Blowing Up The Ed Department

The executive order has finally been signed, and it clarifies... nothing. Lord knows I have often beefed with the department and prayed it would improve, but this is definitely not that.

A photo op with children as a prop. The bulk of it is a bunch of bullshit about the many failings of education and a made-up number about what we've spent ($3 trillion? Really? Can I see the back of the envelope you got those figures from?). The actual meat of the order is this paragraph:

The Secretary of Education shall, to the maximum extent appropriate and permitted by law, take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education and return authority over education to the States and local communities while ensuring the effective and uninterrupted delivery of services, programs, and benefits on which Americans rely.

If I were someone from Team Dismantle The Department, I would call this pretty weak sauce. Like that whole "maximum extent appropriate and permitted by law" thing-- within those limits the list of things they can do is fairly short. I can't believe I'm sending you to something from the Education Reform Now people, but these are crazy times, and they have a pretty handy quick explainer about who can legally do what. And it's not much.

Of course, that's within the restrictions of law, and under the current regime's legal theory of "Whatever Dear Leader Wants To Do Is Right And Legal And Anyone Who Disagrees Is A Traitor Who Should Go To Jail," "maximum extent appropriate and permitted by law" is meaningless tissue paper.

The regime also has at hand its favored tool for gutting departments-- firing everyone and making the department functionally non-functional (as someone on social media noted, when you remove 30% of the parts of a plane, it does not fly 30% slower). Trusk has already gutted the Civil Rights wing of the department as well as the Center for Education Statistics, which among other things ends the NAEP test that Trusk cited as proof that US education is sad. NCES would also be needed to come up with the numbers that Title I and IDEA would use to distribute funds, so that's another wrinkle.

The regime has made its basic talking point "Look at all the money we spent on this department, and we didn't get higher test scores." This is a misdirection. This post from Rep. Sylvia Garcia (D-TX 29th)--

"We're going to send education back to the states" is also a baloney talking point-- the states already have responsibility, control, and most of the funding for education. Some would just like to exercise all that without any accountability to anyone. Also, some folks would like to be free of paying taxes to educate Those Peoples' Children.

We still don't know exactly what Trusk and McMahon are going to attempt specifically. Turn IDEA and Title I into block grants (then slowly zero them out) per Project 2025? Use the money to force compliance with MAGA culture panic edicts? Move some of the programs to other departments? Put Wells Fargo in charge of the college loan portfolio (after they buy a $100 million membership at a Trump golf course)? Cut the department to three people, let it fall apart, and declare victory? Cut IDEA and Title I funding to $1.50? Plenty of those things would be illegal, but that just means a fight in the courts, the results of which are double uncertain--uncertain they'll fall correctly, and uncertain that Trusk will pay any attention to the court ruling.

We don't really know any more than we did before the executive order, other than he's saying more loudly that he wants the department gone. So discussion continues to center on conjecture about what would result if X happened

That's stressful, because the one thing we know is that whatever he does, it will be bad-- bad for education, bad for students, bad for the country. 

David Coleman Is Still Clueless

You can be forgiven for having forgotten that David Coleman is a thing. He's been laying low-ish as head of the College Board since his days of dropping Common Core on the US education system like sewage-filled water balloon. But he's still around, still sharing his ideas about education and how to use the College Board's big products-- the SAT and AP courses-- to inflict his vision on students.

Yes, David Coleman. David "Don't Know Much About Teaching Literature" Coleman. David "I Don't Know How To Teach Writing, Either" Coleman. David "I'm a Genius" Coleman. David "I Messed Up the College Board" Coleman. David "I'm an Educational Amateur and That's Why I'm Awesome" Coleman. And, of course, David "Nobody Gives a Shit What You Think" Coleman.

For whatever reason, Alyson Klein at EdWeek sat down for a "far-ranging" interview with Coleman, and it is just one special Coleman moment after another. 

Klein says, "AI tools can pass almost every AP test. Are students taught what they need to know to thrive in a future workplace dominated by AI?"

This might sound like a challenge to AP tests, but that's not what Coleman hears. "High schools had a crisis of relevance far before AI." For once, he's not entirely wrong-- by reducing writing to a simple algorithmic process divorced from expressing ideas, many educators have turned it into a task that a computer can do. You know what pushed us--hard--in that direction? Common Core, and the tests that came with it. 

Coleman says we have to make high school "relevant, engaging, and purposeful" by creating the next generation of coursework. "We," he says, "are reconsidering the kind of courses we offer." So I guess he's not going to address that whole "AI can beat your test" issue.

But it's this next exchange that shows how far off the rails College Board is ready to go.

Klein: College Board has previously partnered with higher education to create courses. Will you now be partnering with employers/industry?

Coleman: What we are doing is giving employers an equal voice.

So, an example of a new partner [in course design] is the [U.S.] Chamber of Commerce. What’s cool about what we’ll do with business or cybersecurity is that it will simultaneously get you college credit at institutions that offer it and get you that workforce credential. [After successfully completing] AP Cybersecurity, you could definitely get some really good jobs and be qualified for them.

So, to expand their market, they're going to take the "college" out of College Board. Coleman says they might also take a whack at health care, sort of integrate chemistry and physiology and health care careers. 

Klein points out that employers want "tricky-to-measure skills, like creativity, communication, collaboration and critical thinking." Does Coleman have a plan for dealing with this stuff?

He does, and it's dopey. The big move will be AP Seminar-- less required content, more group work. Also, the business and personal finance course "has heavy emphasis on entrepreneurship and responding to change, plus flexibility, adaptation, and resourcefulness. 

So how do you measure stuff like resourcefulness asks the man who still hasn't acknowledged that AI can beat his current set of tests. And he has another non-answer:

In the business course, every student needs to make a business plan and share it and have a competition [around] it. And they have to act as a financial adviser to a family similar or different than their own. With those two projects, you can test students for their ability to adapt to changing circumstances.

Okay, but how do you test them? Give them a multiple choice question with one answer that is the resourceful one? Is there a special resourcefulness rubric for the project? Coleman is skating past a huge question here-- how do you use a standardized box to assess how well a student functions outside the standardized box?

Klein steers him back toward AI. Could an AI write the paper for that Seminar class? 

