The AI Used By Privatizers

Here at the institute, we often wonder what would happen if we could just press a button and churn out more research, more postings across social media, and more emails to a vast mailing list of possibly-interested readers.

Of course, AI could do that, and so, of course, AI is doing that. At least, for one chosen sector of clients.

Meet Technology for Freedom. 

T4G can "supercharge your intel & influence" and their promise is simple and clear. 

We help MAGA advocates, think tanks, and influencers dominate the battlefield with AI that delivers real results.

Discover your next secret weapon.

The company appears to have been founded in March of 2024 by founder Daniel Poynter. Poynter is a 2008 graduate of Purdue (Philosophy) with a MacArthur Young Innovator award. Since 2004 he's been a busy guy; he has 18 jobs on his LinkedIn profile, including gigs like web developing, IT stuff, digital literacy, coaching for social entrepreneurs, and founding/running Carbon Neutral Indiana ("fun and effective climate action") an outfit that seems to deal with educating ordinary folks and brokering carbon credits for other folks. 

His head of engineering is John Bohlmann, a top-of-class computer grad from Purdue (2011) who has done a mountain of tech work. 

If "you're a think tank or advocacy organization, fighting for the spirit of 1776," T4F offers three main services--

AI-powered research, AI-powered advocacy, and AI training.

This breaks down to "value" services like AI-compiled contact lists. For example, they helped the Mackinac Center for Public Policy (the pro-privatization pressure group) "get contact information, even once unavailable residential mailing addresses, of thousands of elected officials in Michigan." They helped School Boards for Academic Excellence (the anti-woke school board association) find thousands of school board members in 19 states.

They can automate workflows:

Free up time, cut costs, and scale faster with AI-powered automation. 

Your team is wasting hours on manual, repetitive tasks - hours that could be spent growing your movement, winning more fights, and driving real impact.

 For example, they helped EdChoice data mine public comments at public school board meetings and "uncover a new source of public sentiment." They helped the team of  Heritage Foundation and EdChoice "find and analyze media coverage of school choice debates."

They can offer this creepy service:

Increase Your Influence with AI-Powered Social Network Analysis 

Power isn't just about what you know - it’s about who you know. 

Our AI-powered Social Network Analysis (SNA) helps you map relationships, uncover hidden influencers, and identify leverage points to maximize your reach and impact. Whether you’re engaging donors, studying the opposition, or finding ins to key decision-makers, SNA gives you a strategic advantage. 

Real Results

Increase meetings with high-net-worth donors 

Identify key decision-makers and their trusted connections 

Map opposition networks and uncover their coordination strategies

They can also provide AI guidance on demand, including strategizing and leadership advice The specifics here are particularly alarming:

We advised a Governor’s Office on how AI can uncover regulatory overreach by comparing agency rules to the original laws passed by elected representatives. 

We identified how a national non-profit can automate the monitoring of hundreds of university websites, saving over $1.5 million.

The website includes some chirpy endorsements, including kudos from Paul DiPerna of EdChoice, Jason Bedrick of The Heritage Foundation , and Jarrett Skorup of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy. Bedrick's endorsement includes 

I strongly recommend Technology for Freedom to any think tank or advocacy organization looking to enhance their research capabilities through AI while maintaining academic rigor...

So if you've been up late thinking about all the scary ways AI can be used, add outfits like this (I'm betting this isn't the only one). Let's salute the brave new world where political advocacy is an arms race between competing bots. Should be delightful. Also, folks who keep insisting that AI will be objective and fair and unbiased really, really don't get it. Don't think of AI as a dispassionately objective arbiter; think of it as a for-hire creature that will do whatever it is hired to do, dispassionately freed from any conscience or scruples. AI is not Spock; it is Javier Bardem in No Country for Old Men, or Arnold Schwarzenegger in the first Terminator. And some folks have already hired it and put it to use.

Yes, Middle Schoolers Are Hard To Teach, and Nobody Is Really Lazy

Stop me if you've heard this one-- primary grade students love to learn, and middle school students do not.

I could hear my joints crusting over while reading a new piece about disengaged teens in The Atlantic, by a pair of writers who are apparently experts. This is, I guess, one of those features of age-- young folks earnestly explaining to you things that you thought conscious human beings already knew.

"The Teen Disengagement Crisis" is by Jenny Anderson and Rebecca Winthrop, a journalist-educator team that have written a whole book about this (which I have not read yet). 

Some of their observations are not news to anyone who has taught, ever. "By middle school, many kids’ interest in learning falls off a cliff." Well, yeah. When you are a little, the world is exciting, learning stuff is as easy as breathing, and you are both receiving and exuding glorious, unconditional love (as long as you don't have lousy parents, and sometimes even then, depending on what other people are in your world). You are crackling with energy. 

