Musk's Robot Co-Teacher

The amount of sheer crap being cranked out to promote "AI" in education is staggering, a veritable Mauna Loa of marketing puffery masquerading as serious account of What The Future Holds. 

Take this piece from Carl Williams, who is listed as the "creator" of the article, which is just one of the 28 articles that Carl "Definitely Not An AI" Williams has "created" for Tech Times in the last week. It contains this very special sentence:

However, just like any tool and technology, AI can be used as a force for good in education.

Yessir-- any tool and technology can be a tool for good in education. Staplers, rocket boosters, chicken de-featherers, aglets, AK-47's-- all forces for good in education. Thanks for that insight, "Carl."

But at the top of our ed tech Krapatoa, we must make room for pieces like this one-- "Could Elon Musk’s AI Robots Save A Troubled Education System?" 

Classrooms where routine tasks are handled by a humanoid robot could soon be a reality. With 44% of K-12 teachers in the U.S. feeling burned out “often” or “always,” advanced AI robots could offer much-needed support.

This is one of many reactions to Tesla's "We, Robot" robopallooza which featured the humanoid robot Optimus. 

These robots, along with similar technologies, have the potential to integrate into various aspects of daily life, including educational settings, potentially revolutionizing how we approach tasks and combat issues such as teacher burnout.

The robot will cost between $20K and $30K, says Musk. "It'll basically do anything you want. So it can be a teacher or babysit your kids. It can walk your dog, mow your lawn, get the groceries, just be your friend, serve drinks, whatever you can think of, it will do." Sure. Because mowing the lawn and teaching a human child are pretty much in the same class of activities. Writer Dan Fitzpatrick shows how little somebody (maybe himself, maybe Tesla's copy writer, maybe Musk himself) understands about teaching.

Could Optimus change how classrooms operate? As a teaching assistant, it could handle tasks like preparing materials and supervising students during activities. This could reduce the administrative burden on teachers, allowing them to engage more with students. In special needs education, Optimus could provide personalized instruction and physical assistance, improving the learning experience for students requiring extra support.

Yes, because if there's anything that would be easy to script AI programming for, it's teaching students with special needs. There is no reason to think that LLM have cracked the code of authoring teaching materials, nor is there any reason to think that housing an LLM in a human-ish body would somehow improve that capability and not add a whole other series of potential failure points to the tech. But I admit to wishing just a little bit that I could watch all the hilarity and chaos that would come from a Tesla robot trying to supervise a roomful of students, even the ones too young to consciously conclude "If no human being thinks I'm important enough to stay here and work with me, then why should I bother to work-- or behave-- at all?"

Fitzpatrick says he knows of a school that has the stack of money set aside to spend on this monstrosity should it ever appear on the market. Fitzpatrick also says that it's "important to note that the actual implementation of Optimus in classrooms is still theoretical." Rather like Tesla's self-driving cars. 

You may remember that the last time Musk trotted out a "robot," it was a guy in a suit (as hilariously lampooned by John Oliver). The staged roll-out of Optimus has many folks saying it sure looks as if the robots are just remote-controlled cyber puppets. 

Look, sometimes Musk's people do good work; the space-geek child within me is pretty squeed out that Space X managed to catch a booster rocket. But that strikes me as a hell of a lot simpler than programming Robby the Robot to teach American literature to sixteen year olds, let alone perform an imitation of human movement while doing it. It speaks to one of the most common issues of ed tech-- it's created by people who have absolutely no clue about what teaching actually involves. And this idea layers on other questions-- people mostly hated learning in isolation via screens during COVID, but would they like it better if the screen read itself to you and get up and walk around at the same time?

It's the modern ed tech pitch. Instead of "Here's a thing that the tech can actually do, right now, that will help you do your job" or even the old "Here's some technology that will help you do your job, if you will just go ahead and change the way your job is done," this pitch is the hard sell-- "This technology is inevitable, so you might as well get on board now." 

It's a display of childlike faith that tech execs still think that the threat of inevitability still carries weight. Musk alone has a long list of unmet promises ("Autonomous robotaxis for Tesla next year" he said, in 2019). 

Fitzpatrick, however much he salts his cheerleading with "could" and "potentially," is in need of some serious restraint in his speculation.

These robots could significantly alter how we educate our children in the next decade or two. They could support teachers and provide personalized learning experiences, potentially leading to higher success rates and improved student well-being. Learning to live and work in collaboration with such technology will be an essential skill and introducing this at school could better prepare younger generations.

Sure. They could also perform surgery and pilot jumbo jet liners and become sandwich artists at Subway. But maybe, possibly, those highly complex activities will turn out to be too much for them, and also, why? Other than the possible chance for businesses to save money by firing humans, what problems does this solve? Also, "could better prepare younger generations" for what? Having to work with software than other human beings? Is too much human interaction some sort of problem that needs to be solved? Having reached a new near-consensus that smartphones should be kept out of the classroom, should we now insert a smartphone that can walk and talk?