The answer, buried under some verbage, is yes, and the student might be scored "whether they’ve effectively used it to advance their work. Also--

What we definitely are thinking about is, “How can students skillfully use AI without replacing their own skills development? How can you use AI resourcefully and powerfully without it totally eclipsing what you’re trying to get kids to learn?”

I think that interplay is essential for advancement in the AI world. We always want the check and balance of what can you do with it and what can you do without it, to see what you’re gaining separately from [the course].

Behind all this argle bargle is... nothing. It's meaningless noise until it's turned into specific plans. How would those "checks and balances" work? There is nothing remotely insightful about saying, "Students should know how to work AI and they should know how to work without it."  

Will teachers be trained in AI or cybersecurity? Coleman's answer boils down to "Not really." Just give them enough resources to "stay a step ahead of their kids." 

But Coleman also answers a question that Klein didn't ask-- would the AI replace teachers? 

Teachers recruit kids who did not believe that they could do [rigorous academic work]. They give feedback and encouragement daily. It is just foolish to condense teaching to the transmission portion of the teaching job.

So sure, someday we could get wonderful lectures and tutoring through AI. But not the encouragement, support, and engagement that a teacher does in responding to humans in front of him or her.

So, pretty much like the computer-delivered education models that don't require teachers-- just coaches to encourage and monitor.  

How will they keep courses up to date? The course framework will be a 'living portion," which is some great corporate baloney-speak. But hey-- Coleman never built any capability for update in the Common Core, so maybe he has learned something?

How about AP Data Science? Coleman says the AP Computer Science Principles really covers that. Also, the new verbal section of the SAT includes charts, because to be literate you can't skip the tables in a science article ("unless you're just gonna read fiction," and we know Coleman's not a fan). 

Also, they're not changing the AP African American Studies course, and states, schools, and students can choose.

Look, the College Board lost its way ages ago. The SAT division now trues to flood the market with variants, like a cookie manufacturer trying to some up with new flavors in order to suck up market shelf space. I look forward to the Fetal SAT, given in each trimester of pregnancy. The Advanced Placement courses and tests were arguably a good-ish idea, but they have lost their way (read Annie Abrams' Shortchanged for a fuller telling of that story).

But this is clearly not an improvement. Coleman has never shown himself to be a fan of the liberal arts, so perhaps it's a surprise that he hadn't already shifted the AP course from liberal, college level academics to some high end vocational training, but here we are. Never mind that artsy fartsy thinky stuff; let's dig out the graphs and charts. Dump those crazy abstract maths and get down to crunching the kinds pf numbers that corporate overlords are interested in. Maybe as colleges and universities shift away from liberal arts education and toward meat widget prep, the AP was destined to be dragged along with them.

Thing is, Coleman, at least in this interview, doesn't seem to have a real vision of where he's headed-- just some obvious platitudes and vague gestures. And he can make noises about next generation education programs, but that doesn't really address the problem that a LLM bot can breeze through his tests (and, one wonders, how much bots are being used to score that same test). 

Nothing here indicates that Coleman gas a plan-- just a vague impulse to get more vocational and computery. We'll see if that's enough to hang onto his steadily eroding market share. 

Another Anti-Union Teacher Union

Those wacky folks at the Freedom Foundation are at it again, trying to convince teachers to dismantle their own unions. And they have a new high-profile edubro to help.

Who are they? Well, their website gives us a good introduction to them:

The Freedom Foundation is more than a think tank. We’re more than an action tank. We’re a battle tank that’s battering the entrenched power of left-wing government union bosses who represent a permanent lobby for bigger government, higher taxes, and radical social agendas.

Their language when approaching teachers and other members of public sector unions is a lot about liberating public employees from political exploitation. Their language in spaces like fundraising letters is a bit more blunt:

The Freedom Foundation has a proven plan for bankrupting and defeating government unions through education, litigation, legislation and community activation ... we won’t be satisfied with anything short of total victory against the government union thugs.

Destroy unions and defund the political left. And they work hard at it, too. They have put an army of foot soldiers out there going door to door in hopes of turning an entire state blue. In one example, they sent activists dressed as Santa Claus to stand outside government buildings, where they told workers they could give themselves a holiday gift by exercising their right not to pay that portion of union dues that goes to political activity.

The foundation was launched in 1991 as the Evergreen Freedom Foundation by Lynn Harsh and Bob Williams. These days Harsh is VP of Strategy for the State Policy Network, the national network of right wing thinky tanks and advocacy groups founded in 1992 (it appears that the foundation may have helped with that launch). Her bio says she started out as a teacher and went on to found two private schools. Williams was a Washington state politician and failed gubernatorial candidate. He went on to work with SPN and ALEC, the conservative corporate legislation mill before passing away in 2022. SPN started giving out an award in his name in 2017.

The foundation is not small potatoes operation-- the staff itself is huge, and the foundation operates out of offices in five states (Washington, Oregon, California, Ohio, and Pennsylvania).

Longtime CEO Tom McCabe is now the Chairman of the Board, and he has been pretty clear in his aims. “Labor bosses are the single greatest threat to freedom and opportunity in America today,” he wrote in one fundraising letter. The current CEO is Aaron Withe, the guy who headed up the door-to-door campaign the get Oregon union members to quit their unions. Presumably he didn't go door to door with the same smarm evident in his company bio pic.

The foundation gets money from a variety of the usual suspects, including the Koch family foundations, Sarah Scaife Foundation, Donors Trust, Ed Uihlein Family Foundation, the Richard and Helen DeVos Foundation, and the State Policy Network. The have gotten small mountains of money from the Bradley Foundation, which also heavily funds the anti-union Center for Union Facts.

Many of these same folks helped fund the Janus lawsuit that did away with Fair Share, and the Freedom Foundation was one of the groups that immediately started to work to get teachers to leave their unions.

The Freedom Foundation has tried various pr stunts to get teachers to quit the union, like the time they sent out Halloween mailers exhorting teachers to "Stop these money-sucking vampires and TAKE BACK YOUR PAYCHECK TODAY"

But now they've added a new feature to the mix. Meet the Teacher Freedom Alliance-- an alternative to those evil unions! It's even Free Market! (What does a free market union even mean? Shut up, you!)

