The School of the Future

It will be seamless and swift. AI will develop syllabi and lesson plans. AI will design and assign all the work to be completed. Then AI will complete all the assignments and send them to AI for assessment. (AI can then send personalized assignments to address the AI's weak areas, but it probably won't have to).

All the teachers will be fired. All the students will stay home. Building repairs will be unnecessary as long as the computer hub at its heart is preserved.

Leaders and Ed Tech companies will survey the empty building, buzzing with electricity whizzing up and down the wiring in the hollow walls, and congratulate themselves on its modern efficiency.

The school year will last about a half an hour, depending on how many AI are enrolled. 

You can say that this is extreme hyperbole, that of course things will never progress this far. My question is then, where will the line be drawn? At what point will Important People step up and say, "This has gone far enough." 

At what point will Important People say that we can't remove any more human element from the process.

Maybe at this point we're just too overwhelmed by the gee whizzakers of it all, like the guy who showed up on Bluesky "So excited to publicly launch All Day TA," a teaching assistant that would work 24/7 and coincidentally free a college from having to hire one more live human. 

Maybe some of us are just so amazed that we aren't ready to ask questions like "What problem is this supposed to solve" or "Does it actually solve that problem" or even "Are the costs worth the results?" 

I can remember the days decades ago when my students discovered personal computers and printers. They were so amazed that they could print their work in any font in any size in any color that they absolutely never stopped to ask if printing their paper in, say, 8 point French Scrip rendered in yellow ink, might not be a great choice. 

That's the initial moment of technological exuberance--so excited you can do it that you don't stop to ask if you should.

For the current AI irrational exuberance, add-- so excited at what you've been promised you can do that you don't stop to check if you can really do it.

As with the pandemic, we are being challenged to think about what, exactly, we think the point of education and schools is supposed to be and make deliberate choices to build schools around that vision and not some higgledy piggledy attempt to incorporate every shiny thing that attracts our attention, whether it furthers the actual purpose of school or not (and whether it can deliver its promised product or not).

Too many AI-in-education seem to think that the whole purpose of school is to produce and assess school work, resulting in grades that lead to a credential, and if you think the purpose of school is to crank out these various products, then sure--computerizing these processes makes perfect sense.

But if you think the purpose of education is something like helping each individual human being become their best self, to be fully themselves, to grasp what it means to be fully human in the world-- well, then, we need at a minimum to remember that it is AI, and not the humans in the loop, that is the tool.  

ICYMI: 10 Shopping Days Left Edition (12/15)

Well, maybe just nine. What are you doing sitting there looking at your screen?? You have responsibilities as a consumer to go consume stuff. Go on. 

We've got newbies around here, so let me review the idea behind this weekly digest. I have a platform--not a huge one, but a platform--only because people once upon a time boosted my signal. Folks like Anthony Cody and Nancy Flanagan and Jennifer Berkshire and especially Diane Ravitch, plus lots of other folks, too. I started out not really knowing what I was doing other than venting a great deal of frustration. I was at the time a long-standing classroom teacher in a small town with bot a single direction to the wider world of education policy and practices, but people found what I wrote useful at times and shared it and amplified it and here I am, still at it.

I'm here with more than three readers because folks helped boost my signal, and so I feel a powerful obligation to boost other signals. Yes, I also always have an urge in life to point at interesting things and say, "Look at that!" Hence the teaching career. But the one thing we can all do is boost the signals of people who are saying things that are important, useful, helpful, recognizable as True. So I have a blogroll on the side column of my regular blog, and I have this weekly digest that lets me say, "Look at all these smart people saying smart things. Maybe you missed it, but I don't think you should." 

So when you see something here that speaks to you, go to the original source and share it on your social mediums. Boost that signal. We have an extraordinary infrastructure in place for spreading ideas and words, even if it is a pipeline that delivers toxic waste as easily as lifegiving water. But when I think of the kind of trouble it took for someone like Thomas Paine to get his word out in a country just a smidgeon the size of ours today, I think how lucky we are to be alive right now, and how we have such a powerful chance to spread whatever good words we see.

