MO: A New School Surveillance Idea

Missouri is going to start watching school wastewater for drugs.

Wastewater monitoring is not an entirely new idea. Here in PA, we've been looking at monitoring K-12 school wastewater for indications of Covid in the school. 

But in Missouri, a $7 million project is being launched to monitor wastewater for fentanyl and other drugs. $4 million of that goes to monitoring K-12 wastewater in schools, while $3 million will go to "wastewater testing involving law enforcement efforts." Superintendents across the state received an e-mail inviting them to sign on for the project. 

"Through the collection of one small wastewater sample per week, schools will receive near real-time insights into local substance misuse trends at no cost and with no additional responsibilities for your staff," said Mark James, director of the Department of Public Safety in the email.

Mike O'Connell of the Missouri Department of Public Safety told Missourinet that 40 schools have signed up and twelve have already begun the weekly testing. 

“By doing weekly testing, you’ll be able to track trends and then the data are shared with the schools and then the schools can look at what types of programs they want to implement, and some may decide that it’s a bigger problem than they anticipated,” said O’Connell.

Asked if the data would also be shared with law enforcement, O'Connell replied that there was nothing contractually to prevent that sharing. “But I believe that that is still being worked out.”

The company contracted for the work is Stercus Bioanalytics, a company already doing similar wastewater analysis in other states. They belong to Mighty Good Solutions, LLC, a company that includes a variety of products from antibacterial wipes (Wipe Those Hands and Wipe That Tush are actual MGS company names that I did not make up), diagnostic kits, and household products like Pizza Saver, toothbrush head covers (Germ Guard) and measuring spoons. Mighty Good was founded in 2012 in Kansas City and started out making "plastic consumer goods." When COVID hit, they started making and donating medical face shields for hospitals and health professionals, then moved into health and hygiene products. The founder Ben Rendo and his company seem like swell folks.

Wastewater testing, particularly when it doesn't require the school to do anything except look at the data, could be useful. Testing wastewater for fentanyl use has been around for several years now. Nobody seems to be questioning its accuracy. Commenting on the practice in 2024, Jeffrey Brent, MD, PhD, a distinguished clinical professor in the CU Division of Pulmonary Sciences and Critical Care Medicine and a national leader in medical toxicology research, pointed out the danger of stigmatizing an entire community. "Such stigmatization has implications for factors like real estate prices, the likelihood of community improvement related to the willingness of businesses to establish themselves locally, and community gentrification.”

Is that a possible problem for schools? Probably. I'm wondering what happens to a student who is applying for college from a "notorious druggie school." I'm more concerned that the results could be used as an excuse for law enforcement to land on a school with both feet. 

I get that if a school has a fentanyl problem, it is better for school leaders to know than to not know. But every time someone comes up with a new way to put students under surveillance, I have concerns. When we collect data about young humans, the Law of Unintended Consequences always seems to kick in. We should keep an eye on how this pilot program pans out. 

AI Student Spectators

States are trying to figure out how to respond to AI in schools, and they are most flubbing it. A piece from CT Insider shows just how far in the weeds folks are getting. 

The piece by no less than five staff writers (Natasha Sokoloff, Crystal Elescano, Ignacio Laguarda, Jessica Simms, Michael Gagne) looks at how Connecticut's district approaches are working out in the classroom, and the items touted as success are... well, discouraging. Meanwhile, the state is putzing along and "plans to build its formal AI guidance for all districts based on the findings of the pilot program; collaboration with experts and AI educational organizations; and research-based documents 'to ensure we get this right,' [state academic chief Irene] Parisi said."

Westport Public Schools has AI tools in place that are, according to Parisi "education-specific and have privacy protections." 

“They said it was like having a teacher in their pocket,” she said. The tools could help students work through a particular problem, brainstorm ideas, research for projects and provide feedback, she said.