Then you turn 11 or 12 or 13 and it all turns to hell. Your body turns on you, growing into some gangly thing you can't quite control, as well as producing all sorts of foreign effects that can be alarming. You are suddenly at the mercy of hormone-induced emotions that you can't manage. You are simultaneously and painfully aware that 1) your life is largely leashed and restrained by a bunch of outside powers that you can't overcome and 2) that having the freedom to operate without those chafing restraints is absolutely terrifying. 

You used to do stuff and sometimes you'd win and sometimes you'd fail and it's not that you didn't have feelings about it, but now you have FEELINGS!!!! about it. 

And learning is hard. Somehow the machine in your head that just automatically picked stuff up is now broken. Well, at least it seems that way to you but that kid in the next desk in math seems to pick stuff up just fine and ace every test without even trying and who the hell does he think he is and why are you struggling so much oh my god is there something wrong with you and why didn't Pat say hi at lockers this morning and what's for lunch today shit is there a zit on my nose now??!! What was the assignment again?

Anderson and Winthrop write about "Passenger Mode" which I think is a good way to describe the mode some students settle into. They aren't super engaged, and they aren't totally checked out. Sometimes folks stick passenger mode students with the L word-- lazy-- and the writers are on point here as well. Anderson and Winthrop point at painfully unengaging school work as a big part of the problem, but I think it's both more complicated and simpler than that. 

I taught 39 years, and I never met a lazy student in my entire life. What I met were students who were making choices about their own agency.

I could learn to speak conversational Chinese or work with Linux. But I've made a cost-benefits analysis and determined that the usefulness I'd get from the learning compared to the time and effort I'd have to put in means I'm just going to say, "No, thank you." Nobody calls me lazy or, worse yet, learning disabled because I make that choice. Adults make choices like that all the time. So do students.

I've shared that thought with my students. Particularly in the second half of my career, I was very explicit about respecting their right to make that decision, even if there are consequences ("I respect your right to skip all the assignments, that will still work out to a failing grade.")

Students can conduct the cost-benefits analysis, but they're not always good at it. They may not be great at assessing the benefits (my informal assessment is that roughly 98% of teens think learning history has no benefits). They may also be bad at estimating the costs, particularly if they have been ill-used by the system and beaten into a low estimate of their own skills. As the writers point out, treating students as if they are incompetent and have to be nagged into compliance does not help. It just increases their estimate of what compliance is going to cost (a chunk of their self-esteem). 

So the teacher's role is to help students with that cost-benefits analysis. Part of the job is to sell the material; what do they get out of complying with the lesson? In an earlier age, this was where the teacher was encouraged to "make the lesson relevant," which is truly terrible advice. If the lesson is relevant, explain why. If it isn't, don't teach it. And if you have to make it appear to be relevant, that's an admission that it isn't, so see the above. Benefits include practical items (communication skills are job skills) and broader items (I told my students for years, "The more education you have, the more jokes you get"). 

The cost side is where teachers have some control. The cost of the learning can be endless tedious drill or not. Teacher-as-coach work is about convincing students, one way or another, that this won't take all that much out of them. We've always known that little success points along the way boost confidence; ime, the main cost barrier for students tends to be that the task just seems too huge. 

Cost is also where the system figures in-- if it has been set up to convince students that Passenger Mode is the low-cost way to get through school, they will gravitate toward that mode. Again--this is not because they are lazy. It's a basic human approach-- would you be more likely to buy a pizza for $5 or essentially the same pizza for $150?

The cost side in school is also a two-part computation-- what is the cost of doing this compared to the cost of not doing this? This is where we get the adult approach of trying to jack up the price of non-compliance. I'm not going to say this is never productive ever, but I will say it's pretty close to never ever. For one thing, you're creating a lose-lose for the student, with two unpleasantly high-cost choices. For another, you are conditioning the student to run away from things rather than towards them, to practice building their life around avoiding unpleasant things rather than moving towards good stuff. And the worst part of both-- a teen will tend to blame anything sucky in their lives on themselves. 

I have ordered the book on the strength of this article, though I fear that the authors are far too ready to throw schools under the bus. But the board of directors are approaching these years, and it's been a couple of decades since the last time I was the parent of teens, and it won't cost this old fart much to read what these two have to say. I'll get back to you later. 

Two Sigma Cyber-Tutoring For The Poors

Much of the US education policy has been driven by a simple enough issue-- a lot of people who would like to spend as little as possible educating other people's children. Especially when those other people are poor and/or of color. 

The last few decades of the school choice movement has been driven in large part by Milton Friedman's dream of a country where the government is not involved in schools at all and an education is a consumer good that parents are fully responsible for purchasing on their own. That would, as with any other market sector, result in tiers of service. The well-to-do would get nice schools, and the less well-to-do would get the Dollar Generals of education, and people located in certain communities would get the equivalent of food deserts for education-- little chunks of the market that no vendor wants to serve.