So do that. Some of the people who appear here don't really need my boost--they have strong audiences of their own. That's okay-- an expanding audience is always a good thing, and this is one of the ways we move forward in 2025--by amplifying what is good and right. So join me every Sunday, and share what you find that speaks to you. 

So here we go.

Who’s afraid of a public library?

Colbert King in the Washington Post commenting on the loss of one more library to culture panic actors.

Billionaire Ideas: Andrew, Bill and Elon

Speaking of libraries, Nancy Flanagan looks at how the very wealthy used to spend their money.

Why being forced to precisely follow a curriculum harms teachers and students

Yeah, you already know why, but Cara Elizabeth Furman in The Conversation really makes it clear. Like this:

The term “fidelity” comes from the sciences and refers to the precise execution of a protocol in an experiment to ensure results are reliable. However, a classroom is not a lab, and students are not experiments.

Sixth period horseback riding lessons

Meg White looks at the state of education in Arkansas, and it's not pretty. But it does come with riding lessons.

What Should We Be Watching For if Linda Mahon Is Confirmed as Education Secretary?

Jan Resseger looks at the possible treats we might get under McMahan's leadership.

Secretary Cardona Was a Huge Disappointment

If you read me, you probably already read Diane Ravitch regularly, but I don't want you to miss this one. A reminder of how much Joe Biden disappointed us in education, and the tale of how NPE dug up evidence of costly charter shenanigans, and the ed department just waved it on by.

Measure Once, Cut Twice...or Something

Andrew Ordover writes a thoughtful post about the nature of assessment and the ways we have been led into the weeds on the subject.

Is calculus an addiction that college admissions officers can’t shake?

At Hechinger Report, Jill Barshay looks at debate over calculus and the question of whether or not there's reason to cram it into high school senior's heads and/or transcripts.

Where Have All the Plumbers Gone (long time passing)?

John Merrow is a long-time top education reporter, now sort of retired. He addresses one of my favorite issues--the importance of blue-collar vocational training in a world that keeps telling students they must go to college.

An Open Letter to the Listeners

Writer, scholar and teacher Jose Luis Vilson writes about the power of listening. While you're going to look at this, you should be subscribing to his blog.

12 Years and 60 Minutes Later

Audrey Watters watched 60 Minutes fawn over Sal Khan, and she hasn't forgotten when they previously fawned over his predictions about changing the face of education-- twelve years ago. Not to mention all the crap in between.

How Assessment and Data are Used to Stigmatize Children as Failing

Nancy Bailey on some standardized assessments that collect data, label students, and generate income--but not much else of use.

Yule Time Education Policy News from the Volunteer State

Nobody does better at capturing the grit and detail of Tennessee education shenanigans than TC Weber, and the beauty of it is that even if you aren't in Tennessee, you can see and recognize the patterns of how these things work. Like, say, a school board that fails to hold its superintendent's feet to the heating grate, let alone the fire...

To the Victors Go the Spoils, Part III: School Vouchers

Nate Bowling continues a post-election series with a look at school vouchers, and what they mean to those who already have privilege.

Will The Real Wackadoodle Please Stand Up.

How messed up are you when even a Moms for Liberty chapter says you are in the wrong. In Florida, a Conservative School Board Association member got caught at the M4L summit talking smack about everyone in the district where she sits on the board. Sue Kingery Woltanski has the run down on Jessie Thompson.

Dubuque private school raises tuition by 58% after voucher expansion

Once again, the advent of vouchers is treated like a windfall by private schools who just jack up prices. Reported by Zachary Oren Smith for the Iowa Starting Line.

Behind the Curtain: The Boston Foundation Is Underwriting that “Science of Reading” Lawsuit

Maurice Cunningham does the work the Globe won't. Who's actually bankrolling that Science of Reading lawsuit.

Pedagogy of the Depressed

I did talk about this post from Benjamin Riley already this week, but it is too hilarious/sad to miss. A quick scan of some of the AI for education "training" out there.

The Pennsylvania Society is Decadent and Depraved

What do rich folks like Jeff Yass do in Pennsylvania to figure out how they're going to handle their lessers? Turns out there's a whole organization for that. Lance Haver reports for the Philadelphia Hall Monitor.

How Christian extremists are co-opting the book of Esther

Not strictly about education, but an interesting explication of one thread of far-right christinism that's on the march these days.