 "Help" and "work through" are doing some heavy lifting here. "Provide feedback" remains one of the popular items in the AI arsenal. I remain unconvinced. Feedback that does not understand or include student intent-- what they thought they were doing, what they meant to do-- is just correction. "Do this instead of that." If you don't know why the student did "that" in the first place, you can't provide much in the way of useful correction, and since AI does not "know" anything, all it can do is edit the student's work for them. What do students learn from this? This is the pedagogical equivalent of an adult who shoulders the student aside and fixes their work while the student watches.

But the proud example of an AI project, shared by the superintendent in a board meeting, is even worse. 

Students in a middle school social studies class used AI to create and question “digital peers” and “characters” from the Middle Ages while the teacher guided them in evaluating responses for accuracy and evidence.

Many teachers (including me) would recognize this assignment immediately, only Back In The Day, we would have the students create and role play the characters themselves. In Mrs. O'Keefe's eighth grade English class (back in 1971), we had to research a historical person and then portray them as a guest on a talk show (my friends Andy and Stewart drew Van Gogh, and in the middle of his interview he became over-emotional and cut off his own ear, complete with fake blood).  My sister-in-teaching Merrill annually had her students put Milton's Paradise Lost on trial, with students role playing characters from the work.

This is a variation on that same assignment except AI does the role playing and students are transformed from actors into spectators.

Almost any version of this assignment would be better. Let students role play. Let them craft faux social media accounts for their characters. Anything that had them actively creating the character based on their own research, rather than feeding some stuff into an AI and sitting back to observe and judge the result. What does the teacher even assess in such an assignment? How is this any better than just watching a video about the topic?

If you're considering incorporating AI in your lesson and wondering how to decide what to have it do, here's a hint-- do not have it turn students from active participants into spectators who simply watch what the bot does for them. Students should be main characters in their own education, and not observers, sidelined so that the plagiarism machine can shine. 

When Implementing New Tech, Always Ask This Question

Installing new ed tech? Implementing new policies or procedures? I wish with all my heart that the People In Charge would ask a simple set of questions.

Who is helped by this? Which job does this make easier?  

This has always been an issue, because it is easy to sit in an administration office and come up with procedures and paperwork that would make your life easier. And that's a perfectly human impulse-- to look at the work you're slogging through and think, "Man, this would be so much easier if I had my subordinates do X." 

In education, it's often something data related. "I would love to have data on how many left-handed students bring their own pencils," muses some admin. "I wonder who could collect that data for me?" (Spoiler alert: it will be the teachers). 

You don't have to look any further than the Big Standardized Test, which is the result of a whole bunch of policymakers saying, "Well, we could impose some of our favorite policies if only we had some data to excuse them."

The astonishing thing about applying the "Whose job does this make easier" lens to education is how truly rare it is that the answer is "teachers." 

It's not always huge stuff. When my old school switched from a paper attendance system run out of the main office over to a computerized system run by teachers, it created one more nuisance. Now every period had to have a built in moment within the first five minutes of class that allowed me to go to my desktop computer and record attendance, rather than doing it on paper to be checked later against the master attendance list. 

Was this a massive inconvenience? Of course not. But what generally grinds classroom teachers down is not the massive weight of large policy ideas, but death by a thousand small paper cuts. 

And this was a case where the central office was very proud of how this saved labor and made their job easier. But many labor-saving programs are actually labor-moving programs, and in school, the labor is most commonly moved to teachers. A thousand paper cuts.

Imagine a district where the administration said, "Yes, this would make my job easier, but it would put more burden on the teachers, so let's not do it." If you don't have to imagine that district, God bless you.

I am not arguing that the goal should be to make teaching the easiest walk-in-the-park job ever envisioned; that is neither possible nor desirable. But the basic function of a school administration is to make it possible for every teacher in the building to do the best job they can, and every administrative decision should be examined through that lens. Every decision should be centered on the question, "Will this support teaching in classrooms?"

