coaches are now from outside the teaching staff. There are certainly non-teacher coaches who do good work, but non-teacher coaches too often don't grasp that 1) they are teaching students and 2) that these students have lives outside of their sport. 

Some of this intensity seems to be trickling down from college and pro sports. My daughter graduated from Penn State, and I have other family that went to Pitt, so I'm familiar with what fairly... intense... fandom looks like. One of my nephews is a Penn State grad and sports writer who still covers his alma mater and posts like this one show he has kept his perspective. But goodness, do some fans take their college and pro teams very seriously.

And while I'm not sure the intensity has changed, I think how I feel about it in this moment has shifted.

Sports love is very much a tribal thing. Decades ago one of our football captains stood up in a pep rally and declared "I hate [rival's name] because... because... they're [rival's name]." He still gets grief about it, but it's actually nice shorthand, more honest that trying to pretend that [rival's name] has some sort of odious quality.

Which is the way it usually works. You pick out That Team You Hate and declare that they have That Detestable Trait that makes it okay to hate them. You love and support your team, sometimes to the point that you excuse terrible behavior by team members. You go way past loyalty and make the team a critical part of your identity to the point that any that attacks the team attacks you. 

Thing is, we are living through a demonstration of how tribalism can be bad for a nation. What is MAGA except a team in the game of socio-political sports with the most rabid fan base ever? We're not supposed to inject any nuanced reality into the discussion of their team's honored icons (Dear Leader, a certain version of US history) and we aren't supposed to acknowledge any nuanced positive aspects of the teams they hate (LGBTQ, immigrants). 

So I'm not really enjoying the tribalism of sports these days. It no longer seems like a harmless diversion over inconsequential contests. It seems too much like a mirror of the kind of toxic tribalism that is seeping into every aspect of US life, and I'd just rather not.

I was a band guy. Something I would tell band members or sports-involved students when they seemed a little into the Hate That Team groove was this-- Out there, when you're doing your thing at this event, those people on the other side are the only people in that place who really understand what you go through to do what you do. Not the fans, not the people screaming for you to "Kick those @!##%^'s asses." 

I'm not arguing excessive sports fanning is remotely a cause of the current tribalism cursing our nation. But I am suggesting that the worst kind of sports fandom echoes the worst kind of politics, and maybe we want to be a little more thoughtful about the kind of sportsthusiasm that we foster in young humans. If sports are supposed to build character-- well, as a nation we are suffering from a bit of character deficiency and maybe we should keep that in mind. 

FL: Schools of Hope and Charter Property Grab

Florida is implementing a whole new way for charter schools to hoover up taxpayer dollars.

Schools of Hope started out in 2017 (the bill originally called them "Schools of Success" but someone must have decided against overpromising). The idea was the ultimate in targeting struggling public schools; the idea is that when you find a school that is struggling, you don't give them additional resources or support, but instead pay some charter school to come into the neighborhood. 

The scheme was cooked up by then-House Speaker Richard Corcoran and then-Rep. Manny Diaz, two long-time opponents of public education in Florida. And they got some help-- according to Gary Fineout, an AP reporter who has covered many Florida crazy-pants education stories:

Rep. Michael Bileca, a Miami Republican and chairman of the House Education Committee, said legislators met with charter school operators and asked what it would take for them to set up schools in the neighborhoods now served by traditional public schools. He said one answer was that they needed help paying for new buildings to house the school.

Emphasis mine-- we'll come back to that. Cathy Boehme of the Florida Education Association pointed out the obvious:

You are saying funding matters. You're saying good strategies matter. And then you turn around and keep those strategies from schools that you could save from these turnaround options.

Yup. "We've found schools that need help," said the legislature. "Let's give that help to someone else!"