Educators, policymakers and tech developers need to collaborate to thoughtfully integrate robots like Optimus into educational frameworks. As this technology advances, the question remains: Are we ready to embrace a classroom where robots and teachers work together to inspire the next generation? What do you think about the potential of robots like Optimus in education? Are we ready for this next technological leap in our classrooms?

Educators, policymakers and tech developers do not need to "collaborate." Tech developers need to stand back, shut up, and try to learn about teaching and see if they can identify some problems actual teachers actually have that tech could actually solve instead of showing up with their favorite solution and demanding that educators "collaborate" with them to help them crack open a market for their product. What me to "embrace" a human-robot classroom partnership? Then tell me what problems in education a robot would solve other than the problem of "How do we sell more of these robots?"

Of all the promises one could make about one's pretend hypothetical AI robot, why bring up education? What is it about education that is constantly leading amateurs to imagine that teaching is a simple process, easily reduced to simple algorithm-friendly steps and measurements? As long as there have been schools, there has been a steady parade of people who are sure they have invented--or at least come up with the concept of a plan-- a device that will revolutionize education by solving problems that they imagine need to be solved.

What do I think about the potential of robots like Optimus in education? First, I think that so far even Optimus is not a robot like Optimus. It's an idea, unrealized and poorly defined and lacking any specific capabilities that could be useful. The idea itself seems to me like a nightmarish, expensive, non-useful idea, but maybe when there's an actual robot that actually does teaching stuff, we can renew this conversation. 

In the meantime, if the tech sector could create a printer that works the ways it's supposed to even 95% of the time, that would be way more classroom help than an imaginary robot.

ICYMI: End of Season Edition (10/13)

We've reached the end of the Board of Directors' first season as cross country runners. As guys who would run all the time anyway, cross country turned out to be just the thing, but now we're done for the year (except for the pizza party tomorrow evening). So that was a fun new adventure, and we're all better for it. 

I have some things for you to read from the week. Remember that sharing the original source helps everyone, and amplifies the message. We can all be amplifiers.

Local private schools announce tuition hikes nearly a year after the passage of Iowa's school choice law

Reported by Kaelei Whitlach for Iowa's News Now, the news that private schools in Idaho continue to use voucher money to crank up school tuition. Happened last year, happening again this year. 

Nevada Asked A.I. Which Students Need Help. The Answer Caused an Outcry.

Troy Closson at the New York Times on one of the dumbest uses of AI so far. Sure, let AI decide which schools need aid to help educate at risk students, and keep the algorithm for making the decision a mystery.

How one hurricane-impacted school district pivoted to relief efforts after the storm

In North Carolina, one school turns out to be the backbone of the community.

Superintendent Ryan Walters' legal fees surpass $100,000 amid multiple lawsuits

Education dudebro-in-chief Ryan Walters has many distinctions racked up, and it turns out that this kind of public dysfunction doesn't come cheap. Congratulations, Oklahoma taxpayers.

Nine Reasons Why Standardized Tests and Grades Shouldn’t Necessarily Match Up

Nancy Flanagan talks some sense to the "teacher grades don't match standardized test grades because teachers stink" crowd.

Breaking the Public Schools

Jennifer Berkshire takes another big picture look at the dismantling of public education. 

Ohio’s capital budget quietly funded private school construction. Now, a national group is investigating

Ohio found a new way to funnel taxpayer dollars to private religious schools. Now some folks would like to know a little more about this scam.

Restricting Education in Florida.

At Accountabaloney, Sue Kingery Woltanski looks at the stifling of education in Florida-- including hurting the chance of Florida students to be accepted by college.

Trump Just Took His Project 2025 Promise a Step Further

The New Republic looks at what Trump has to say about how what exactly he'll replace the department of education with, and it is more whackadoodle than you think.

Why an end-of-the alphabet last name could skew your grades

Jill Barshay at Hechinger looks at something you may not have even considered. Sire, a human classroom switches up the name order, but computerized instruction always puts the WXYZ crowd last, and it turns out that may cost them.

In a State With School Vouchers For All, Low-Income Families Aren’t Choosing to Use Them

Zero shocks here as this ProPublica piece explains one more way that voucher dollars mostly benefit the already-wealthy.

More on Walton and Barr Stakes in Voices for Academic Equity

Who's really behind those parents pushing policy? Dark money expert Maurice Cunningham connects the dots.

Elite colleges accused of price-fixing to make divorced parents pay more

And the College Board is behind it. Um-frickin-believable. Even if your deadbeat spouse refuses to help fund their child's college education, some schools will make you count their resources anyway. Danielle Douglas-Gabriel at Washington Post.