A whole family of ed tech products are based on the proposition "If teachers put their work into these tech platforms, it will be easier for administration to monitor them." Digital lesson plans don't make it any easier for teachers to plan, and in fact can add time to the whole process, but they do make it easier for admins to monitor those plans (and in extreme cases, admins may have visions of an entire digitized program, so that the teacher can be more easily replaced).

The newest tech wave of AI products should face the same question. What job does this AI-powered whizbang actually make easier? Is it, for instance, easier to have an AI extrude lesson plans which the teacher must then edit and check for errors? Who does this actually help? Does it help a teacher to automate the brainwork of teaching (hint: does it help athletes to have a robot lift weights for them). 

Teachers aren't the only stakeholders who need to be considered. Yes, it may make communication easier for the school, but does it really help parents and students to have to download one more app in order to get important information from the school?

Even worse is the tech that is adopted simply because it's cool, with no idea that it will help anyone at all. It's just cool, you know, and we've heard other schools are getting it. Surely you'll figure out some use for it. 

The thing is, every new tech a teacher adopts (willingly or not) is either helping or hurting. Even if it's not actively making the job harder, a non-helping piece of tech represents opportunity cost, money that could have been spent on something that was actually useful. 

So administrations, I beg you-- before you adopt, ask yourself who would be helped by this new technowidget, and if the answer is not "The people who do the actual work of teaching students," maybe ask yourself if it's really worth purchasing.

A Dumb Act About Faculty Merit

What if we hired college professors based on their SAT scores?

George Leef just turned up at National Review pushing this very dumb idea. Leef is the director of editorial content at the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal, and if you want to know where he's coming from, the first sentence of his NR piece gives us a hint. 

The diversity mania that has swept over American education for the last 50 years or so has had a malign effect on the quality of professors. Many of those hired to fill quotas for certain groups are, to be blunt, not especially qualified. Moreover, such hiring violates the law against discrimination.

Thing is, we could dismiss Leef as one right winger with a dumb idea, but it's not just Leef's personal individual dumb idea. Let's trace it. He's referencing a piece by David Randall published at Leef's own shop, "It's time to mandate merit." Randall is the executive director of the Civics Alliance and director of research at the National Association of Scholars, and what he is pushing is their model bill, the Faculty Merit Act. Which is a dumb bill.

Who are these people?

The National Association of Scholars is a long-standing right wing outfit that was culture panicking before it was cool. They were founded in 1987 to preserve the "Western intellectual heritage" and "to confront the rise of campus political correctness," originally called Campus Coalition for Democracy. They get funding from all the usuals-- Alliance Defending Freedom, Bradley, Koch, Scaife, Olin, etc etc etc. Founder and long time president was Stephen Balch, who has made a career out of operating in these Let's Make Colleges Not Liberal circles. Current president Peter Wyatt Wood is a regular columnist for National Review.

Jeanne Kirkpatrick, a Reagan adviser, has been in the group, as has Chester Finn. Go figure.

Leef's opening idea-- that a lefty education ideas like multiculturalism, gender studies and affirmative action are 1960s radical notions that caused institutions like universities to become a threat to Western civilization and general white conservatism-- that's a long-standing belief of NAS, periodically updated to include CRT and DEI. NAS has launched a variety of battles to oppose things like the AP History framework and anything DEI-ish and climate change talk. They often worm their way into state level stuff, like back in 2001 when they tried to commandeer Colorado's teacher training system.

In 2022, NAS decided to launch a whole new initiative under the heading of Civics Alliance, an attempt to ride the wave of culture panic into some new controls that included a variety of pre-fab policies for new board members who wanted to make sure that White kids weren't being discriminated against.