Don't Bite the Hand That Feeds You

Jess Piper looks at some of the myths on the left about rural Americans, and boy do I feel her. 

At Bucks County Beacon this week I added to the copious literature on the subject of What Trump Might Mean for Education.

At Forbes.com I wrote about Ohio's place in the march on cell phones.

I also wrote about the federal voucher bill and, frankly, am a bit concerned to see low readership numbers on the piece, not on my own account, but because this bill could turn out to be a major issue, and I'm afraid people aren't paying attention to just how bad it could be. 

If you are moving over to Bluesky, you can find me there at @palan57.bsky.social

And of course, subscribe to my newsletter to get everything I crank out in an easy-to-put-off-till-later email form. Free now and free forever.

Stock Trading Naughtiness With Stride

You may have heard about Senator Markwayne Mullin lately because he's been a big ole MAGA cheerleader for unqualified cabinet nominee Pete Hegseth and indeed the whole misbegotten cabinet. 

But he's also in the news for some stock trading shenanigans, specifically shenanigans involving Strife (formerly K-12) the 800 pound gorilla of cyber-charter schooling. Mullin sits on the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, so trading involving stock in an education firm smells a little fishy. 

Still, the whole scene is on brand for Stride, which was never so much about education as it is about profiteering. Stride's history isn't nearly as well known as it deserves to be; let me pick some details from my own coverage.

It was founded in 2000 by Ron Packard, former banker and Mckinsey consultant. One of its first big investors was Michal Milken. That investment came a decade after he pled guilty to six felonies in the “biggest fraud case in the securities industry” ending his reign as the “junk bond king.” Milken was sentenced to ten years, served two, and was barred from ever securities investment. In 1996, he had established Knowledge Universe, an organization he created with his brother Lowell and Larry Elison, who both kicked in money for K12.

K12 was frequently in the news for one shady deal after another. Packard was himself sued for misleading investors with overly positive public statements, and then selling 43% of his own K12 stock ahead of a bad news-fueled stock dip. Shortly thereafter, in 2014, he stepped down from leading K12. 

The New York Times had quoted Packard as calling lobbying a “core competency” of the company, and the company has spread plenty of money around doing just that. And despite all its troubles, Stride is still beloved on Wall Street for its ability to make money.

So maybe it's no surprise that a big (quiet) investor in Stride is the investment behemoth Blackrock. BlackRock is the largest money management company in the world, founded and led by Larry Fink. Larry's brother Steve is on the Stride board. Steve was also, starting in 1984, Michael Milken's next door neighbor and "trusted confidant." It was 1988 when Larry Fink started BlackRock under the umbrella of Steve Schwarzman’s Blackstone Group. In 2000, Steve Fink was heading up Nextera, part of Milken’s Knowledge Universe web. Additionally, according to a 2011 Seattle Times article, Milken graduated from the same public high school as Larry Fink.

In short, Stride has always been about getting investors a return for their money, and not so much about providing an actual education to students.

So in that setting, how unexpected can it be that a senator might decide to dip in for a little insider trading. This is all just part and parcel of unleashing market forced in a human service sector. Just another day with the invisible suggesting that folks grease its invisible palm. 

GA: Voucher Program Blowing Up Real Fast

Boom! Georgia's taxpayer-funded school voucher program turns out to be not so much "generous" as "huge." And all because reading is hard.

Georgia passed a law to create vouchers and a whole government agency to watch over them. Rural Republicans fought back hard, but in the end it was signed into law last March. 

It turns out that a whole lot of people either didn't read the words in the law, or they just misrepresented them to other folks. The widespread belief was that, as many news reports put it, the education savings account style vouchers were for "students at low-performing schools who want to transfer to private schools." 

Any student who attended a school in the lowest 25% of schools were going to get an ESA taxpayer-funded stack of money that they could spend on whatever edu-thing they wished. 

Only it turns out that when the Georgia Education Savings Authority went to set up the rules for the Georgia Promise voucher, they read the actual language of the bill, and what it says right there in line 
344 in the eligibility requirements is:

The student resides in the attendance zone of a public school that is included on the list of public schools provided for in Code Section 20-2B-29

See the difference? Not just attending the low-achieving school, but in the attendance zone for that school. So if an elementary school is on the naughty list, every middle and high school student who lives in that attendance zone is also eligible for a taxpayer-funded voucher.