As teachers, we see the MCAS graduation requirement doing more harm than good

In Massachusetts, there's a big battle going on against the Big Standardized Test. Here some actual teachers make their case.

Framing the MCAS Opposition: “Business Community” or “Parents”?

Speaking of that debate, Boston media have unleashed some serious baloney on the argument, but Maurice Cunningham is not fooled.

Private school vouchers opposed by more than half of Pa. voters, poll shows

Turns out when you ask voters a question about vouchers that describes them accurately, the majority of voters are noy fans.

Amid parent complaints and national scrutiny, South Western School District boards up bathroom windows

From the York Dispatch. Our old friends at the right wing Independence Law Center tries harassing LGBTQ kids and got caught.

Teachers are Dangerous to MAGA

Anne Lutz Fernandez peels back some layers in the MAGA attack on teachers. It's not just a culture war.

Only a Harris-Walz Administration Would Protect Equity and Inclusion in the Public Schools

Jan Resseger makes her case for Harris-Wals on education.

The Return

After a long hiatus, Audrey Watters is back to the ed tech beat. It's a very welcome return. If you haven't been reading her other space, Second Breakfast, you should hop on there for great pieces like Luddites Win. There is nobody any better at writing sharp and incisive pieces that connect all the dots.

Confessions of a (Former) Christian Nationalist

Rob Schenck was a major player in the Christian nationalist movement. He trained rich folks in shmoozing Supreme Court justices. He walked away, and this powerful piece in Mother Jones tells the story of how he reclaimed his faith by dropping the politics.

Meanwhile, at Forbes.com, I looked at the storm brewing around Oklahoma's religious charter school.

Check me out on substack. It's completely free. 

When Schools Are Businesses

Tech writer Cory Doctorow writes a lot these days about enshittification, for instance in this piece that spins from Prime's continued addition of advertising to the content you thought you had already paid for. The explanation isn't complicated:

The cruelty isn’t the point. Money is the point. Every ad that Amazon shows you shifts value away from you — your time, your attention — to the company’s shareholders.

There's a lot to read about digital rights and chokepoints and music and videos and books, and there are some implications for education there (like, what happens when IP rights destroy your ability to use or adapt materials in any way other than that proscribed by the manufacturer, or require you to use standardized tests in ways that are not useful for you, but preserve the company's IP), but I want to focus on one aspect of enshittification-- the state where your "victory condition" is “a service that’s almost so bad our customers quit (but not quite).” As he explains:

The reason Amazon treated its workers and suppliers badly and its customers well wasn’t that it liked customers and hated workers and suppliers. Amazon was engaged in a cold-blooded calculus: it understood that treating customers well would give it control over those customers, and that this would translate market power to retain suppliers even as it ripped them off and screwed them over.

But now, Amazon has clearly concluded that it no longer needs to keep customers happy in order to retain them. Instead, it’s shooting for “keeping customers so angry that they’re almost ready to take their business elsewhere (but not quite).”

So imagine this principle becomes a guiding principle for charters or voucher schools that are aimed at turning a profit, either directly or by the companies that run them. There is, as we often note, a zero sum problem there-- every dollar spent on students is a dollar that doesn't go into the company's bank account. 

Things would be hunky dory to start, with the choice school working hard to make customers happy. But the thing about schools is that the switching costs are large, so the point of "so angry that they're almost ready to take their business elsewhere (but not quite)" is a bit further along than for say, ordering books. Switching to buying books at bookshop.org rather than amazon is easy (and you should do it). Pulling a child out of class in the middle of the year and leaving behind friends, activities, academic processes-- that's pricey. 

Choicers love to talk about how market forces will create accountability because schools will work hard to keep those families delighted. This is a delightful fantasy, but the fact is that choice school-flavored businesses only have to keep families just happy enough. And choice schools have a couple of advantages over amazon. One, there's the human tendency to convince yourself that the choice you've made is great (choice-supportive bias). Two, choice schools only need to capture a small slice of the market to be successful. 

Someone is going to say, "Well, the same enshittification applied to public schools." It does not. There is no profit to be wrung out of public schools. If I skimp on materials for my classes, neither I nor anyone else get to pocket the savings. Administrations may be motivated to keep expenses down because the public won't give them the money to do more, but there is nobody calculating "I bet I could cut calculus classes, bank the money I would have spent on them, and no families will be upset enough to bail." It's a different calculation. If you give a public school more money, it goes to operating the school, but if you give an edu-business more money (or extract more money by making your product worse), somebody pockets it. 

Doctorow's ideas about enshittification explain a great deal of what sucks about the world we live in and why the invisible hand is not your friend. I hope it doesn't come to explain more about how education works.

Three Lessons from Management Guys

The Algorithm shows me a lot of stuff about management, and I encourage it because I'm fascinated by the issues surrounding management because 1) I think so many problems in this country are caused by plain old bad management and 2) the overlap of management stuff and classroom teacher stuff is fairly large and useful.