They held a big launch party for TFA (they should have checked to see if that acronym was taken) with special guest ranter, Oklahoma's Education Dudebro-in-chief, Ryan Walters! Walters pointed out that the union fights him on cool stuff like merit pay and signing bonuses. Of course, merit pay has never worked and is usually just an excuse to lower base pay, and signing bonuses are a one-time raise that is useless for things like home loans. But Walters is sad that they draw opposition from those awful unions that he has called terrorist organizations (meaning either they are really awful or Walters is easily terrorized). 

Walters's part of the festivities is a greatest hits collection. Teachers union is on the run! The Left is mad about dismantling the Department of Education (cheers) because they want bureaucrats in DC to tell teachers how to teach math, how they should teach our kids that America's an evil racist country. He even brings up Common Core! Free market, which I guess turns out to mean that the market tells teachers how much they can have. That teachers union-- they don't care about teachers or students. And Trump is great. And we should put the Bible in classrooms. 

Walters has gone all-in on promoting TFA, which has led at least one Oklahoma legislator to ask the state attorney general if it's legal for the state education chief to use state resources to promote this thing. Just add that to the list of Walters's questionable choices in office. Meanwhile, he issues a typical non-statement statement in response as reported by Murray Evans at The Oklahoman

"Democrats and union bosses are grasping at straws because teachers finally have a real choice," Walters said. "My office will always communicate with educators about their options, no matter how much it upsets the political establishment."

So what is TFA offering? For one thing, culture panic:

We are a group for teachers and by teachers, ready to change the direction of public education, returning us to traditional, American values. Excellence, not ideology.

On the website, that's in all caps. I spared you the shouting.

Turns out the "by teachers" part is a stretch. The three members of "the team" include Rachel Maiorana is the Director of Marketing and Advocacy; she is also the former Deputy National Director of the Freedom Foundation after serving as California Outreach director since 2021. She was also a Campus Coordinator for Turning Point USA, after doing "brand ambassador work for Coke and serving as a cheerleading coach. Coms degree from Cal State Fullerton.

Director of Member Programs Ali Abshire joined the program in December 2024. Before that she was a Behavioral Health Specialist at Cincinatti Children's, a program officer at the Reagan Ranch, a nanny, a kitchen team member at Chick-fil-A in Lynchburg, and a manager at Zoup! Eatery! Her BS in psychology is from Liberty University in 2022.

Executive Director Eloise Branch came from the Director of Teacher Engagement post at Freedom Foundation, after a couple of years as curator at Young America's Foundation (a campus conservatives outfit) and teaching for two non-consecutive years at The Classical Academy. She got her BA in History from Grove City College in 2017. GCC is about 30 minutes away from me, and it has fashioned itself into a small Hillsdale College of PA. 

So not exactly a deep bench of seasoned and experienced educators here. What benefits do they offer? 

Well, there's "dignifying professional development." And when it comes to that Big Deal that everyone frets about-- liability insurance-- their offer is novel. You get a chance to piggy back on the liability coverage offered to two other "alternative" teacher unions. You can choose the Christian Education Association (you can read their story here) or the Association of American Educators (more about them here). Both are longstanding non-union unions, with CEA very Christ-in-the-classroom emphasis and AAE more aligned with the Fordham-AEI axis of reformsterdom. Neither is large enough to provide credible support for a teacher in a big-time lawsuit, nor am I sure how hard they'd try to defend someone accused of reading Naughty Books or doing socialist DEI things. 

There's a third benefit offered, and that's "alternative curricula" which includes "alternative curriculums and teaching pedagogies ranging from the science of reading to classical mathematics to explicit instruction to the Socratic Method" which may lead one to ask "alternative to what?"

If you can't already guess based on the source of these folks, the website drops more hints about what these folks consider "alternative." 

We exist to develop free, moral, and upright American citizens.

That "free, moral, and upright" appears frequently. There's a blog post outlining the benefits of dismantling the department of education ("funding and decision-making authority" will shift to state and local levels, which is at least half right). There's a small assortment of news articles about education, including one from the conservative Illinois Policy website, a harmless Natalie Wexler article, a Rick Hess interview with Daniel Buck, an article from the right wing Daily Caller, and another from the wingnut right Daily Wire.

And you know, there's no reason that there can't be a right wing union for right wing teachers (though this is only the latest of many failed attempts), but their other repeated idea is "Excellence, not ideology."

We support the right of every educator in America to pursue excellence in the classroom free of ideological interference.

Except our ideology, because, you know, that's just "common sense." The fictional narrative is that teachers are too busy teaching Marx and Crazy Left Ideas to ever cover actual reading and math, which is a thing you can only believe if you have never spent any time in a public school. Anyway, by replacing Cray Lefty Stuff with academics laced with Common Sense (aka right wing ideology), we can Make America Smart Again. At the launch party, Withe said that their curricula would teach students “to love our country; we’re going to teach them that capitalism is the best economic system ever created.”

Now, how deeply they want to actually pursue this is anyone's guess, given that the organization's a wing of a group that has explicitly stated that they want to dismantle the teacher unions, which makes the actual mission of TFA secondary at best.

The launch party was attended by 50 whole educators and a bunch of Freedom Foundation staffers. 

Also worth noting-- the Center for Media and Democracy reports that Freedom Foundation tried this on a smaller scale in the Miami-Dade district, where they backed another faux union and, aided by Governor Ron DeSantis-backed anti-union legislation. They promised that they would "bring the nation's third-largest teachers union to the brink of extinction." They did not-- teachers voted 83% to 17% to stick with their existing AFT affiliate. 

TFA is mum on one other union function-- negotiating contracts. At the launch party, Withe promised that TFA would “provide benefits and resources that are far superior to anything that the teachers unions do.” He even made an emphatic gesture on "far." That's another piece of the free market fairy tale-- the free market will just pay teachers a whole lot. This is a silly argument. First of all, the free market doesn't work quite the same when you're talking about people paid with tax dollars. Second of all, the notion that people are just dying for the chance to pay great teachers a whole lot more, but that darned union is holding them back is unsupported by any reality-based evidence. You'll occasionally find young teachers declaring that left to their own devices, they could negotiate a far better deal than the union, and, oh, honey. What kind of leverage do you think you have. But even if you could, the finite pot of money that schools work with means that you would be negotiating against all the other teachers. Maybe teaching Thunderdome would be fun, but I doubt it. 