The Associated Press is reporting this as if the GESA changed something. "Georgia makes many more students than expected eligible for school vouchers" says the headline. Like GESA pulled a fast one, or something was "changed." But the only fast one pulled here is by the people who knew exactly what the law said and let stand (or promoted) the idea that only those at low-scoring schools were eligible.

But here's House GOP Speaker Pro Temp Jan Jones saying that the "authority's interpretation" needs to be reined in. This, she says, is not what she advocated for. "That wasn't my understanding," she told the AP.

The House Education Committee chair, Republican Representative Chris Erwin has also announced that this needs to be fixed. “The scholarships are specifically designed for children in an individual school that meets the eligibility requirements, and are not intended to be provided to every student in a district where the qualifying school is located,” Erwin wrote in a text to the AP.

Look, I agree with the goal of reducing voucher damage to the school system of the state, and I'm even inclined to believe their current statements of protest, but come on, lawmakers-- the language is right there in the bill in plain English. Did nobody read it? Did everyone just accept the word of whatever lobbyist pushed the bill? 

The law is set up to fund about 22,000 vouchers. The AP figures that about 400,000 students are eligible.

I retired after 39 years in the classroom as an English teacher, so it always saddens when people just don't bother to read (it has been a long year), and heaven knows that legislative bills are especially hard to wade through, but that's part of a legislator's job (or at least that of their staff). Georgia is now facing the result of some combination of ineptitude and turpitude. We'll see if they get anything changed in the next session. 

AI in Ed: The Unanswered Question

It is just absolutely positively necessary to get AI into education. I know this because on social media and in my email, people tell me this dozens of times every day. 

Just two examples. UCLA is excited to announce that a comparative literature course next semester will be "built around" UCLA's Kudu artificial intelligence platform. Meanwhile, Philadelphia schools and the University of Pennsylvania are teaming up to make Philadelphia a national AI in education model. The AI-in-education list goes on and on, and there are soooo many questions. Ethical questions. Questions about the actual capabilities of AI? Questions of resource use?

But here's the question I wish more --well, all, actually-- of these folks would ask.

What problem does it solve?

This is the oldest ed tech problem of them all, an issue that every teacher has encountered-- someone introduces a new piece of tech starting from the premise, "We must use this. Now let's figure out how." This often leads to the next step of, "If you just change your whole conception of your job, then this tech will be really useful. Will it get the job done better? Hey, shut up." 

This whole process is why so many, many, many, many pieces of ed tech ended up gathering dust, as well as birthing painfully useless sales pitchery masquerading as professional development. And when it comes to terrible PD, AI is right on top of things (see this excellent taxonomy of AI educourses, courtesy of Benjamin Riley)

So all AI adoption should start with that question.

What problem is this supposed to solve? 

Only after we answer that question can we ask the next important question, which is, will it actually solve the problem? Followed closely by asking what other problems it will create.

Sometimes there's a real answer. It turns out that once you dig through the inflated verbiage of the UCLA piece, what's really happening is that AI is whipping up a textbook for the course, using the professors notes and materials from previous iterations of the course. So the problem being solved is "I wish I had a text for this course." Time will tell whether having to meticulously check all of the AI's work for accuracy is less time consuming than just writing the text herself.

[UPdate: Nope, it's more than the text. It's also the assignments and the TA work. What problem can this possibly solve other than "The professor does not know how to do their job" or "The professor thinks work is way too hard." Shame on UCLA.]

On the other hand, Philadelphia's AI solution seems to be aimed at no problem at all. Says dean of Penn's education grad school, Katherine O. Strunk:

Our goal is to leverage AI to foster creativity and critical thinking among students and develop policies to ensure this technology is used effectively and responsibly – while preparing both educators and students for a future where AI and technology will play increasingly central roles.

See, that's a pretty goal, but what's the problem we're solving here. Was it not possible to foster creativity and critical thinking prior to AI? Is the rest of the goal solving the problem of "We have a big fear of missing out"?