This clip gets better the longer it goes. It's Ben Askins, one management stuff guy, reacting to another management stuff guy clip, and they go through three things I want to touch on.

Asking questions.

This has the most limited use in a classroom. I am not a 100% inquiry learning guy-- many times it is quicker and simpler to just go ahead and explain the concept that you're trying to teach than forcing students to stumble around in the dark. Even  if you want to be the Guide on the Side rather than the Sage on the Stage, well-- do some guiding. If you are not in a classroom to share greater knowledge and understanding of the content, why are you there?

That said, if you simply hand students every answer every step of the way, they get mentally flabby and don't retain as much as you'd like. So the questioning approach has value.

Non-punitive accountability

Part of getting students to own their screw-ups (both academically and behaviorally) is to expect that accountability but at the same time not beat them up over it. That wrong answer they just offered does not have to prompt an expression or tone that suggests the student is a dope. Decoupling academic performance from their intellectual ability or worth as a human being avoids a world of hurt and trouble. And really, it's just basic respect for their humanity. Bonus points if you demand they show the same grace to each other. It's fundamental to making a classroom a safe place (I'm pretty sure it's the solution to the Great Cold Call Debate-- cold calls in a safe and respectful classroom aren't a big deal). 

A safe classroom doesn't mean a classroom in which a wrong answer is as good as a right answer, but it does mean a classroom where the students who gave those different answers are treated with the same respect. It's okay to be explicit; my response to wrong answers was sometimes, "No, that's wrong. But you are still ok, and you will still go on to lead a full and happy life." 

Same principle holds true for behavior issues. I have often told my Miss Gause story. She was my elementary music teacher, and one day she caught me in the back of the room mocking her conducting arm flapping. She called me up to the front of the room and paddled the flap right out of me (it was 1968). But what stuck with me was not the paddling, but the aftermath-- there was none. She didn't go on to treat me like some Bad Kid who would forever live in the shadow of that bad behavior. To put another way, the immediate consequence was the only consequence; too often teacher "consequence" for misbehavior is a lingering disrespect for the guilty student.

Fostering creativity and expression

Finally the point that if you tell your people you want them to "think outside the box" but you are "bellowing at them by 9:15 because of some tiny mistake" you will get zero creativity or innovation.  Same for the classroom. If there is only one right answer, and it is your answer, and all others will be shot down mercilessly, then your classroom will not be about exploring ideas or finding ways to express them-- it will be about trying to divine and reproduce the teacher's preferred answer.

This is doubly deadly in an ELA classroom. If you want students to express themselves freely, if you want them to practice forming and developing ideas and interpretations, then you have to support them in their attempts, no matter how far into the weeds they get. For students, every attempt to complete an assignment, respond to a question, participate in a discussion--that's taking a risk, and as the teacher, you get to manage how much of a risk that might be. If you want students to take risks, you have to make trying and coming up short an unintimidating prospect. 

This is so important in a classroom, where students are not just learning how to spit out the Right Answer, but learning how work out a Right Answer on their own. 

SCOTUS Won't Take On Parent Protest Lawsuit

You will recall, back what seems like a thousand years, folks like Chris Rufo whipped some counter-factual frenzies about the supposed presence of Critical Race Theory in public schools, with a side of masking and LGBTQ panic for good measure. 

This led to some parents absolutely going off the rails in school board meetings. This in turn led to a bunch of school board members (who in the majority of districts are simply citizen volunteers who did not sign up expecting violence and death threats) getting scared and sending up flares for help. Which led to the National School Boards Association asking the Biden administration for some kind of help.

That request included the unfortunate choice to liken the most extreme protestors to "domestic terrorists." The NSBA backed that bus right up and apologized, but anti-public school folks smelled blood and decided to press on the attack. In the process, folks on the right sort of fuzzied up the use of the phrase "domestic terrorists" so that in many retellings, it was Merrick Garland who was using it, even as he sicced the Department of Justice on parents just trying to exercise their First Amendment rights.

That counterfactual narrative was useful for stirring up outrage, and that in turn led to a lawsuit back in 2022. The plaintiffs were an assortment of parents from Loudon, VA, and Saline, MI, and the law firm was the American Freedom Law Center, a Christian conservative shop that proudly went to fight against "lawfare."

The suit itself was not based on actual reality. In their press release about the suit, AFLC charged the "AG has pejoratively designated these parents and private citizens as ‘threats’ and ‘domestic terrorists,’" (he hadn't) and "that he was calling upon the FBI and federal prosecutors to use the overwhelming power of the federal government’s criminal justice system to target those parents who dare to publicly criticize the local school boards that are indoctrinating their children with a harmful and radical left-wing agenda disguised as school curricula" (nope, just the violent and death-threaty ones).