But the dream has some obstacles to overcome. One of the largest is that we like the idea of America as a nation that educates everyone, that schools are our great equalizing engine and we've worked hard to pursue that idea. It's hard to reconcile ourselves to saying, "From now on, you only get the education that your parents can afford, and if that's not much, well, now you know what your station is in life." To give up on equity in education for all is to give up on the whole "all humans are created equal" thing.

Yes, lots of folks have always believed that some people are better than others, and that the betters should rule over the lessers (and we're living with the effects of that right now)-- but it's still hard to say it out loud and admit that we aren't quite who we like to think we are.

So the attempt to install a tiered education system stalls on the messaging problem. How can we short-change the not-so-wealthy families of this country while somehow making it look like we aren't, that our cool new system is still making a quality education available to all?

One proposed solution is microschools. Microschools are the answer to the complaint, "What good does a voucher do me when there isn't a private school that will accept my child within fifty miles of me?" You can start a microschool with a computer, an internet connection, any adult to be a "coach," and a license for some set of software. Gather a few neighborhood kids around the computer desk and voila! You have your own private school! (The overlap between microschool fans and those still angry about COVID distance learning is a monument of cognitive dissonance).

The other idea used to paper over the inherent inequities of a market-based commodified education system is tutoring, Betsy DeVos liked to harken back to the days when Alexander the Great skipped public education and was tutored instead by Aristotle. Let's do that!

Specifically, we find folks touting  Two Sigma tutoring, a magical kind of tutoring that creates magical education achievement. There are tutoring companies waving the Two Sigma Tutoring flag all over the place, including Sal Khan presenting a TedX Talk on how his AI-flavored Khanmigo tutoring service would provide the Two Sigma Solution.

When you hear about Two Sigma tutoring, you're hearing about a 1984 essay by Benjamin Bloom that has become a classic. In it Bloom argues that super-duper tutoring can raise student performance by two whole standard deviations. That would mean, for instance, that students scoring in the 50th percentile would be moved up to the 98th percentile (God only knows what would happen if all students were given the 2 Sigma treatment).

If that sounds like it might be bunk--well, yes. Education Next has a new piece by Paul T. von Hippel that is the most thorough look at Bloom's work that you could ask for. Bookmark that puppy for the next time some tech company shows up to sell your district AI-driven Two Sigma tutoring. 

I'm not going to cover the whole article, but here are just a few highlights to keep in mind.

A chart often shown to illustrate Bloom's "findings" (including by Sal Khan) is not an illustration of actual data, but Bloom's hard-drawn illustration of "this is what it would look like."

Bloom's essay leans on the work of two grad students working with a tiny sample size. As von Tippel notes, these grad students, having supposedly discovered the secret of super-tutoring, did not go on to make it big in the tutoring world.

There was a lot more than simple tutoring involved. Extra tutor training, tests, feedback, and, most crucially, a focus on topics about which the tutees initially knew nothing; when student knowledge starts at zero, you have a lot of room to improve dramatically.

The two-sigma effects obtained in the 1980s by Anania and Burke were real and remarkable, but they were obtained on a narrow, specialized test, and they weren’t obtained by tutoring alone. Instead, Anania and Burke mixed a potent cocktail of interventions that included tutoring; training and coaching in effective instructional practices; extra time; and frequent testing, feedback, and retesting.

And for the purposes of all the AI-powered tutoring being hyped, Bloom's results relied entirely on tutoring by actual human beings. Though von Tippel doesn't get into this, I will-- any value of one-on-one tutoring includes a closer connection between tutor and student, increasing the tutor's ability to get a sense of what is going on in the student's head, which in turn makes it easier to address precisely what the student isn't getting. AI can't do that. 

What von Tippel does point out is that chatbots aren't necessarily very good at this. He found that a chatbots "quickly get lost when trying to teach common math concepts like the Pythagorean theorem." And he rightly questions how well students will engage with a chatbot tutor. Ultimately, he's pretty gentle with the two sigma promise of AI, calling it "rash," when perhaps "highly improbable" or even "bunk" might be accurate. 

But what can AI tutoring do? It can allow supporters of commodified education to point and say, "See? Top-quality education available at low, low prices, so we are absolutely fulfilling our promise to get every child a decent education." The supporters will probably not go on to say, "And I don't have to pay for it, which is awesome."

Every bit of the school choice "revolution" is about creating a multi-tiered system of education, pretty much like what we have for higher education (complete with the chance to take on crippling debt in hopes of getting ahead in life). 