Their mission statement manages to squeeze a whole lot of right wing alarm bells into one paragraph:

We oppose all racism and support traditional American pluralism, e pluribus unum—out of many, one. These beliefs are not those of the radical New Civics activists, which espouse identity politics with overlapping ideologies of critical race theory, multiculturalism, and so-called “antiracism.” Unfortunately, these dogmas would ruin our country by destroying our unity, our liberty, and the national culture that sustains them. They have replaced traditional civics, where historical dates and documents are taught, with a New Civics based on the new tribalism of identity politics. Their favored pedagogy is service-learning, alternately called action civics, civic engagement, civic learning, community engagement, project-based civics, and global civics. These all replace civics literacy with a form of left-wing activism that adapts techniques from Alinsky-style community organizing for use in the classroom.

Well-meaning folks, they warn, might adopt the new wolves in sheep's clothing, but "Well-intentioned reformers must not collaborate with those promoting an ideology that would destroy America."

Civics Alliance drew a real crowd to sign off on their We Want letter-- folks from the Claremont Institute, Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs, Great Hearts Institute for Education, Heartland Institute, 
The Federalist, Eagle Forum. And plenty of familiar names. Jeremy Tate (Classical Learning Test), Sandra Stotsky, Chris Rufo, Nicole Neily (Parents Defending Education), Katharin Gorka, Max Eden, our old friend Rebecca Friedrichs, and  of course George Leef. And that doesn't even scratch the surface.

What does the proposed bill actually say?

CA appears to have set itself out to be a source of model legislation and policy, so the Faculty Merit Act is just one among many others, like the Campus Intellectual Diversity Act and the Human Nature Act (an anti-LGBTQ bill). 

The introduction of the bill re-asserts that administrator and faculty hiring is rife with political discrimination in hiring, which is itself just a "fig leaf" for discrimination by race and sex. "Faculty merit has declined precipitously as a result." It varies by discipline, of course-- "the average professor of ethnic studies is as acute as the average professor of physics." 

How are we to turn back this tide of affirmative action mediocrity in hiring for college professors? Clearly, the solution is standardized testing. 

Our model Faculty Merit Act promotes academic transparency by requiring all parts of a state university system to publish every higher-education standardized test score (SAT, ACT, CRT, GRE, LSAT, MCAT, etc.) of every faculty member, as well as the standardized test score of every applicant for the faculty member’s position, of every applicant selected for a first interview, and every applicant selected for a final interview. The Act also requires the university to post the average standardized test score of the faculty in every department.

Yes, the best way to judge that 30-year old aspiring political science professor is to look at the scores from the test they took when they were 17. This is such a dumb idea, and the creators of this dumb bill almost admit it. 

A standardized test is only a rough proxy for academic merit—especially as the College Board has weakened its tests. Some professors will have a greater ability to teach and do research than appears on a SAT score. But standardized tests do provide some measure of general intelligence.

Do they? Do they really? Because the SATs offer roughly zero measure of teaching and researching skill. In his article, Randall argues 

a standardized test score isn’t a bad proxy for student merit in undergraduate admissions, and it isn’t a bad proxy for faculty merit in the hiring process. If the public and policymakers can see that a faculty search had 300 applicants, that the standardized test scores dropped during each round of the selection process, and that the person who got the job had a lower SAT score than 290 other applicants, then they can see that something is wrong.

Will they? Because I'm pretty sure that a standardized test score is a terrible proxy for faculty merit. Leef quotes this same section and follows it with "This is a very good idea." No, this is a very dumb idea. But the second part really captures the real intent of the policy, which is to get the public riled up against these slacker liberal professors who, these guys are certain, have terrible test scores. Says the bill language:  

The public also will learn something by comparing the average standardized test score of different departments. If Ethnic Studies professors have standardized test scores two standardized deviations below those of physics professors, then the public will have better means to assess the claims of the professoriate to intellectual capacity that merits public deference.

In other words, we have a list here of departments that we think shouldn't exist, and we feel certain that the professors in these departments tanked their SAT scores back in the day, so if we can publish the proof of their intellectual ineptitude, we could erode the support that would keep us from axing them. Also, and "perhaps most importantly," it would provide statistical information that guys who didn't get that job could use to sue the school. 