People don't pay teachers much because A) they can't afford to and B) they don't want to. And C) they especially don't want to spend a lot on education for Those Peoples' Children. And this is especially true of folks like the Freedom Foundation, who do not want to end unions for the teachers own good but because A) ending the unions would hurt the Democratic party and B) without unions, it would be even easier to pay teachers bottom dollar. 

At that same launch party, Ryan Walters said, "The Freedom Foundation-- it sounds too good to be true. I promise you it's not." I suspect he's right both times-- it's not too good, and it's not true. 

ID: DEI Panic! Is Everyone Welcome Yet? (Spoiler alert: no)

 Don't give the West Ada School District too much credit yet. If you read past the morning headline (W. Ada considers requiring ‘everyone is welcome’ signs at each school), you'll see that the district is in an indefensible mess.

The story started, of course, with a teacher who decided not to shut up. Sarah Inama, a 6th grade world civilization teacher at Lewis and Clark Middle School in the West Ada district, went to reporter Brian Holmes at KTVB with her story.

Inama was told by district admins to take down classroom signs. One said "everyone in this room is welcome, important, accepted, respected, encouraged, valued, and equal" and the other said "Everyone is welcome here." These, she was told, violate a district policy requiring neutrality. The Chief Academic Officer told her via e-mail that district facilities should respect others' differing opinions. 

And it just got worse. Inama said she was told that the problem was not the message so much as the Everyone Is Welcome sign included graphics of hands in a variety of skin tones. 

Inama took down the signs, went home, thought about it, and put the "Everyone is welcome" poster--the one with the multi-toned hands-- back up the next day. The district gave her till May to get rid of it. The other poster uses some colors of the rainbow, and we all know that rainbows are forbidden in classroom decorations.

Chances are you already knew most of that, because the story blew up nationally, letting the whole country see the shame of West Ada. The district is the largest one in Idaho, serving around 35,000 students. It's a big district to be doing something this dumb.

But they kept piling on the dumb. The day after Inama was on the Today show, the district issued a memo entitled "Ensuring a Consistent and Supportive Learning Environment." They decided to go with sports analogies. The Chief Academic Officer is a like a referee who enforces rules "to ensure a fair and level playing field." And there's this howler--

If one player decided to wear a different uniform, use a different-sized ball, or ignore the rules, the game would lose its structure, creating confusion and imbalance,

 Then news this morning's report from BoiseDev that the Board of Trustees is considering making every teacher put up an "Everyone is welcome" poster-- just without those multi-colored hands. Responding to BoiseDev, a district spokesperson explained:

Regarding the Everyone is Welcome Here posters, the district determined that while the phrase itself is broadly positive, certain design elements have been associated over time with political entities and initiatives that are now subject to federal restrictions

Inama told Idaho EdNews, “That’s appeasing not a political view, but a bigoted view that shouldn’t even be considered by a public school district.”

EdNews asked the district spokesperson about concerns that removing the sign certainly seems like a racist move communicating that students of color are not welcome in the classroom.  The response is pure baloney:

West Ada School District is committed to ensuring that every student feels safe, supported, and valued in our schools. The request to remove specific signage is not about excluding or marginalizing any group of students. Our policies are in place to maintain a neutral educational environment while upholding our commitment to inclusion, respect, and belonging for all.

 The board has been emailing about signage and an "Everyone is welcome here" sign for every school--just one that doesn't have any visual display of some of those everyone's because, you know, some people think they shouldn't be welcome, or that welcoming them is a DEI violation. 

In the meantime, Chief Academic Officer Marcus Myers has been responding to inquiries with a form letter that says in part

While we respect individuals’ rights to express their perspectives, it is important to reaffirm that this situation is not about limiting speech or expression but about ensuring consistency in our classrooms and maintaining a learning environment free from distraction. The district’s policies are designed to provide clarity and fairness for all teachers and students by establishing clear expectations for classroom materials.

Which is all kinds of baloney, because the one thing the district has not been is deliberately clear. I would guess that's because saying out loud "Do not do anything that shows Black and Brown students are welcome is too controversial, so don't do that" or "No non-white people on posters" or "No versions of rainbows ever." 

This is anti-diversity policy in action. Don't acknowledge the existence of non-white people. Don't give the racists and bigots anything to complain about. Everyone is not welcome here, and you must never forget that (but you must also never say it out loud). West Ada is not the only place where it is district policy to say "Everyone is welcome here" (the district already has plenty of diversity diversity posters up), but do not live those words.

Myers also blamed the final decision on the lawyers. That's unsurprising on many levels, except that last fall the district was sued by the families of three students who alleged years of racial harassment and bullying. 

God bless Imana for standing up. Who knows how many thousands of teachers have been through a similar experience but did not feel they could buck their local system. It shouldn't be that big a lift for districts to say "Everyone is welcome here" and then act, in all ways, like they mean it. That should be the bare minimum that anyone can expect from a school district-- not knucklingh under to racist snowflakes.

AI Nightmare Fuel

Remember Diane Tavenner? The Bay  area edupreneur started the ill-fated Summit Charter Chain, got a whole bunch of money and tech from Mark Zuckerberg, watched a whole lot of students and their parents push back hard on her automated-education-in-a-box model, and spun it all off into a non-profit thingy. 

That was back in 2018. Since then, she has been doing all the fun silicon valley stuff, including writing books like Prepared: What Kids Need for a Fulfilled Life, chaired the Pahara Institute, started a find-your-career Life Navigation Platform (and app) in Mountain View, and she started a podcast, because of course she did. And it's on The74. And that's what we're looking at today.

Her co-host is Michael B. Horn, a speaker-author with a book blurbed by Reed Hastings. He's a co-founder of the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation, and he writes blog posts with titles like "Why Tech Didn’t Fix Schools: Applying Innovation and Disrupting the Factory."