AI just facilitates that, providing one more way to paper over the idea of abandoning the lessers. I will believe otherwise the day I see wealthy parents pulling kids out of elite academies and plunking them down with an AI tutor instead. "Why would I send you to Philips Exeter when you can get an equally awesome education here at home on your Macbook and AI-ristotle?"

This is the choice argument again and again-- not that choice won't usher in an age of upper and lower strata in education, but that the lower tiers will actually not be so bad. Separate, but equal, one might say, even if such claims seem rash. Or even bunk.

Moms For Liberty and the Salvador Gulag

We're all suddenly painfully aware of Nayib Bukele, the El Salvador dictator who has been subcontracted to run a gulag for housing whatever people the MAFA regime wants to offshore this week. But you know who was already buddies with Bukele? Catalina Stubbe, Moms for Liberty's head of Hispanic Outreach.

Stubbe was born in Colombia and is a former Miss World Colombia. She earned a sociology degree from the Sorbonne, and moved to the US about 16 years ago. She operates the Stubbe Ranch, and lists herself as a National Media Commentator, and has appeared on things like Lindell-TV, OAN, Newsmax, Telemundo, and Fox and Friends.

She lives, of course, in Florida, with four children and her husband Dr. Hermann Johan Stubbe. Dr. Stubbe practices family medicine, and he appears to be good at it. He graduated from med school in Puerto Rico in 1999. The couple appear to have filed for a business called Metaboliclife back in 2015. For what it's worth, the four children are mentioned far more often in her press than her husband is.

Stubbe was brought into the M4L fold in 2022, but she has been plenty busy since. She does plenty of speaking, like an appearance at the right wing Pennsylvania Leadership Conference, who praised her because "The pulse behind all her work is her profound love for her family and her Savior, Jesus Christ."

The Economist reported that at the 2023 M4L conference, well...

According to Catalina Stubbe, under the guise of sex education Florida schools are teaching boys to masturbate. This may be the result of demonic forces she saw at work in her own child’s classroom. When her seven-year-old’s maths homework repeatedly featured the number 666 (interpreted by some to signal the devil) she knew there were leftists behind it.

 She hung out with Heritage Foundation for their 50th anniversary. She went on the Matt Gaetz Show to argue for the end of the Ed Department. She went to the UN to talk about parental rights (of course, not if the parents are parents of LGBTQ kids, or if the parents are themselves some unfavored minority). She stumped for Dear Leader in 2024, and then posted this on the gram--

Our @POTUS is hands-down the greatest in history and let’s be real, the most handsome too! At 78, he’s defying time with a jaw-dropping glow and an energy that’s straight-up electric. Charismatic doesn’t even cover it, he’s got that magnetic charm that lights up every room, a sharp wit that keeps us all hooked, and a vigor that puts people half his age to shame. The way he commands attention with that dazzling smile and unstoppable drive? Absolute perfection. We’re witnessing a legend who’s rewriting what it means to lead with style and grace!

In March pf 2024, she was at CPAC. So was Nayib Bukele, who at the time was mostly known for A) the kind of conservative dictatorship that has become popular on the right and B) his attempt to convert El Salvador's currency base to bitcoin, a bold idea that has turned into a demonstration of why that's a bad idea. (I'll let someone else see if there are dots to be connected between the failure of a grand cryptocurrency grift and the launch of a gulag-for-profit grift.)

While Bukele was at CPAC, Catalina Stubbe connected with him for some interview time.  

The results were reported by FSSPX News (that's the Society of Saint Pius X, a canonically irregular traditionalist Catholic outfit):

From February 21 to 24, 2024, the Salvadoran president attended the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) which was held in the United States. During the event, he was questioned by Ms. Catalina Stubbe, member of the Moms for Liberty organization – responsible for dissemination in the Hispanic community.

He explained that he thought it was “important that the curriculum does not carry this gender ideology and those types of things,” and assured that “parents should be informed and have a say in what their children will learn.”

He added: “I think it is important that God be reintroduced into schools, that morality and civics are reintroduced, that traditional elements – like mathematics and history – are taught. … Nobody is against modernization: what we are opposed to is the introduction of unnatural, anti-god, anti-family ideologies which have no place in our schools.”

The Minister of Education, José Mauricio Pineda, confirmed on social networks that “all traces of gender ideology have been removed from public schools.”

So while you're managing your anger over a third world dictator who throws around accusations while running a gulag for the US's unconstitutional rendering of whatever brown people they don't like this week, remember that this is yet another appalling ally for the "cheerful warriors" of Moms for Liberty. It is possible that in all my reading I missed the Bible passage in which Jesus said that we should round up people who bother us and stick them in some torturous prison. And M4L love for only certain parents is old news by now. 

Meanwhile, Moms for Liberty's website still features their bullshit origin fable about how a couple of moms just took $500 and a t-shirt design to launch their group, and not the actual story of how some experienced political operators got backing to launch their next attempt to mobilize GOP women. Along the way they've allied themselves with some pretty awful people, but cozying up with a dictator who hopes to get rich torturing political prisoners is an even worse look. 