The plaintiffs kept losing all the way up to the Supremes, and I suppose they had reason to be hopeful, given that SCOTUS has been willing to overlook facts in order to hand victories to christianist folks before. 

But the Supremes passed on this appeal, so the lower court ruling stands, despite arguments citing authorities like an article in the Washington Examiner. The arguments for the AG pointed out some of the holes in the case.

Petitioners only have standing to sue if they show that Garland's memorandum targeted actions they were expecting to take. The memorandum was very clear that it was focused on "threats of violence and similar unlawful conduct." So unless the petitioners intended to break the law as their way of complaining, the memorandum had nothing to do with them. 

At no point does the AG actually call the petitioners "domestic terrorists." To that point, "Neither the Attorney General’s memorandum nor the FBI email refers to petitioners at all, much less brands them with any labels."

Some of the government's arguments are disingenuous, like the "just because we're collecting information and making files, that shouldn't be intimidating anyone." But there is also the reality of what happened next. The DOJ received (as of March of 2023) 22 reports of threats against school officials, and only six of those were referred to local authorities. So the massive crackdown on parents who just wanted to yell at board members about CRT programs never happened. Kind of like the Obama then Biden program to take away everyone's guns. 

At any rate, it looks like maybe this particular legal flap is over and done with. 

Curriculum As Foundation

I've had a tab open since July, an interview of Robert Pondiscio by Chris Herhalt looking at one particular chapter of the Hoover Institute's retrospective on the modern reform movement, which dates that movement to A Nation at Risk. That's one of the many bad signs about the tome, and there's plenty to disagree with, but I think curriculum is worth discussing.

Part of Pondiscio's shtick has always been one particular point: 

As I like to say, you go to school with the teachers you have, not the teachers you wish you had. It’s just math, right? If you need four million of anybody doing anything, a number that large means a normal distribution of human talent.

I think you still have to take great care in how you say that. I was a teacher. I don’t want to suggest for a second that I think teachers are less than capable or cannot be trusted to make curricular decisions. If I said that, no one would listen, and rightfully so. The point is, we’ve made this job too damn hard for the teachers we have.

I'll admit that this point often raised plenty hackles for me, particularly back in the days when the modern reform message included "All educational problems are caused by the many, many terrible teachers in schools, so let's find them and fire our way to excellence." The terrible teacher theory was embraced by many sub-species of reformsters for a variety of reasons. For those who wanted to see teachers unions disempowered, firing a whole lot of teachers seemed like a good way to further that cause. For those who wanted to push school choice, it was one more way to sow distrust in public schools. For textbook manufacturers, it was good hook for selling a "teacher proof" program in a box. For technocrats, it dovetailed nicely with their belief that the whole system needed to be standardized, with all those messy individual human teacher variations smoothed out. Put all those together, and you got reformster ideas like hiring anyone with pulse to implement teacher proof programs as efficiently as a MacDonalds' fry cook. Or the undying idea that we can just find the super teachers and stick them in a classroom with a couple hundred students.

So when Pondiscio says you have take care in how you make the "teachers are only human" point, he's on the mark. 

I can quibble a bit. I do think the talent distribution for teachers skews toward the top of the bell curve because it is really hard to go into a classroom and suck day after day. The students will make your life miserable and drive you out the door well before any administrator ever gets around to putting you on an improvement plan. (On the other hand, given the huge number of underqualified teachers in class room these days-- roughly 7% of the teaching force-- maybe he's right).

The reformster theory of action for years was to use a big stick and threaten teachers into excellence, as if teachers all along knew how to be better but were just holding back until someone put the fear of God into them.

TLDR: A Nation at Risk ushered in an atmosphere in which teachers felt so besieged that it became hard to have a conversation about how they could be better.

But on this point I agree with him:

Any reasonable chance at improving outcomes for kids requires taking a good hard look at the demands that we make of the four million men and women that we have in our classrooms.

That list of demands is huger and getting steadily huger. Has been for years. Is there a problem in society that we want to see solved? Let's give it to the schools to fix it! Some of this makes practical sense-- schools might as well handle lunch programs because school is where students are at lunch time. Dealing with students issues stemming from trauma and difficult homes and societal problems etc etc etc-- we can say that shouldn't be the school's problem and teachers should "just teach," but when a student comes into the classroom, she brings all her baggage with her into the school and it will be hard to "just teach" her until we somehow find a way to help her set that baggage aside.

The thing Pondiscio believes can be lifted off teachers' backs is curriculum. However "the sun will go out," he says, "before we have a national curriculum in this country." So never mind that idea. 

I wish more folks would give up that dream. Waves of reform-- No Child Left Behind, Common Core, Race to the Top, and decades of the Big Standardized Test can be understood as attempts to influence/control local curricula from DC, while circumventing the Constitutional prohibition against federal curricular meddling. But that's like trying to trim a bonsai shrub with a dull scalpel toed to the end of a forty-foot pole. Worse, so many of these attempts were steered by people who knew far too little about teaching. And yet in too many places, the Big Standardized Test became the de facto curriculum.