The actual list of retired scores included in the bill is the ACT, the Classic Learning Test, the Law School Admissions Test, the Medical College Admissions Test, the Graduate Record Examinations, and the SAT. Also, the school has to swear they coughed up all the applicable scores or they will be subject to charges of perjury. The language of the bill hits all the particulars of the ideas covered above.

The whole exercise takes me back to the early days of the Big Standardized Test, when reformsters were just so certain that they knew about the Trouble With K-12 Education and that test results would provide the biggest lid-blowing digitized Gotcha ever. NAS/CA are already certain that all those damn squishy liberal non-white hires are a pack of inferiors who need to have their inferiority stripped naked to the world so that public opinion can chase them away from the University. 

That's not a particularly admirable goal, but really, the whole proposal is a just a dumb idea. The notion that an SAT score makes a major statement about someone's merit, especially years and years later is just bizarre. "Well, Dr. Wisdompants, we're sure your PhD work is fine and all, and your work as a graduate teaching assistant is swell, along with these letters of recommendation from you last teaching positions-- that's all well and good, but what we really want to see is your SAT scores." 

Or maybe they're picking up on student conversations. "Yes, Professor Bigbrains runs a good class, and I am learning like crazy in there. The professor really knows the field and really knows how to make it understandable to us. But damn-- have you seen their SAT scores??!!"

The Faculty Merit Act is just dumb. It's a dumb idea that wants to turn dumb policy into a dumb law and some National Review editor should feel dumb for giving it any space. If this dumb bill shows its face in your state, do be sure to call out its dumbness and note that whoever attached their name to it is just not a serious person. 

ICYMI: Back To It Edition (1/4)

Vacation is over and it is time to get back to it, whether your "it" is work or school or extra-legal kidnappings of foreign heads of state. Feels like a long year already.

All of this [waves vaguely in direction of country] makes me oddly more committed to following education, because education remains hugely important even as it falls off the radar of folks who are worried about things like unaffordable health insurance and wars for oil and a decaying federal government. 

While on vacation, lots of folks' output slows down, and this list gets quieter because of it. But there's still stuff to not miss. So let's see what we've got here. 

U.S. Dept. of Education denies appeal to save $30M grant funds for Idaho rural schools

The department continues to withhold taxpayer dollars from public schools. KTVB reports on how Idaho students are getting squeezed by the feds, because somebody saw some scary DEI words.

When Billionaires Built a Teacher

Mike Simpson is mostly know as one of the big voice amplifiers on line; Big Education Ape shares a ton of writing with snappy illustrations to go with. But Simpson does do some writing of his own, like this big picture piece about the big billionaire plan to dismantle public education.

Charter School Flimflam 

Thomas Ultican looks at the latest report from the Network for Public Education looking at the charter school industry.

In Their Own Words: The New Orleans Community Wants Their Direct-run, Leah Chase School.

The indispensable Mercedes Schneider is back at it with an in depth look at the single public school left in Orleans Parish and the continuing threats to its continued existence.

Why Conservatives Should Defend Socialized Education

Robert Pondiscio spotted my piece highlighting the Michigan lawmaker who wants to cut school taxes for property owners without kids in school. I didn't care for that idea, and Pondiscio doesn't, either. Here's the conservative argument for taxing everyone to pay for schools.

Days Gone By

Audrey Watters offers an end-of-year reflection on the dangers of throwing AI at humans in general and young humans in particular.

Wanted! Presidents/Leaders Who Protect ALL Children!

Nancy Bailey provides an excellent beginning-of-year reminder of the many areas in which children need leaders who care about them.

Where the Students Are Leaving—and Who Is Left to Absorb the Cost

Something strange-- and undoubtedly costly-- is happening to Nashville school enrollment. TC Weber had the time to sort at least some of it, and the resulting report unveils the story-- at least part of it.