Predicting AI Armageddon For Universities

Once again, the Chronicle of Higher Education is hosting some top-notch chicken littling about the coming  of our robot overlords. This time it's "Are You Ready for the AI University," from Scott Latham, and it is some top notch hand waving.

Latham is a professor at the Manning School of Business at the University of Massachusetts, with a background in tech and business, which certainly fits with the pitch he's making here. It's worth looking at because it leans hard on every marketing note we encounter in the current full court AI press.

The hyperbole here is huge. AI will be "forever altering the relationship between students and professors." Latham waves away mundane cheating concerns, the "tired debate about academic ethics" because students have always cheated and always will, so, I guess, never mind that ethics baloney. 

An AI arms race is under way. In a board room at every major college in America there is a consultant touting AI’s potential to lower costs, create new markets, and deliver more value to students.

Latham is certain of not only the inevitability, but the dominance of AI. And the FOMO is strong with this one. Here's just one of his broad sweeping portraits of the future.

Across the country some institutions are already piloting fully AI-instructed courses and utilizing AI to enable higher yields and improve retention, graduation rates, and job placement. Over the course of the next 10 years, AI-powered institutions will rise in the rankings. US News & World Report will factor a college’s AI capabilities into its calculations. Accrediting agencies will assess the degree of AI integration into pedagogy, research, and student life. Corporations will want to partner with universities that have demonstrated AI prowess. In short, we will see the emergence of the AI haves and have-nots. Sadly, institutions that need AI the most, such as community colleges and regional public universities, will be the last to get it. Prepare for an ever-widening chasm between resource-rich, technologically advanced colleges and those that are cash-starved and slow to adapt to the age of AI.

Yes, I am sure that wealthy, elite parents will send their children off to the ivies along with a note to the college saying, "Now don't try to stick my child with one of those dumb old human professors. I want that kid hooked up to an AI-driven computer."  

Latham seems to think so, asserting that 

Colleges that extol their AI capabilities will be signaling that they offer a personalized, responsive education, and cutting-edge research that will solve the world’s largest problems. Prospective students will ask, “Does your campus offer AI-taught courses?” Parents will ask: “Does your institution have AI advisers and tutors to help my child?”

I am the non-elite parent of two potential future college students, and this sounds like an education hellscape to me.

But Latham says this is all just "creative destruction," like when digital photography killed off film photography. He seriously mischaracterizes film photography to make his point, but there's no question that cheap and easy digital photography kneecapped the film variety. 

Latham argues that the market will force this, that the children of the Amazon, Netflix and Google generation want "a speedy, on-demand, and low-friction experience." Of course, they may also have learned that increasingly enshittified tech platforms are the enemy that provides whole new versions of friction. Latham also argues that these students see college as a transaction, a bit of advanced job training, a commodity to be purchased in hopes of an acceptable Return On Investment, and while I'd like to say he's wrong, he probably has a point here because A) that's what some folks have been telling them their whole lives and B) we are in an increasingly scary country where a safe economic future is hard to come by. Still, his belief in consumer short-sightedness is a bit much.

So they regard college much like any other consumer product, and like those other products, they expect it to be delivered how they want, when they want. Why wouldn’t they?

Maybe because somewhere along the way they learned that they aren't the center of the universe? 

Latham is sure that AI is an "existential threat" to the livelihood of professors. Faculty costs are a third of institutions cost structure, he tells us, and AI "can deliver more value at lower cost." One might be inclined to ask what, exactly, is the value that AI is delivering more of, but Latham isn't going to answer that. I guess "education" is just a generic substance squeezed out of universities like tofu out of a pasta press. 

If Latham hasn't pissed you off yet, this should do it:

Professors need to dispense with the delusional belief that AI can’t do their job. Faculty members often claim that AI can’t do the advising, mentoring, and life coaching that humans offer, and that’s just not true. They incorrectly equate AI with a next-generation learning-management system, such as Blackboard or Canvas, or they point out AI’s current deficiencies. They’re living in a fantasy. AI is being used to design cars and discover drugs: Do professors really think it can’t narrate and flip through PowerPoints as well as a human instructor?

 And here is why colleges and universities are going to the first to be put through the AI wringer-- there is a lot of really shitty teaching going on in colleges and universities. I would love to say that this comes down to Latham getting the professorial function wrong, that no good professor simply narrates through a Power Point deck, and I'd be correct. But do some actual professors just drone and flip? Yeah, I'm pretty sure they do.