Their guest on the episode in question is John Bailey, American Enterprise Institute's AI guy. He has worked under Governor Glenn Youngkin, done some White House stints, vp-ed at Jeb Bush's Foundation for Excellence in Education, Aspen Global Leadership Network. You get the world these folks soak in.

The episode is called "How AI is Democratizing Access to Expertise in Education," so you know we're in for a good time. Let's dig into the transcript, and start by skipping the obligatory introductory shmoozing.

Bailey talks a little about how he ended up in this particular arena, coming from a background in ed tech already.

And if I have to admit, like, I’ve been part of a lot of the hype of, like, we really think technology can personalize learning. And often that promise was just unmet. And I think there was, like, potential there, but it was really hard to actualize that potential. And so I just want to admit up front, like, I was part of that cycle for a number of years. And. And then what happened was when ChatGPT came out in December of 2022, everyone had sort of like a moment of ChatGPT, and for me, it wasn’t getting it to write a song or, you know, a rap song or. Or a press release. It was. I was sitting next to someone with a venture team and I said, what is, like, what is an email you would ask an associate to do to write a draft term sheet? And she gave me three sentences. I put it in ChatGPT and it spit back something that she said was a good first draft, good enough for her that she would actually run with it and edit it.

Yes, ed tech has failed to live up to its hype before, but This Time It's Different (which, coincidentally, is a phrase that is always part of the hype). Bailey found ChatGPT fun to play with, and I agree-- I, too, played several rounds of Stump The Software, myself, but only one of us was invited by corporate to come play with the toys inside. This is going to be "so transformative," says Bailey. "It just feels different." 

So what are the rewards and risks here? Well, the internet "democratized" information access (it also democratized information creation, which has not turned out to be a great thing and has rather messed up the other thing). 

What I think is different about this technology is that it’s access to expertise and it’s driving the cost of accessing expertise almost to zero. And the way to think about that is that these general purpose technologies, you can give them sort of a role, a Persona to adopt. So they could be a curriculum expert, they could be a lesson planning expert, they could be a tutoring, and that’s all done using natural language, English language. And that unlocks this expertise that can take this vast amounts of information that’s in its training set or whatever specific types of information you give it, and it can apply that expertise towards different, you know, Michael, in your case, jobs to be done.

Yikes. Bailey has lost me already. LLMs can pretend to be these things, and do it quickly, but "expert"? I don't think so. You aren't accessing expertise; you're accessing a parrot that has listened to a huge number of experts and also a huge number of dopes who know nothing and the LLM is incapable of telling them apart. At the same time, it's not clear how using ChatGPT is any quicker or more efficient than just googling. 

Bailey thinks it's going to be a great tutor. But no-- a great tutor needs to be able to "read" the student to suss out the exact areas that the student is stumbling over, and do it in real time. Tutoring by algorithm has been the same forever-- give the student a task, check to see what the student got wrong, give the student a new task that focuses on what they got wrong. This is slow, clunky, a blunt instrument approach to teaching. It's the same theory of action behind the earliest teaching machines, and it has the same problems. 1) The machine cannot read the student with any sort of precision and 2) the student is asked to perform for a mechanical audience. At best, the AI might be helpful in generating a worksheet to specifications given by a human teacher. That's helpful. It's not transformational.

I think it’s also going to be an amazing tutoring mechanism for a lot of students as well. Not just because they’ll be able to type to the student, but as we were just talking about, this advanced voice is very amazing in terms of the way it can be very empathetic and encouraging and sort of prompting and pushing students, it can analyze their voice.

I cannot say this hard enough-- the bot cannot be empathetic. It might simulate empathy. Do we expect students to be moved and motivated by a machine that can pretend to give a shit about them? And what, I ask, and not for the first or last time, is the problem being solved here? Is there some reason it's better to have software that can mimic a human interaction than it is to have an actual human interaction with an actual human. 

What will deployment in education look like? Bailey compares it to offices where AI is deployed in "back office functions," like, say, coding. He admits that a back office low risk function would be a better start than, say, having an AI do tutoring and "hallucinating," and I am reminded of the observation that AI is always hallucinating, but sometimes the hallucination accidentally matches reality. 

What does Bailey think a low risk back office education function might be? How about parent communications? And holy shneikies, how is that remotely low risk. On what world does a parent want to hear from their child's teacher's bot, rather than the teacher? 

How about using AI to do scoring and assessments? We've been doing that for ages, and mostly the result is designing the test so that it can be scored by a machine rather than designing it so it measures what we want to have measured. Computer-assessed writing? We've been pursuing that for ages and it still sucks and, like the robocaller on your phone, can only handle responses that fall within specific parameters. 

Teacher productivity tools? Maybe, but people whose lives are outside the classroom seriously mis-estimate what "productivity" covers for a teacher. Teachers are not making toasters or cranking out footstools, and creating lesson plans and assessing tasks-- that's not like working an assembly line.

What are the risks? Well, despite the calls to keep teachers in the loop, Bailey is concerned that tired and overworked teachers might jump to AI, much like they turn to Pinterest and Teachers Pay Teachers now, So I guess AI doesn't solve that problem. Because an AI lesson plan for reading might not even be based on the science of reading or aligned to your curriculum. He thinks this is much like the concerns about students just improving an essay with a button instead of doing the struggle that is how one learns. And maybe even talking to an empathy-faking AI will cause students to miss the friction of real human interaction, which would be bad. So for a whole long paragraph Bailey made sense in a way that he hadn't up to this point. Because I'm pretty sure everything he just said is the argument against tutoring students and probably also doing the back office stuff for teachers.

Tavenner is also concerned that the increased "efficiency" of AI will reinforce the current model instead of disrupting it all. I think by "efficiency" she really means "speed," which is not the same thing at all (I would rather have my surgeon be efficient than fast).

Bailey agrees that yes, as she has often said, the system and institutions within the system are "remarkably resistant to change." Also, because of that, "technology doesn't change a system." I have a theory about this, but this post is already long, so let me just say that "change" is constantly happening in education, just not the kind of transformation that every person with a piece of ed tech to peddle envisions in their pitch. The key here is utility. Teachers adopt practices and technologies at the speed of light--when they are useful. But ed tech vendors are forever showing up to the construction sight with a case full of butter knives declaring, "This will be a huge help in building houses if you just change the way you build houses. At least, that's what our in-house testing projections say."