Francis Wilkinson: MAGA's book bans are coming back with a vengeance

Frances Wilkinson doesn't so much provide a picture of the current state of censorship as she provides a history of the last couple of years, and in that respect, it's a nicely done piece of work. This is how we got here. Go ahead and get frustrated and angry all over again.

Trump administration makes good on many Project 2025 education goals

Christina Samuels at Hechinger provides a handy update on how far the Project 2025 assault on education got this year.

A Banner year for Censorship

Big Katherine Stewart fan here. This post from her newsletter looks at the nature of censorship this year under Dear Leader.

Whatever Happened to the Art of Brainwashing America Before Plunging It Into Unnecessary War?

Cezary Jan Strusiewicz at McSweeney's with another darkly hilarious take on our current moment.

At Bucks County Beacon this week, I offered a look back at the year in education here in Pennsylvania {it could have been worse). 

At Forbes.com, I looked at some uncomfortable findings about young humans and their use of AI "companions."

In the other end of the state, New Years means a mummers band, and while the pageantry and costumes are nice, there is something about just getting out there and playing for the neighborhood. It's a sound unlike any other.

Sign up for my newsletter. It's free, and it lands in your email so you don't have to venture out into the social media world.

The Sad Gift of 2025

There is a lesson to learn this year, or maybe we can call it a demonstration. And it is huge, beyond politics, beyond the squabbling, but not beyond education itself.

Let me explain.

We come into the world, and even at the youngest ages, we start to sense the outlines of the great existential issues, grasping the edges with chubby fingers and a still-plastic mind. I am tiny and powerless in a huge world. I am isolated and alone. And someday, I am going to die.

We move into the world, through the world, grappling with these. We find healthy ways to manage. We learn to value and connect with other people, becoming part of something larger than ourselves, healthier and stronger than we are alone. We make our peace with death, embracing a belief about how it is followed by something more than oblivion, or, alternatively, finding grace and acceptance of an oblivion we believe we can't escape.

Not everyone copes well. Fear and panic drive us to more extreme measures. Am I small and powerless? Then I will do everything I can to gather power and might to myself, enough to bend the world to my anxious will. Am I isolated and alone? Then I will find ways to demand the love and attention of others, maybe even use force to take what you should be tokens of affection (but which I have transformed into signs of my own power). Am I going to die? Then I will find ways to make a mark on the world, to build monuments and scribe my name on anything large enough to be seen by everyone. We deny our own nature in order to put on whatever mask we imagine would protect us from whatever fear drives us. We hollow ourselves out and try to cover the gutted remains with borrowed armor, a makeshift Gregor Samsa. 

Most of us, at one time or another, succumb to these fear-driven impulses, but if nothing else, our circumstances limit us from taking it too far. But when the fear grabs us, we try some small version of these big fights against the abyss, and we come up short against the restrictions of our circumstances, thinking "if only..."

Well, here's the gift of 2025. We get to watch a man who acts out the worst of human emptiness and fear, who has his whole life (for those of us who have been paying attention) been awful. Have you imagined that given enough power and money, you could silence the voices of fear and emptiness that nag at you? Look on his works, ye wanna-be mighty, and despair. 

He slaps his name on everything, worried that if he does not build himself a monument, nobody else will. He acquires (and wastes) mountains of money, and insists on displaying it in an imagined show of wealth. He demands attention and praise for his great achievements, no matter how imaginary. He diminishes everyone else who challenges him or in any way challenges the notion that he is so great that he is above the abyss. He looks for some simulation of love, though he perversely and repeatedly confuses love with submission, which is just one more way he tried to reassert his power over the world. He does all of these things over and over again, because none of it is ever enough.