Assuaging FOMO is certainly one of the major problems that AI adoption is meant to address. The AI sector makes some huge and shiny predictions, including some that show a fundamental misunderstanding of how education works for real humans (looking at you, Sal Khan and your AI-simulated book characters). Some folks in education leadership are just deathly afraid of being left behind and so default to that old ed tech standard-- "Adopt it now and we'll figure out what we can do with it later."

So if someone in your organization is hollering that you need to pull in this AI large language model Right Now, keep asking that question--

What problem will it help solve?

Acceptable answers do not include: 

* Look at this thing an AI made! Isn't it cool! Shiny!

* I read about a school in West Egg that did some really cool AI thing.

* We could [insert things that you should already be doing].

* I figured once you got your hands on it, you could come up with some ideas.

* We're bringing in someone to do 90 minutes of training that will answer all your questions.

* Just shut up and do it.

The following answers are also not acceptable, but they probably won't be spoken aloud:

* We are going to replace humans and save money.

* It will make it easier to dump work on you that other people don't want to do.

Acceptable answers include:

* We could save time in Task X

* We could do a better job of teaching Content Q and/or Skill Y

Mind you, the proposed AI may still flunk when you move on to the "Can it actually do this, really," but if you don't really know what you want it to do, it's senseless to debate whether or not it can do that.

There's some debate raging currently in the world of AI stuff, and as usual Benjamin Riley has it laid out pretty clearly here. But much of it is set around the questions "Is AI fake" and "Does AI suck," and in the classroom, both of those questions are secondary importance to "What problem is AI supposed to help solve here?" If the person pushing AI can't answer that question, there really isn't any reason to continue the conversation. 

NH: Vouchers Subsidizing Religious Education

Tiny New Hampshire has been the poster child for just about every bad education reform idea to come down the pike.

An unqualified politician as head of education? Check. Far-out libertarian attempts to gut schools? Check. Unsupervised charter schools wasting money? Check. Shafting students with special needs? Check. Shady shenanigans to install vouchers by circumventing the actual taxpayers? Double check. That voucher program turning out to be wildly more expensive than originally promised? Triple check. 

And now Jeremy Margolis at the Concord Monitor reports that the state's Education Freedom Account school vouchers are servings as a huge windfall for religious schools-- specifically a small set of Christian schools.

Looking at the figures from 2022-23, researchers at the Monitor found that a quarter of the tuition dollars paid out went to just five schools-- all of them religious schools. The top ten recipient schools are all religious schools (either Christian academies or parochial schools).

In fact, 90% of the taxpayer dollars distributed by the voucher program went to religious schools.

The Monitor reports that the program currently spends $27.7 million on 5,321 students (about 3% of all NH students). They list 115 schools collect taxpayer dollars via voucher. 25 of those schools receive at least $100K. 

Those top 5 schools are Laconia Christian Academy ($372,496.62), Concord Christian Academy ($370,783.22), Portsmouth Christian Academy ($331,605.83), Mount Royal Academy ($322,463.29) and Trinity Christian School--Concord ($265,567.39).  Bringing up the rear are Capital Christian School ($1000), Salem Kid Start Kindergarten ($960) and Holderness, a prep school, with a measly $70.

Are these schools open to all students? Well, Concord Christian Academy student handbook notes that going against the sex God gave you, or premarital sex, or public displays of affection, or  engaging in LGBTQ-- this "sexual immorality" could result in suspension or expulsion. Mount Royal devotes the month of October to the virtue of "docility." Trinity elementary admissions include the requirement that parents "are willing to support our statement of faith and who share the mission and purpose of the school" and high schoolers require a pastoral recommendation.

So as is often the case, New Hampshire taxpayers are supporting not just religion, but religious discrimination.

One striking bit of info-- New Hampshire taxpayers are footing the bill for 29 students to attend school in another state ($310K total). But many of the schools receiving vouchers have grown with the new income. 

And so New Hampshire demonstrates as clearly as any state that the major purpose and function of modern school vouchers is to get taxpayers to subsidize religious schools. 

Student Surveillance Is Still A Scary Thing

Back in January of 2020, I predicted that one of the big stories of the coming year would be a growth in the student surveillance industry. I'd been following the story as it popped up, because it was everywhere. 