AI in education is still a solution in search of a problem. Bailey is going to swing back around to the "access to expertise" idea which is just-- I mean, he is clearly a smart and accomplished guy, but AI bots possess no "expertise" at all and your best hope is they can hallucinate their way to a passable imitation of it. 

[I]f you’re a school principal, all of a sudden you have a parent communication marketing expert just by asking it to be that Persona and then giving it some tasks to do. And if you’re a teacher, it means all of a sudden every teacher in America can have a teaching assistant like a TA that is available to help on a variety of different tasks.

"Variety of different tasks " is doing so much work here, and I know this is a podcast and not a dissertation, but these are the specifics on which his whole idea hangs, and what he comes up with are the vague generalities and things like asking the AI TA , "I see like John and Michael really struggling in algebra what are some ways I could put them in a small group and give them an assignment that would resonate with both of their interests and help them scaffold into the next lesson? That was impossible to do before." Well, no, not really impossible; more like regular teaching. And the teacher would still have to feed the AI the boys' interests and the scope and sequence of the next lesson.

There's some chatter about pricing which is as close a we get to asking if AI in education would be worth the cost to money-strapped schools, and then Horn has a thought he wants to toss out here. So you list bad things like losing the humanity in coaching, he says, and an easy button for writing that "jumps you ahead to the product, but not necessarily the learning and the struggle from it" but what if... and he takes me back to my college days with an analogy from Brewer Saxberg, learning scientist, that Saxberg attributed to Aristotle but I'm pretty sure I learned about studying how pre-literate cultures shifting to literacy.

The idea is this-- when cultures shift from oral tradition to the written word, certain skills get lost, like the ability to recall and recite Beowulf-sized chunks of poetry. "Kids these days," complain the elders. "Can't even remember fifteen minutes' worth of Bede. Just walk around staring at those funny marks on paper all day." 

Horn seems to be suggesting that we're on the cusp of something like that. Here's a real quote:

of these things that might hurt, which are really going to, are they still going to matter in the future or are there going to be other things that we, you know, other behaviors or things that are more relevant in the future? And how do you think about sort of that substitution versus ease versus actually like really, you know, frankly, I think when you talk about social interaction that could be, forget about disruptive, that could be quite destructive.

Interesting, says Bailey. AI is chipping away at entry level jobs, but that means that people are not acquiring the entry level job skills. His example-- legislators don't need an intern to summarize legislation. AI can do it, but then the interns aren't learning to read legislation. So now the intern has to do higher level cognitive functions, which tells me that students who coasted through high school letting ChatGPT do their homework or all the thinky parts of writing are going to be even LESS prepared for entry level jobs that require MORE skills. Bailey understates that there will be a huge strain on the education system, but then he ruins it by citing TIMSS and NEAP scores as if those tests provide any sort of measure of high level thinking. 

And he's back to the cheap expert again, offering that he can't do fancy Excel stuff, but now an AI can do it for him, so "now I could do it," except of course he still can't, and I have to wonder how much it matters that he still couldn't understand what the AI had done on the spreadsheet.

Look, there's a whole continuum here. The tech trend is always toward needing less and less understanding from the user. The first people to own automobiles had to know how to fix every last nut and bolt; now you can drive in blissful ignorance--as long as nothing ever goes wrong.

So maybe you can just count on AI magic and not care what's happening. But I don't think so--particularly because AI can only deliver in certain sorts of situations.

Catch your breath, because there's more nightmare to come. Tavenner wants to talk about the intersection between AI and ed policy. Like, could you use AI to help you decide how to use your ESA voucher money? Bailey says that sounds cool, and gives some examples, and seems stuck on hos the AI could make the "friction" between families and education institutions go better with robot empathy simulations. Let the AI help you figure out what to do with your education, your career, your life. "We're very close to that," says Bailey, repeating the motto of every tech promise of the last decade (self-driving cars have been a year away for ten years). And speaking of old familiar songs--

I think that’s going to be powerful and it’s going to make policy easier. I’m still, until we create more flexible ways for teachers to teach, for students to learn and students to engage in different types of learning experiences, I just think we’re going to end up boxing and limiting a lot of this technology capabilities.

Once we change how we build houses, the power of this butter knife will be unlocked. Because the education system is there to help unlock technological potential, and not vice versa. 

This is what's out there among the thought leaders and people who get excited by tech stuff and don't know much about classroom teaching of live humans. These are smart, accomplished folks. They even seem nice. But they are on some planet far, far away. 

I can offer you one palate cleansing chaser after all that-- two weeks later they did an interview with Ben Riley, who said a whole lot of things that need to be said. Go read, or listen to, that one. 

 

 

Are These The Last Days Of Public School

I know there's not a great deal of overlap between Robert Pondiscio's audience and mine, but this one is worth reading for a non-raving example of how the issues look from the other side.

Pondiscio's "The Last Days of Public School" appeared in The American Enterprise, the glossier, more magaziney outlet for the American Enterprise Institute, and you may not find it encouraging, but it is a fairly sober look at where we are.

The hook he hangs the piece on is the idea of "peak public school," the zenith of the public education, arguing that "A school choice revolution is rapidly reshaping how public education is organized, funded, and delivered in America." Pondiscio doesn't spend time analyzing the good or bad of that transformation, just the general shape and possible dangers of it.

Some of his observations, such as the fact this revolution "has spurred surprisingly little public discussion" are observations I very much agree with. I might argue that the lack of discussion has been caused in no small part by choicers who very much wanted to stay low and avoid such discussion, but it has always frustrated the hell out of me that we are changing some fundamental assumptions about what the nation's education system is supposed to be and do without really talking about it but instead acting as if we're just getting a new design on slipcovers instead of replacing the couch with a bar stool.

Pondiscio is not soft-pedaling the "revolution"

For generations, America’s K–12 public schools have been largely immune from the disruptive forces that have roiled retail, travel, entertainment, health care, and many other sectors of the economy and culture, but the reckoning has finally come. Public education is on the verge of an unprecedented crack-up. In fact, it’s already underway.