There is no doubt that being a teacher set adrift in a classroom with no scope or sequence or coherent materials just sucks, increasing the mental load of teaching by a hundredfold (I speak from experience). I'll also argue till my eyeballs dry up that a scripted, detailed curriculum (on Tuesday, at 9:15 a.m., the teacher will say "Today we will study the prepositions that begin with the letter b") is a straightjacket that kills any hope of excellent teaching. 

But I agree that all roads lead to curriculum. It's an important piece of teacher support as well as coherence across the system. It improves instruction, gives teachers room to breathe, and even helps with classroom management (step one in classroom management is to know what you're doing and do it with purpose). 

So what features does a curriculum need to make a good foundation for a system?

Content matters.

Here's a point on which Pondiscio and I have always largely agreed-- you can't teach reading as a set of discrete and transferable skills that exist in a vacuum, somehow apart from the actual content being read. Content and the background knowledge it fosters are critical for reading. But the standards movement and its Big Standardized Test have moved us in exactly the opposite direction, to the point that tests often feature topics about which students are unlikely to have any background knowledge (ancient Turkish political systems for elementary students) in an attempt to rule out background knowledge as a factor when testing for "skills." 

Pondiscio argues that a coherent and consistent body of knowledge can be part of the glue that holds us together as a society. That's a valid point. But it also helps build a ladder for learning. When I taught 11th graders Heart of Darkness, we could open up all sorts of new ideas by looking back at one of their 10th grade novels, Lord of the Flies. 

Flexibility.

This summer Auguste Meyrat wrote a piece for Real Clear Education entitled "How to fix the problem of rogue teachers" (in which Pondiscio is quoted on some adjacent issues). Part of the solution for "rogue teachers" is not to create a system that requires them to go rogue to use any of their own professional judgment. 

This is yet another education issue that requires a delicate balance that has to be checked and adjusted every day for the rest of forever. There is no set it and forget it. For an English class, that means the list of works needs to be revisited every year or two. It may mean a curriculum that leaves a spot for the teacher to fill as they best judge.

Two stories. One of my teaching colleagues regularly finished the year with her 12th grade honors class by studying Paradise Lost, culminating in a trial in which they had to argue whether or not Milton had successfully justified the ways of God to man in the work. The trial was run by one of the county judges, and the jury was a combination of teachers, former students, and local attorneys. Only someone with her love of Paradise Lost and with connections to local legal establishment could have pulled it off. Her seniors came back after their official school days were over just to work on this, and underclassmen begged to go watch. It was hugely successful on a variety of levels. Should it have been dropped so that we could adopt a different curriculum "with fidelity." Should her successor in the job have been forced to do the unit, despite not having the tools?

One unusual year, I had a group of fifteen-ish 11th graders, of whom nearly a dozen were either pregnant or parents. My reading and writing units ran on a great deal of discussion, and while every year the concerns and interests of the students are a little different, for that class, they were really different, and it affected the work that I assigned. These were not college-bound students, but they were not the kind of students for whom their life was some vague thing waiting off in the future. They were focused and interested in the things that mattered to them. Should I have been chained to a static curriculum that required me to say, "Sorry, I know you care about that, but we don't have time for it." 

Pondicsio says that it's universal for teachers to dismiss "boxed curriculum" as something that "won't work for my kids." I don't know about that. I expect more of us say something along the lines of "that won't work for all my students all the time." A district hires a teacher for her professional skills and judgement and her own body of knowledge. It seems like a waste not to give her room to use it, just as it seems a waste for her to just wander off into the Land of Do As You Please. Like I said, an endless job of balancing.

The flexibility is doubly important if we're talking about a state-level curriculum. A curriculum that is going to fit urban schools in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia as well as rural schools in my county cannot be too narrow and inflexible to fit both.

Weather the Storms.

There are no new debates in education. The phonics debate has raged for almost as long as there has been print; "reading wars" is plural because there are so many of them. I was in my forties before I learned that the math world has a couple of camps, including the pure math camp (students need to understand the theories and principles behind the math) and the practical camp (just get the right damn answer). Think theoretical physicists versus engineers. 

Is Shakespeare in or out? And if he's in, should he have the dirty parts removed, because we also argue infinitely about keeping Naughty Books out of school. Who else should be in or out of the canon? Pondiscio is a fan of E. D. Hirsch, but not everyone digs Hirsch's particular canon.  Should special needs students be mainstreamed or have dedicated classrooms? There are business-based educationists who think schools should be strictly focused on preparing meat widgets to be useful to them. And all this is before we get to all the folks whose idea of curriculum is loosely based on What I Learned When I Was In School. I am regularly told, once folks discover I'm a teacher, that it's just awful that schools don't teach Latin or cursive any more (two subjects I am perfectly happy to see fade into obscurity). And I'm an English teacher who sees no value in teaching grammar as anything but a very specific tool for reading and writing. And when it comes to writing, I cringe at curriculum like Philadelphia's new sentences then paragraphs then essays program, a step back to decades past.