Florida (you know--the Freedom State) was implementing a huge student surveillance system. Colleges were using student phones for all manner of tracking. Public schools were experimenting with all sorts of creepy facial recognition and surveillance software. Audio surveillance was another great frontier. In 2019, California enacted the Cradle-to-Career Data Systems Act, intended to data mine the hell out of California's minor citizens. And that was on top of the old stuff like Pearson's crazy student surveillance to protect its tests (a story I can't fully relate because a piece about it was one of the few posts that Google ever took down on my blog).

So when I made that prediction in January of 2020, I felt I was making a pretty good prognostication. However, as you may recall, a few months later, education (and mush other) news was dominated by something else entirely. 

But the fact that we were all kind of distracted did not stop the march of ed tech's surveillance industry. How could they? It was like printing money, and it dovetailed perfectly with the longstanding interest in data mining children to get that womb-to-tomb pipeline up and running. No matter how creepy it seemed, it was a profitable way to fix it so that busy CEOs could log on and select meat widgets like picking out toasters on Amazon.

Ellen Barry just dropped a piece at the New York Times that, as the NYT is wont to do, accepts the framing of the folks who sell this stuff-- "Spying on Student Devices, Schools Aim to Intercept Self-Harm Before It Happens." 

This is always the pitch-- "Let us surveil your students during every possible moment of their day, and we will protect them from themselves and each other."

I don't mean to make light of this pitch. I have lost students and former students to suicide, and given the opportunity to prevent that, I'd be awfully inclined to take it. But at the moment, the "evidence" that this works is anecdotal at best. Here I am, forced to agree with Reason of all outlets, asking if this kind of spying on children is really doing any good?

And the cost of this kind of surveillance is pretty extreme. Barry tells a couple of the usual sorts of dramatic tales of a student who was headed off because of what they typed into their heavily monitored school-issued device. Much further down the page comes this paragraph--

Dramatic stories like that are unusual, though. Every day, Mr. Clubbs’s team sifts through and responds to the alerts, a task that occupies about a quarter of his work hours, and a third of his counselors’. He could not say how accurate the system was. “We’re not keeping any data like that,” he said. “We’re just responding to the alerts as they come in.”

Many students report being "caught" with false positives, or pranks. And some of these result in late night police visits to the home, which come with their own level of fraughtness. 

Barry calls identifying people at risk for suicide a "needle in a haystack" problem (linking to a 2022 article about using smartphones to spot suicide risks). There are about 7,000 deaths by suicide in people under 24 each year. A large number of those involved firearms; in 2022, there were 2,526 gun deaths in the 1-to-17 age group.

So why invest so much money in surveillance software rather than, say, tighter gun controls or more mental health services?

We can point at a couple of possible factors. One is that young humans don't have the same kind of lobbying and political power as gun fans. Children's lack of political clout makes them the path of least resistance for all sorts of policy ideas. We've seen this too many times in education--poverty is bad, so let's fix it by making children take standardized tests every year so that they'll get better scores and thereby end poverty.

And as mentioned above, this kind of data collection dovetails nicely with the goals of folks who dream of massive data collection (the kind of all-encompassing data collection that adults would be more reluctant to put up with, but if we can just get kids to accept that "sharing your data" is a fact of life...). 

That, of course, points to the big problem with this sort of operation. Data is the new gold, and what we get are a whole bunch of companies saying, "I would like to collect a bunch of your gold, but don't worry, I'll keep it safely stored in this unlocked desk drawer." Then before you know it, you're reading about how huge investment firm Blackstone has bought Ancestry.com and its vast stores of genetic information. Probably just because they have a keen interest in genealogy.

The surveillance industry didn't take a nap when Covid hit-- in fact, they had a golden opportunity to pitch "Now that all your students are on devices for school, this is the perfect time to install our creepy safety surveillance software." And I'm not even touching on the data-sucking maw that is the product of various outfits like Google that are oh-so-eager to help out with education.

When they get access to computer tech, students need to understand that nothing is private and everything is forever. It would be nice if their responsible adults understood that as well. It's no small thing to sign away the privacy rights of an entire generation, even if it is "for their own good."