We may argue the scope and size of this crack-up, and I don't love the word "reckoning" here, as if public schools are at last paying for their sins. But it gets us to this:

The reckoning has arrived. What comes next, and the social and cultural cost of “peak public school,” is a question that demands serious consideration.

Pondiscio provides a short, pointed history of school choice in fewer sentences than I would need to summarize it. He identifies the final straw as Covid and culture wars, and here I will disagree with him. These aren't just crises that happened, but crises that were deliberately harnessed and amplified by choicers who routinely repeated the "parents saw school on Zoom and were alarmed" narrative, but stayed silent when polls showed that parents were largely satisfied with how their local schools handled Covid.

The list of other crises is debatable as well: "historic declines in student achievement, chronic absenteeism, discipline crises, and plummeting teacher morale." Sort of, in some places, yes, and yes. Of course, we may never know how the NAEP story ends, now that Trusk has fired all the data people.

Pondiscio's culture war account provides an interesting point of view. In his telling, the uneasy alliance of left and right started to crumble when "education reform’s dominant progressive wing began adopting the arguments and slogans of the social justice left to explain away the movement’s failure to close achievement gaps between black and white students." This, he suggests, is when the culture was came for the reform movement,

I would quibble with bits of that; from out here in the cheap seats, none of the "progressive" wing of reform ever looked particularly progressive (e.g. Democrats for Education Reform, specifically designed to "look" leftish). And I've never liked the term "culture war" with its suggestion that both sides are on the attack, when I see attacking mostly coming from one side only (spoiler alert: it's the side that employs Chris Rufo specifically to find ways to attack opponents). Was the pursuit of "equity" some sort of attack? That said, I've heard before of conservative reformsters stung by accusations from their supposed allies. 

But the next graph sure hits the nail-

Freed from having to make nice with their progressive colleagues, education reform conservatives went all-in on school choice and on the attack against “woke” public schools. A 2021 AEI Conservative Education Reform Network report by Jay Greene and James Paul noted that a significant number of all school choice bills passed in statehouses did so without any Democratic support. A follow-up Heritage Foundation report functionally served the education reform left with divorce papers. The pair argued that private school choice would be attractive to conservative parents concerned about teacher activism and public schools’ embrace of a social justice agenda. They concluded, “It is time for the school choice movement to embrace the culture war.”

And as Pondiscio points out, that has worked out well for them. He does fail to note one important point--that public support isn't all that deep, and that every single one of the choice movements victories has been achieved by legislators acting without, or even in spite of, public input.

From there Pondiscio moves on to rewards and risks. We disagree on the rewards, but I appreciater his clear-eyed view of the risks.

If, as seems inevitable, more Americans adopt a “choose your own adventure” style of educating their children, it could exacerbate the gaps between educational haves and have-nots and lead to an even further degradation of social cohesion.

Absolutely. No "could" about it. Because we aren't talking about a school choice movement, but a taxpayer-funded, free market school choice system, a distinction that has gone unquestioned even though neither taxpayer funding nor the free market are needed to implement school choice. But basing school choice on an educational marketplace, we are absolutely guaranteed gaps between tiers based on financial resources (see also: every market good in the country, from cars to groceries). 

Pondiscio is correct in pointing out, "While public schools have largely failed to be the 'great equalizer of the conditions of men' Mann envisioned, they have at least aspired to provide a shared foundation of civic knowledge and literacy." And also this-- "Schools transmit not just knowledge but shared values, norms, and narratives." Cato Institute in particular has argued the presence of different and conflicting values in public school families is a reason to promote school choice, but I cannot for the life of me figure out how raising students in separate ideological bubbles will bear civic benefit-- especially when some bubbles are the Mercedes Benz of bubbles and others are the used Kia.

As Pondiscio notes, we are sliding into a system in which schools have "few common guardrail." I think it's more accurate to say that some schools (public) have guardrails and others (private and charters) have none. Pondiscio has hopes that choice will allow some students to escape the low-achieving schools, though he acknowledges that leaves even more kneecapped schools and students behind. And the choice system we're growing isn't even particularly well-suited for such "rescues" because 1) quality private school costs are prohibitive and 2) choice laws have been written to privilege the private schools' ability to exclude anyone for any reason. 

Also, school choice does not guarantee better schools—only different ones. The same market forces that produce elite private schools could also create a “long tail” of low-quality options.

Exactly. We're already seeing it. 

Pondiscio gives an on-point look in the rear-view mirror.

In retrospect, the pandemic could not have come at a worse time for traditional public schools. Decades of expensive and intensive efforts to improve public education outcomes at scale have been disappointing and dispiriting. The education reform movement of the past several decades, which began with the youthful, can-do optimism of Teach For America and high-flying urban charter schools, morphed into a technocratic regime of standards, testing, and accountability that proved not just ineffective but deeply unpopular with parents and teachers alike. Even before pandemic-driven “learning loss,” long-term trends in student achievement didn’t match the effort or expenditure devoted to improving student outcomes and closing the achievement gap.

I don't think he'd say it this way, but I will-- the education reformster movement was an expensive bust that wasted money and time, degraded the teaching profession (Teach for America was not so much optimistic and hubristically disconnected from reality), and promoted a fanatical focus on hitting the wrong target-- test scores. And in the process, reformsters (some inadvertently and some absolutely on purpose) eroded public trust and faith in the institution of public schools.

Pondiscio allows that traditional zip-code public default mode education "is unlikely to disappear entirely," but his argument is that "its influence and dominance can only wane."

Have we seen the peak? We do tend to forget that there was a long slow growth, that people who try to call back some golden age of US education are fantasizing. Any trip into the even-barely-long-ago past takes us to a day when fewer Americans finished school, those that did learned less, and the promise of a good education for everyone was only barely acknowledged. We have done great things with our public system, and we have always had room to improve.

The pandemic pause gave us a chance to recalibrate the system and build back better, and we pretty much let that slip through our fingers. Now we've got a system that has been kicked around a bit by reformsters, by choicers, and by opportunistic culture panic grifters. 