However, Schools of Hope did not take off. Florida was hoping to attract national charter chain action, but it turns out that national charter chains understand that in neighborhoods where public schools struggle, charter schools will also struggle (see also: sad story of Tennessee's Achievement School District). The League of Women Voters attributes the program's struggles to four factors:

• Facility costs remained prohibitive even with 25% loan caps and state subsidies  
• Building schools from scratch takes years of planning, approval, and construction 
• Local opposition emerged in some communities skeptical of outside operators 
• Easier markets existed elsewhere for charter operators seeking expansion

The legislature, more interested in nursing the charter industry than the public school system, tried modifying the law. They expanded the range of public schools that could trigger Schools of Hope, both in terms of school achievement and location. They threw more money at the program.

It still wasn't enough.

So this year, the Florida State Board of Education just went ahead and changed the rules. 

Remember that problem with getting new buildings up and running. Fixed! Colocation! Now districts must provide "underused, vacant, or surplus" facilities to SOH charters. No rent, no lease, no cost, and districts can't refuse. However, the district must provide building maintenance, custodial services, food service, and transportation. And as long as the facilities are "underused," the district has no say.

"Underused" is a big problem here. There's an administrative rule in the state code that defines "fully used" roughly as "no unused student seats," but that's not much help at all. Intermittent or irregular use? And there's a whole world of other programs that serve students in schools. As Education Matters in Manatee points out

[P]erhaps on an Excel spreadsheet (page 2 of 4 is shown below), a classroom housing six or seven students, one teacher, and several aides may appear to be “underutilized” - but it isn’t. It is in fact providing essential services to some of the most vulnerable citizens of our county.

Imagine you and some neighbors have a regular car pool to work. You share gas expenses, even pool money for a morning cup of coffee. Then one day another neighbor says, "I see you've got a spare seat in the car. I'm going to sit in it and you're going to drive me to work." The seat's not really empty, you reply-- most days we put the stuff we take to work there, and on Tuesdays we take Pat's mom to the doctor. "Don't care," says the neighbor. "You have to take me." Will you chip in for gas money? "No way," says the neighbor. "Also, you're going to buy me donuts and coffee every morning."

If this sounds like a sweet deal for charter operators, well, they agree. Dozens of charter operators have informed a public district that they want the district to fork over the space (WFTV9 pegs the number at 60, but that total appears to be a moving target-- Miami Times Online reports almost 700 "Give us your space" letters going out to school districts). 

And now that the rules have changed--Schools of Hope no longer target just low-performing schools, but any school with mysterious "underused" space-- many of the schools that are being targeted are A and B rated schools, which is swell for charters, because that's the market they want to tap anyway. Schools of Hope were launched with all sorts of florid grandstanding ("No longer will we rob children of dignity and hope. Now every single child will be afforded an opportunity of a world class education.," said Corcoran in 2017). Now charter operators can skip right past those challenging schools and head for the more profitable neighborhoods. Once again, school choice is really school's choice.

Sure enough, here comes Eva Moskowitz and Success Academy to cash in on Schools of Hope. Success has perfected the art of creaming families that will fit in-- none of this "every single child will be afforded an opportunity" baloney for Eva. Backed by $50 million from Citadel CEO Ken Griffin, she's looking to set up shop in Miami-Dade, a move that would have been expensive before the state figured out how to give her facility space (and food service and transportation) for free. In return she gets to pick and choose the most agreeable students from a market that didn't include any low-performing schools under the original definition. 

SOH present an assortment of problems on the ground--what, for instance, happens in a building where the public school staff and the charter school hours don't match up? Cafeteria time? Can schedules be worked out to manage students passing and mingling in the halls? 

And what the heck happens if the public school enrollment grows and they need some of the space back? The law doesn't appear to have any clue (perhaps because Florida legislators are focused on gutting public schools, not building them. 

A Success rep says this will be great for the public school because the co-located school will get increased state aid because of increased head count in the building. I wouldn't bet on it. Meanwhile, the charter gets to double dip-- the state hands over taxpayer dollars so that the charter can operate a school, but at the same time, the public school has to carry some of the costs of operating the charter school. 