I could go on, but you get, I hope, the point--education includes a few hundred pendulums all swinging back and forth, goosed into action every time someone announces, "I know what's wrong and I know what we have to do to fix it!"

A solid curriculum must be able to weather all of these storms, surviving the wrenching back and forth. Way, way, way too many educational ideas are based on the premise, "Once X is implemented, all students will learn Y. X is right, so this debate is decided and will never be opened again." That trick never works. And it's a huge pain when a pendulum swings and leadership decides, "Well, we need to scrap the whole thing. Again. So we can pursue the next Big Education Miracle." 

This is part of why flexibility matters-- if the curriculum is too static and unbending, it will eventually break. 

Teachers in the loop.

If a curriculum is simply done to the people who have to implement it, it is doomed. 

My district, like many, went through regular cycles of "curriculum development," in which teachers were (sometimes) invited into a conference room, where our job was to come up with the correct answers for building a curriculum (aka the answers that someone else had already decided on). It's kind of amazing how rarely the product was not even finished, less amazing how rarely they were actually used.

Most teachers are also familiar with the program adoption in which someone comes in to explain that if you just change everything about how you do your job, this New Thing will be great. I have noted often how over the course of my career, the state's program presentations shifted from earnest attempts to get us to buy in over to "Shut up and do as you're told." 

The most useful curriculum I've had was developed by my department, on our own, because we wanted the kind of help that a structured scope and sequence would provide (I suppose we were what Rick Hess would later call "cage busters"). But we were a seasoned group with plenty of tools and a willingness to devote the time up front that would make our lives easier down the road. One advantage was that it was really easy to tweak and alter the curriculum as needed.

My experience is not possible in all situations, but teachers have to be part of the process somehow. That includes regularly asking them questions such as "Is this working?" and "What do you need to support using this?" on top of the usual supports for training and materials.

Bottom line

The ultimate measure of a curriculum is not its ideological purity or its alignment with the education fad du jour or, God forbid, raises test scores. The measure is "Does it help the teacher do a good job?" I freely admit that "good job" is doing planet-scale lifting here. Nevertheless, it's the measure that matters because it points us back at the flexibility--the beginning ordinary mortal teacher needs different supports than the seasoned veteran teacher.

When it comes to teaching materials, programs, policies, etc I was always a pragmatist-- things that help me do the job are good, and things that get in my way are not. A curriculum that is solid enough to provide a foundation for work and a framework for daily instructional decisions, but loose enough to allow me some freedom to adapt to the students in front of me and adaptable enough to change with reflection and shifting time-- that's a curriculum worth having. 

News From The DeAngelis Redemption Tour

Well, that was fast.

My expectation was that Corey DeAngelis would be redeemed and eventually return to his work, wiping the dust from his shoes after traveling through the village of Dark Past Secret. But I confess that I figured it would take more than a week.  

The only real sign that he was in trouble was being dumped from Betsy DeVos's American Federation for Children, but after a brief pause, a mountain of conservative school choicers stepped up to voice their support for him. Truth be told, I think better of them for it; AFT's move was pretty cowardly and cold ("Doesn't look like he'll be further use to us-- dump him"). Besides, while I hesitate to call any human being irreplaceable, I don't see any fledgling DeAngelis on the bench ready to leap into the gap.

But when word came that DeAngelis was back on the dead bird app, I wondered what DeAngelis 2.0 would look like. Humbled and more mellow? More feisty? Sadder but wiser? What, I've wondered, would his redemption look like.

Well, no need to keep wondering. It looks like this.  DeAngelis sat for an interview with Christian Broadcast Network News to "break his silence" unveil and DeAngelis 2.0, and he looks familiar. But now we know his origin story, and the rewritten version of history that goes with it.

The story of his decade-ago porn career is a familiar one. He was "drawn into pornographic work" as a young adult, and that's why he's fighting so hard now. 

“If I was able to be lured in to make bad decisions as a young adult in college, just imagine how much worse it could be for younger people,” he said, explaining how the experience became fuel in his fight for educational freedom and reform. “So I fought against this kind of material being included in the classroom. I’ve been consistent. I’ve changed my life. People change over time.”