Our huge gaps remain in education, mostly between the haves and the have-nots, as well as that great undiscussed divide between rural and urban. Rural communities have always been on the short end of the choice shtick because places like my county, with only a couple thousand students K-12, don't present much of a market opportunity-- and as the baby bust moves through the next decade or so, that will only get worse. Because choice in this country has been tied to free market forces, it will only ever be significant in high-population areas. I'll also go ahead and predict that at some point, taxpayers who have become convinced by the rhetoric that paints school not as a public good, but as a commodity sold to parents-- those folks will lead the charge to cut voucher support and leave even less money in a system that already favors the wealthy. This to me is one of the ironies of school choice US style-- it is perfectly constructed to reinforce and even magnify every wealth-related ill that the public system already suffers from, but without any systemic push to do better.

So things will look different, somehow. Perhaps it will look like a multi-tier system with fancy campuses filled with rich resources for children of the elite, and bare-minimum training boxes for future meat widgets. It almost certainly will look different depending on which state you live in; clearly we already have some states determined to dismantle the public system (hey there, Florida) and some that aim to preserve and support it. Or maybe we'll reach a point where pressure builds to put guardrails on choice schools, leading them to look more and more like the public schools they meant to replace. 

But I'll repeat that there is no going back to some golden age; there never was. If I had a magic wand, there are some developments of the last few decades that I'd erase, but there isn't, and I can't, and if there's one thing I've learned in life, you can only move forward from where you are, not from where you wish you were.

What I hope the very most, the brink that we are teetering on that I hope we can step back from is this--

Let's not agree to a society in which education is a private commodity, and procuring a good one for the child is the responsibility of the parent and the parent alone. Let's not agree to a society in which we have no collective obligation, investment, or responsibility for making sure that every child has a chance to learn as much and become as much as they can. Let's not wash our hands of them and say, collectively, "This child's future is not our problem, parents. This is on you." If that day comes, public school as we understand it will be gone. 

OK: Teach Students The Big Lie

Oklahoma's state slogan has been through a variety of changes, but they may change it to "We rewrite history." Oklahoma has been working on revised standards for history classes in the state for a while now, and just as they got down to the finish line, those standards picked up just a few more objectionable additions.

Sash Ndisabiye and Bennett Brinkman for NonDoc got their hands on a copy of the proposed standards, and there have been a few changes since the standards were set out for public comments.

The headline-grabbing change calls for high school students to "identify discrepancies in 2020 election results by looking at graphs and other information, including the sudden halting of ballot-counting in select cities in key battleground states, the security risks of mail-in balloting, sudden batch dumps, an unforeseen record number of voters, and the unprecedented contradiction of "bellwether county trends."

What's the goal here? If they can get high school students to look over all the "evidence" that failed to convince a single court, maybe they can finally uncover someone who will find in favor of the Big Lie? No, I expect the hope is just to convince a few folks that the Big Lie is true, and 15-year-olds are about the only demographic left with which they have a shot. Easiest to rewrite history for those who haven't read much of it yet. 

NonDoc reports that this change (and many others) were made after the public comment period, and were also not pointed out to the Board of Education before it voted on the standards. 

If course, that might be because the Board is no longer a group of hand-picked allies of Oklahoma's Dudebro-in-chief of Education Ryan Walters. That's fallout from ongoing feuding among Oklahoma's big name GOP politicians. Walters tried to get State Attorney General Gentner Drummond to make some noise about Trump's anti-diversity edicts to support Walters own response, but Drummond, who has often clashed with Walters, called it "manufactured political drama" intended to get Walters more attention. Drummond is running for governor, Kevin Stitt wants to keep being governor, and Walters sure looks like he's running for something (especially now that Dear Leader didn't call him to DC). 

Then Walters decided to require all schools to send him a list of every undocumented immigrant child, and even Stitt thought that was too much ("picking on kids" he called it) and fired three members of the Board of Education. Walters put two of them on a new made-up thing called the "Trump Advisory Committee" because his old BFF Stitt is now part of the "liberal DC swamp."

Which is why it was one of the new members that ended up telling NonDoc, re: the standards changes, "In the spirit of full transparency, I question why this was done in the 11th hour and why no mention of this was made during the presentation at the board meeting."

House Common Education Committee Chairman Dick Lowe told NonDoc that the standards were already "on the edge" because of the overt Christianity references.

That's not the whole of it. The standards have the usual dopey standards features, like the kindergarten standard that calls for kindergartners to read primary and secondary documents and identify the main ideas of the text. But some curious political items just sort of quietly slipped into the standards.

"Identifying major policy issues" became "Explain the effects of the Trump tax cuts, child tax credit, border enforcement efforts including Title 42 and Remain in Mexico policy, consumer and business confidence, interest rates, and inflation rates prior to the COVID-19 pandemic."

Or how about “Identify the source of the COVID-19 pandemic from a Chinese lab and the economic and social effects of state and local lockdowns.”

And just in case any upstart history teachers feel the urge to make Infrastructure Week jokes, the sneaky revision eliminated “Describe bi-partisan efforts to address the nation’s infrastructural needs.” Rewrite away!

Unfortunately, at the contentious February 27 meeting of the state board, Walters created the impression of a looming deadline and the standards were improved, sneaky changes unseen.

Senator Mark Mann, a former teacher who sits on the Senate Education Committee, summed it all up for NonDoc.

“Anytime you put nonsense like this out, it does two things: One, it makes teachers worried (…) So they just leave something out and don’t teach it, and then kids aren’t understanding and grasping the concept. Or, they do what a lot of teachers have done, and they just decide, ‘You know what, I can go make more at Paycom. I’m not putting up with this stuff anymore.'”

Yup. State standards are most often a PITA paperwork exercise, and once you see that some of them are nonsense, you fill out your lesson plans to look compliant, and then you ignore the damned things. The effect?

“Ryan Walters, clearly, outside of being a total disaster, has done nothing to help solve the teacher shortage,” Mann said. “He’s added to it because teachers don’t want to work under him.”

This next governor's race in Oklahoma is going to be really interesting for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is to see if Ryan Walters has established such a noisy, dysfunctionally high profile that he may be the first state education chief to be an actual campaign issue. It was Stitt who raised Walters up to the state level; let's see how hard he runs away from that. And then, once we see the outcome, we'll see how the Oklahoma state standards rewrite the tale.