And somehow, the party of small government is once again stomping on local control. The members of the community have no say, no voice, in whether or not the charter becomes a squatter in their public school building, and no say in how the charter operates inside that taxpayer-owned building.

What do they get? Hard to say. The results of Schools of Hope are, so far, not particularly amazing and in many cases have been outstripped by public schools that work with the same demographics. SOH charters are not subject to the same sorts of penalties for low performance that public schools suffer. No School of Hope operators have lost their designation because of their low academic performance. But beyond that, much is mysterious because Florida does not collect information about students at SOH charters-- not which groups are represented nor which attendance zones they came from. You would think that a program supposedly aimed at rescuing poor high-risk students would collect data about whether or not those students were being rescued, but no. 

If you're in Florida and want more information, I recommend the website schoolsofnope.org  and the recent report from the League of Women Voters. If you aren't in Florida, watch for this manner of picking taxpayer pockets in your state. 

It's Not About Freedom

You may have seen this meme floating about--

It's a pretty thought, but here's the problem. A bunch of people are going to look at this and think, "Well, I can already put my kids through college without debt, always have access to good health care, and get sick without going broke." These are the same folks who can always have access to good schools for their children, who never worry about affording food or shelter. If being free from fear is freedom, these folks feel pretty free already.

So their question is not, "How can we all be free like the Norwegians," but instead, "Why should I have to pay so that Those People can enjoy my kind of freedom? I deserve it, but what have they done to deserve the kind of power and privilege to which I am so rightly entitled?"

Taxpayer-funded school choice vouchers are not about empowering parents or unleashing parental rights. States have created laws that prioritize a private school's ability to charge what they wish, teach what they wish, exclude who they wish over any family's "right" to choose. "School choice" advocates have taken none of the steps needed to create an actual school choice system. 

Vouchers are about getting the government out of the education business and, by doing so, also get government out of the work of equity. Vouchers are about telling every family, "Your kid's education is now your problem, and nobody else's. Society has washed its hands of you. Good luck."

You can see the same philosophy in action in Trump's health care "plan"-- give the money to the consumers instead of the insurance companies and let the people go find their own health care with "health care savings accounts." It took him a whole decade to come up with what is essentially a school voucher plan for health care. Will your health care voucher be enough to get you the health care you needs, and couldn't you get more buying power by pooling your resources with others? Doesn't matter, because as RFK Jr repeatedly suggests that if you live right, you won't need health care that you can't afford (and if you end up dying, you deserved that, too-- hooray eugenics). 

Social safety net? Unnecessary. Just make good choices. If you do need help, get it from a church (which may not be equipped to help everyone, but may be well equipped to judge who deserves help and who does not).

The idea simmering under school choice and now bubbling up all around us is simple-- Why should I have to help take care of other people (particularly people of whom I disapprove, people who are not like me)? 

"Freedom" is a pretty word for dressing policies of abandonment. It gets traction because there is such a thing as levels of bureaucracy that can bind us in frustrating ways. But pretending that "freedom" is living life without any help or support but your own is myopic. "I saw that the car had spun off the road and slammed into a tree and I didn't want to take away the passenger's freedom to save themselves."

The freedom being advocated for is "freedom for me" or "freedom for those who deserve it." Or maybe "freedom from worrying about anyone else." It's the freedom that comes in a society that assumes that some people matter more than others, that all humans are not, in fact, created equal. We can do better than that. 

CBS Covers Florida Charter Schools

Well, look at that! Someone in the mainstream media noticed some of the very things about how charter schools operate that some of us have been talking about for over a decade. Charter school owners hire their own companies to make bank from taxpayer dollars??!! I am shocked! Shocked!!

Watch this segment, which includes Bruce Baker, one of the Institute's favorite school funding experts. Plus a look at Erika Donalds, Florida's leading school choice grifter.