In the end, Latham's argument is that shitty AI can replace a sub-optimal human instructor. That may be true, but it's beside the point. Can AI provide bad advising, bad mentoring, and bad life coaching? Probably. But who the heck wants that? Can AI do those jobs well? No, it can't. Because it cannot create a human connection, nor can it figure out what a human has going on in their head. 

Latham is sure, however, that it's coming. By the end of the decade, there will be avatars, and Latham says to think about how your iPhone can recognize your face. Well, 

Now imagine AI avatars that will be able to sense subtle facial expressions and interpret their meaning. If during a personalized lecture an avatar senses on a student’s face, in real time, that they’re frustrated with a specific concept, the avatar will shift the instructional mode to get the student back on track.

"Imagine" is doing a lot of work here, but even if I imagine it, can I imagine a reason that this is better done by AI instead of by an actual human instructor.

Beyond the hopeful expectation of technical capabilities, Latham makes one of the more common-yet-unremarked mistakes here, which is to assume that students will interact with the AI exactly as they would with human beings and not as they would with, say, a soulless lifeless hunk of machinery. 

Never mind. Latham is still flying his fancy to a magical future where all your education is on a "portable, scalable blockchain" that includes every last thing you ever experienced. It does not seem to occur to him that he is describing a horrifyingly intrusive mechanized Big Brother, a level of surveillance beyond anything ever conceived. 

Latham has news for the other functions of higher ed. AI can replace the registrar. AI will manage those blockchain records that "will be owned by the student and empower the student" because universities won't be able to stand in the way of students sharing records. 

AI will create perfect marketing for student recruitment, targeted to individual students. AI will handle filtering admissions as well "by attributes that play to an institution's strength." Because AI magic! Magicky magic. 

This is such bullshit, the worst kind of AO fetishization that imagines capabilities for AI that it will not have. AI is good at finding patterns by sifting through data; it does what a human could do if that human had infinite patience and time. Could a human being with infinite time and patience look at an individual 18-year-old and predict what the future holds for them? No. And neither can AI.

AI is going to take over career services, which I suppose could happen if we reach the point that the college AI reaches out to an AI contact it has in a particular business. And if you think students want to deal with human career-services professionals," Latham has a simple answer-- "No, they don't. Human interaction is not as important to today's students." I guess that settles that. It's gonna suck for students who want to go into human-facing professions (like, say, teaching) when they finally have to deal with human beings.

AI will handle accreditation, too! Witness the hellscape Latham describes:

In our unquestioning march to assessment that is driven by standardized processes and outcomes, we have laid the groundwork for AI’s ascendancy. Did the student learn? Did the student have a favorable post-graduation path, i.e., graduate school or employment? Accreditors will have no choice but to offer a stamp of approval even when AI is doing all the work. In the past decade, we have shifted from emphasizing the process of education to measuring the outcome of education when determining institutional effectiveness. We have standardized pedagogy, standardized student assessments, standardized teaching evaluations, and standardized accreditation. Accreditation by its nature is standardized, and we won’t need vice provosts to do that job much longer.

Administration will also be assimilated (I guess the AI can go ahead and shmooze wealthy alumni for contributions). Admins will deal with political pressure by asking, “Did you run this through AI?” or “Did the AI engine arrive at a similar decision?” Because if there's anything that can deal with something like the politics of the Trump regime, it's an AI.

He's not done yet. This is all so far just how AI will commandeer the existing university structure. 

But that is only step one of a broader transition. Imagine a university employing only a handful of humans, run entirely by AI: a true AI university. In the next few years, it’s likely that a group of investors in conjunction with a major tech company like X, Google, Amazon, or Meta will launch an AI university with no campus and very few human instructors. By the year 2030, there will be standalone, autonomous AI universities.

Yes, because our tech overlords have always had a keen hand on how education works. Like that time the tech geniuses promised that Massive Open Online Courses would replace universities by, well, now. Or that time that Bill Gates failed to be right about education for decades. What a bold, baseless, inevitably wrong prediction for Latham to make--but he's not done.

AI U will have a small, tight leadership team who will select a "tight set of academic disciplines that lend themselves to the early-stage capabilities of artificial intelligence, such as accounting or history." Good God-- is there any discipline that lends itself to automation less than history? History only lends itself to this if you are one of those ahistorical illiterates who believes that history is just learning a bunch of dates and names because all history is known and set in stone. It is not, and this one sentence may be the most disqualifying sentence in the whole article.

Will AI U succeed? Latham allows that a vast majority will fail (like the dot-com bubble era) but dozens will survive and prosper, because this will work for non-traditional students (you know--like those predatory for-profit colleges did) who aren't served by the "one size fits all" model currently available, because I guess Latham figures that whether you go to Harvard or Hillsdale or The College of the Atlantic or Poor State U or your local Community College, you're getting pretty much the same thing. Says the guy who earlier asserted that AI would help select students based on how they played to the individual strengths of particular institutions. AI will target the folks who started a degree but never finished it. Sure.