It's a spin that has been popular in anti-drink revivals for ages. "I fell in with bad companions." It's also a good way to straddle a tricky line. “I did make those decisions. I’m not proud of those decisions, but I can see how it can be deceptive, and the entire industry can be deceptive, especially for young people," says DeAngelis. What's missing is an examination of why DeAngelis. among all his peers, was seduced by this deceptive industry. Not that he owes us an explanation, and if his explanation is "I wanted to" that would be a fine explanation. But if there were another one, it would be helpful in determining how to spot and help those uniquely susceptible twenty-somethings. We're left with kind of accepting responsibility and kind of not. He could just say, "I was a grown-ass man and it was what I thought I wanted to do at the time," but the problem for the brand is that if he accepts too much responsibility for his choices then that lessens the impetus to banish any remotely sexual stuff from anywhere young humans.

But that appears to be what we're going with, and it's an effective enough narrative. 

Then we get into the rewrite of history. The article says that the videos and images "intended for gay audiences, have led progressive advocates to mobilize against DeAngelis."

“There has been a cancellation attempt from the left, in particular, and my political opponents trying to accuse me of hypocrisy,” he said. “Their claims fall flat.”

Except that it wasn't The Left that came after him at all. It was a far-right wingnut website that broke the story (two whole weeks ago), and while I suppose "political opponents" is correct-if-misleading, the drumbeat came from a non-zero number of folks on the right who consider DeAngelis a tool of UNESCO and vouchers an attempt to extend government control over private schools, a sort of Leftist Trojan horse. 

There has certainly been some schadenfreude on The Left, though I would say it's been rather subdued considering the number of people DeAngelis and his troll army have harassed mercilessly. But does it really make sense that The Left is going to be after someone because they did gay porn? Yes, the hypocrisy thing has been brought up repeatedly, but he did not get canceled for being a hypocrite and he didn't get canceled by The Left-- he got canceled by Betsy DeVos's American Federation for Children, and I'm guessing that it didn't happen because Diane Ravich called DeVos on the phone and said, "You gotta get rid of this guy." 

The question with hard core voices in any debate is "Does he really believe this stuff, or is this just a performance part of the gig?" Two weeks ago it looked like we might have an answer in this casde. Now we're back to "who knows?"

DeAngelis makes a worthy point via Chris Rufo-- "cancellation requires consent." Which is sort of true. Nobody can make you shut up. They (and this is almost exclusively the people on your own "side") can take away your platform and your financial support and your audience can stop listening to you, but you can always keep yapping, especially in this day and age. 

DeAngelis goes on to talk about more personal attacks-- DMs to his wife encouraging divorce, messages telling him to kill himself, a whole bunch of ugliness. It's inexcusable shit, and no human being should have to endure it ever. I don't believe for a minute that it came primarily from his political opponents; that's not the crowd that ordinarily tells people to die because of gay stuff. And it would be awesome if, on the back of his experience, DeAngelis actively told his social media troll army to stop the ugly personal attacks on folks from the other side. Because nobody (and that absolutely includes DeAngelis himself) should have to go through that shit.

There is of course one more requirement for a good redemption story

One of the most compelling ways the dilemma has changed DeAngelis has been in the area of faith. Describing himself as a lifelong agnostic, he said the situation has brought him and his wife, whom he described as a “believer,” closer to church.

“We’re watching our local church on TV each Sunday,” DeAngelis said. “And, the first time that we tuned in a couple of weeks ago, just the things that the pastor was saying — it just brought me to tears.”

Look, as I've said more than once before, I don't wish DeAngelis ill. I disagree with pretty much everything he works for, and I find his online persona toxic and ugly, but he's a human being, and a relatively young one at that. Like him, I'm glad he doesn't have this chapter of his life hanging over him as potential blackmail material. And I would really love to find out that this whole redemption narrative is an authentic shift to bring the world a better version of the privatization evangelist, and not just a carefully calibrated tale to justify the same old shtick. 

Most of us who have reached a certain age have been Through Some Things--specifically, major missteps of our own creation. You learn a lot of stuff from those episodes. In my own case, one of the things I learned is that you are tougher than you think you are, which in turn means you don't have to strike out viciously at everyone you find in any way threatening. Save your strength for when you really need it.

At any rate, having written about the first chapter of this story, I felt obliged to follow up, especially since my first installment was wrong about what the next chapter would look like. We now have the new pitch-- DeAngelis was seduced by the gay porn industry and that's why he wants to protect students from naughty books in public schools. Also, vouchers, and maybe Jesus. And he's got a new job-- senior fellow with the American Culture Project, a dark money right-wing activist group and "stealth persuasion machine", headed up by John Tillman who also runs the Illinois Policy Institute. ACP has done fundraising by railing against "cancel culture" and general wokitude. 

So DeAngelis is going to be doing just fine. I hope the harassment of him and his family stops. I hope he's in a better place now, a receiver of grace rather than a momentarily useful tool. I hope all of his preferred policies fail, and that he abandons his toxic tactics anyway. As he told CBN,

You can change as a person. If you’re in a bad situation right now, you can get out of it like I got out of it.