He has been successful in pursuing this panic-driven campaign to quell his own empty-hearted flailing against the human existential dilemma-- more successful arguably than any human in the history of humans. Women. Money. Submissive butt-kissing from a host of people. A host of people he can look down on. And the most powerful position in the world. Everyone who ever dreamt that power and wealth could beat back the abyss now has an exemplar.

And it isn't working. Never mind the intellectual and moral and ethical and decent human being shortcomings of this thirst for power and wealth. It clearly hasn't done the job. He's not happy, not at peace, not finding joy. I mean, he's got everything he has fought and wrangled and stomped on others for, and he still seems miserable, a joyless hunk of a man whose still grasping for the one more thing that might make it all okay, a grasping so desperate that it slides through ethical, moral, and legal restraints because nothing--nothing--is more important than collecting that Stuff, because surely that will hasten the moment that finally makes him okay. And it never comes, and it won't come, and he will still die.

Mind you, he's not alone. The techno overlords who really do plan to avoid death and have "more everything forever." The people who believe they are better than the common herd and are therefor exempt from life's hugest questions. The believers who think an angry God has singled them out for different (better) treatment.  And they stick to this because fear has blinded them to the obvious-- that fear and panic do not drive us in a direction that strengthens or soothes the soul. 

They are a sad, pitiable group of humans, accomplished at games of power and wealth, not so great at humaning. Well, they would be pitiable if they were not making life harder for everyone else. 

I mean, we have no shortage of stories about what happens to people who try to escape the boundaries of mortality by pursuing wealth and power and domination of others, people who are certain that if all bonds of restraint on their own will and impulses were removed then--then--they would be happy and at peace. We've heard the stories, and now we are living through a living demonstration and it so much more pathetic and toxic and just worse than any story we've ever heard. 

There are better ways to move through the world, better ways to enjoy a rich, connected life. Ways to make the world better, yourself stronger, your heart less a slave to fear and despair. Ways to be full and truly human, and in doing so give voice to a greater something. 

I won't pretend, in this space, to know every bit of how that better way is to be found and followed, and my suspicion (along with centuries of human history) suggest that there are multiple paths that depend on the person and time and place.

If you want an argument for education-- a quality education, for every single young human-- this is it. I believe that real education is the process of helping young humans find a way to become their own best selves as they try to understand what it means to be fully human in the world.  Not the process of trying to fill up the empty bucket of their head with facts, not the process of training them to have skills they can exchange with corporations for money (though those can be part of the process). 

We all have a front-row seat for what it looks like when a country is awash in leaders who are so hollowed out by toxic fear that they are desperate to dominate the world around them, when they are so 

terrified of their own humanity that they are driven to reject that humanity and instead clutch to themselves a tower of scraps and patches in hopes that it will somehow prove they are not tiny, they are not alone, they will not die, that they are not, in fact, merely and actually human. There has never been, in all of human history, such a display of how to be bad at humaning.

I'll admit, it's not a great gift. This course in "How Not To Human" is not remotely worth the cost we're paying for tuition. But we've all been forced to sign up for this, so the least we can do is learn the lessons being paraded in front of our face. 

We are tiny and powerless and isolated and we can deal with that by A) facing it and B) using empathy and grace and love to connect with our fellow carbon-based life forms. We are going to die, which may mean metaphysical transition or oblivion or some inconceivable other thing, but we can either try to live in denial or use awareness of our brief flicker to give value and beauty to what we set our hearts to do. (Lord, the number of times over the decades I have looked at that man and thought, "Life is too short to live like that.")

Education at its best helps young humans with all of this-- not the how, but the what. Learn about yourself and who you are and who you want to be, your strengths and weaknesses, your aspirations and accomplishments. Be curious about the world, and try to unpack how it is (sciences), how humans can move through it (humanities), and how we can manage the journey (everything else). 