AI U's secret strength will be that it will be cheapo. No campus and stuff. Traditional universities offering "an old-fashioned college experience complete with dorm rooms, a football stadium, and world-class dining" will continue, though they'll be using AI, too. 

Winding down, Latham allows as predicting the carnage is easy, but "making people realize the inevitable" is hard (perhaps because it skips right over what reasons there are to think that this time, time #12,889,342, the tech world's prediction of the inevitable should be believed). "Predicting" is always easy when it's mostly just wishful guessing.

Students will benefit "tremendously" and some professors will remain. Jobs will be lost. Some disciplines will benefit, like the science-and-mathy ones. Latham sees a "silver lining" for the humanities-- "as AI fully assimilates itself into society, the ethical, moral, and legal questions will bring the humanities to the forefront." To put it another way, since the AI revolution will be run by people lacking moral and ethical grounding in the humanities, the humanities will have to step up to save society. 

I have to stipulate that there is no doubt that Professor Latham is more accomplished and successful than I am. Probably smarter, and for all I know, a wonderful human being who is kind to his mother. But this sure seems like a lot of bunk. Here he has captured most of the features of AI sales. A lack of clarity about what teachers, ideally, actually do (it is not simply pour information into student brains to be recalled later). A lack of clarity about what AI actually does, and what capabilities it does and does not have. A faith that a whole lot of things can be determined with data and objectivity (spoiler alert: AI is not actually all that objective). Complete glossing over the scariest aspects of collecting every single detail of your life digitally, to be sorted through by future employers or hostile American governments (like the one we have right now which is trying to amalgamate all the data the feds have so that they can sift through it to find the people they want to attack). 

Is AI going to have some kind of effect on universities? Sure. Are those effects inevitable? Not at all. Will the AI revolution resemble many other "transformational" education revolutions of the past, and how they failed? You betcha-- especially MOOCs. Are people going to find ways to use AI to cut some corners and make their lives easier, even if it means sacrificing quality? Yeah, probably. Is all of this going to get way more expensive once AI companies decide it's time to make some of their money back? Positively. 

Would we benefit from navigating all of this with realistic discussions based on something other than hyperbolic marketing copy? Please, God. The smoke is supposed to stay inside the crystal ball. 

ICYMI: Abraham Lincoln Edition (4/13)

160 years ago today, Abraham Lincoln had his last full day. It was a full one-- Lee had surrendered just four days before and the war was wrapping up. But 160 years ago tomorrow, he would head to the theater for the evening, where actor and failed oil speculator John Wilkes Booth would shoot him.

We know a few things about Booth in my neck of the woods. The oil boom started here in 1859, and Booth actually lived in my small town briefly. He was an investor in one of the umpty-gazillion speculative oil companies that formed in these parts. His plan, apparently, was to strike it rich and use Yankee money to help finance the insurrectionist cause. He was a minor celebrity in town, by most accounts charming and popular. But his wells didn't come in, and he moved on to his next plan. The wells he had invested in did come in big later, which leads to one of those historical questions-- if the well had come in sooner, would Lincoln have lived? History sometimes turns on the smallest random details.

At any rate, here's some reading for the week. Remember to share!

Welcome to the Ohio General Assembly's Great Legislative Education Robbery of 2025

Stephen Dyer examines the latest piece of Ohio's attempt to become the Florida of the Midwest by siphoning funds away from public schools.

Who will stop them? LAUSD says "Hold my beer."

Jeff Waid gives credit to the Los Angeles school district, which has emerged as one of the districts brave enough to hold the line against ICE.

Attorneys Say It’s Illegal for Trump Administration to Extort Compliance with its Anti-DEI Ideology by Threatening to Deny Title I Funds to School Districts

Not that there's any reason to have doubted, but Jan Resseger has the word from experts on how not legal the extortion attempt is.

Why Book Bans Matter

Steve Nuzum provides another update from South Carolina's attempts to curtail reading. Because that's how you get rid of certain ideas, and maybe even certain people.

Breaking the Spell

Audrey Watters on resistance to AI panic. 

A Maine pole vaulter cleared the bar to win the state title. Waiting below was Donald Trump.

For Chalkbeat, Kalyn Belsha covers the ongoing federal attacks on Maine (because its governor wouldn't kiss the ring).

Strategic Alarm: How Fear is Being Weaponized to Undermine Public Education — and Who’s Paying the Price

Rob Rogers urges us to resist the fear being hosed into education circles and to be especially aware of the threat to students with special needs.

Feds end a civil rights agreement on treatment of Native students, citing DEI

The Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights has been looking into the question of why Native American students in Rapid City, SD, were so much more likely to be disciplined, but under the new regime that investigation will be dropped. Laura Meckler covers it for the Washington Post.