That's the lesson of 2025. We are watching our own grotesque Richard Corey, slouching toward oblivion and demonstrating how the most outsized grasping will not bring the peace that humans crave. That path is a dead end, a waste of our brief flicker without peace, joy, or connection. You can try to slap gold foil and your own name on everything, grind some humans into the dirt while begging for the praise of others, collect more imaginary honors, and even if nobody stops you or holds you accountable, you eventually run out of road, still aching from the soul-sized hole inside. 

May we and our children and our students follow a better path. Happy New Year!

AI Makes Strange Bedfellows

There's that weird little feeling you get when you find that you kind of agree with someone you don't generally agree with. So here I am nodding my head to M oms for Liberty, Ron DeSantis, and National Parents Union because they are talking about AI.

In their newsletter, M4L proudly announced that Tina Descovich was "at the table" for the regime's AI in Education Task Force (pretty sure that's not an A1 task force). 

Representing parents across the nation, she expressed support for the responsible use of artificial intelligence as a tool to enhance educational outcomes, while also emphasizing parents’ serious concerns about rushed implementation without appropriate safeguards and guardrails in place.

Well, yes, that's...um...correct. 

Meanwhile, Politico's Andrew Atterbury covered Ron DeSantis's very crabby opposition to AI. 

“Let’s not try to act like some type of fake videos or fake songs are going to deliver us to some kind of utopia,” the governor said Dec. 18.

He notably has taken aim at data centers sprouting up across the country by attempting to slow their growth in Florida, siding with local communities opposing the massive developments. And DeSantis frequently raises fears of how AI could ultimately upend the economy by displacing countless workers. The Republican rails against what he calls the “mindless slop” AI creates and warns deepfakes and manipulation could pose “a potential existential crisis for self-government.”

“The idea of this transhumanist strain, that somehow this is going to supplant humans and this other stuff, we have to reject that with every fiber of our being,” DeSantis said Dec. 15 during an AI event in Jupiter. “We as individual human beings are the ones that were endowed by God with certain inalienable rights. That's what our country was founded upon — they did not endow machines or these computers for this.”

 Okay, a little christiniast nationalismy for me, but basically, I think he's right.

And here's NPR, running the Ai resistance banner up the flagpole that is Keri Rodrigues, the leader of the astroturfed National Parents Union. She found her son interacting with the chatbot on his Bible app. He was asking deep moral questions about sin and stuff. Author Rhitu Chatterjee sets her irony ignorer on stun and writes

That's the kind of conversation that she had hoped her son would have with her and not a computer. "Not everything in life is black and white," she says. "There are grays. And it's my job as his mom to help him navigate that and walk through it, right?"

She's not wrong (she's just a bad spokesperson for moral complexity and nuance). 

It feels a little reminiscent of the Common Core days, when the opposition include a coalition of people who were against the Core because they wanted to defend public schools and those who were against the Core because they considered it the ultimate example of everything Terrible and Wrong about public schools. 

And just to ramp up that sense of deja vu, here comes the AFT to team up with our AI overlords to spend $23 million on teaching teachers to use AI. Or maybe you caught AFT chief Randi Weingarten's Christmas posts on the twitter and ye blue skye-- some lovely arts from the plagiarism and lies machine. Sigh. AFT has displayed some caution about AI in classrooms, and Weingarten has been crystal clear about her opposition to Trump's order to keep states from passing any sort of AI rules.

Lots of smart folks are predicting (even more) AI backlash in 2026, so maybe the right wing outrage crowd is simply angling to get in front of what they believe will be the next big fifteen-minute wave. 

Whatever the case, these folks who are so reliably on the wrong side of so many education issues are, on this issue, are better on AI, or at least are saying some of the right words. Can they keep it up even as Trump continues to argue for unfettered, unregulated AI, including a federal attempt to forbid states to exercise their rights to regulate a business. Because if Dear Leader can do anything, it's sense where a whole lot of money is about to be thrown around so that he can insert himself into the transaction. States' rights? Who cares. 2026 could be an interesting year.