Collective conference myopia

Benjamin Riley went to the ASU-GSV summit and ed tech super-fair, and was pretty alarmed by what he saw and heard there. 

Are Public Schools the Problem or the Solution?

Andru Volinsky asks a basic question about education, and he has some answers from our national past.

A Texas school leader says material about diversity in state-approved textbooks violated the law.

The state's GOP board of education had already stripped all that modern learnin' from the textbooks, but that didn't go far enough for other officials who objected to stuff about vaccines and polio and the United Nations, among other non-medieval items. The Texas Tribune and ProPublica team up again.

New York and the Fight for Truly Public Schools

Jose Luis Vilson considers what puts the "public" in public schools (or keeps it out).

NAEP, the Nation’s Report Card, was supposed to be safe. It’s not

Jill Barshay at Hechinger has some more news about the cloudy fate of NAEP.

A city responding to a lead crisis in schools reached out to the CDC for help. The agency’s lead experts were just fired

All that DOGEing is working out just great for children. Send it back to the states, indeed.

The Reason We Still Need Conferences

Nancy Flanagan was at the NPE conference last week (and I was lucky enough to get to say hi). Here she explains why these are such a good thing.

A College Professor Teaches High School Classes

In 1960, a college professor volunteered to in a high school for a semester, and boy did he learn some things. Larry Cuban reprints this trip down memory lane that will seem not unfamiliar.

This week at Forbes.com I wrote about Andru Volinsky's new book about New Hampshire's landmark Claremont decisions and the American Library Association's annual report.

Here's another astonishing new video from OK GO. If you're really intrigued by this one shot video, here's a "making of" video. Humans are so amazing. "We made this so that you can feel that."

Join my newsletter to get all the stuff conveniently in your inbox. Always free.

Where Do Book Complaints Come From? The State of the Library Report

It's National Library Week, a perfect time for the American Library Association to publish its annual report, a look back at what was happening in 2024, including some striking data points..

Well, you already know what has been going on, but the cover of the report gives a clue. The two find-it-inside headlines are "Top Ten Most Challenged Books of 2024" and "Censorship by the Numbers."

 

Inside we find a one page intro from Leslie Burger, the interim executive director of ALA. She identifies three major trends from the year-- censorship, AI, and sustainability, which seems to mean how libraries help communities be sustainable. On the next page Cindy Hohl, ALA president, points out the many things that libraries do that are important to communities. 

Then Deborah Caldwell-Stone, director of ALA's Office for Intellectual Freedom, gets three pages to talk about the battle over the freedom to read. Censorship attempts are actually down from 2023 (821 vs. 1,247), but that's still the third-highest number ever. She notes that the numbers don't really capture the degree to which librarians and library workers are themselves weathering attacks and a general atmosphere of fear. She also notes some positive news, like the courts that are overturning bans. And as with many issues, much depends on which state you're in. 

Then we get to the data portion of the report. 

There are the top 10 most challenged books of 2024. No big surprises here. All Boys Aren't Blue leads the list, followed by Gender Queer. Bluest Eye and Perks of Being a Wallflower tie for third. Ellen Hopkins makes the list twice, and John Green's Looking for Alaska is still there. Old classics like Huck Finn are nowhere to be seen.

Next the things you probably only suspected.

Where do the challenges to books come from? Turns out only about 16% come from actual parents. 10% come from elected officials/government. 36% come from school boards or administration. Only 26% are listed as from "pressure groups" like your local Moms for Liberty chapter, but who do you imagine is leaning on board members and elected officials to get in there and ban some Naughty Books. So we've got 72% of book challenges coming from someone other than actual parents. Librarians, teachers, and staff account for 1%.

That 72% represents a major trend. in 2020 only 25% of challenges came from pressure groups (or the people that pressure groups were pressuring). In 2021 that soared to 65%., coinciding with the launch of Moms for Liberty (and right wing crankiness about Trump's defeat, and the invention of critical race theory as an issue). The 72% is a dip from 2023, so I suppose we can hope that's the start of a trends.

While school libraries have gotten most of the attention, in 2024 the public libraries led in the amount of challenges: 55% of 2024 book challenges were in public libraries, with school libraries accounting for 38%. 

What was actually challenged? 76% of the challenges were for books and graphic novels. 6% objected to displays. 6% skipped the complaint and went to vandalism and theft of materials. 3% threatened access to the library by threatening to cut funding, close the library, or blow it up (because bomb threats are still a thing in 2024).

The remainder of the report gets back to the main business of libraries (which is not actually fending off folks suffering culture panic). mantal health. Read to Recovery. NASA workshops. Finding ways to provide access, and just generally being a place where persons can connect with a larger world of knowledge and information with a local center for community. They are figuring out how to cope with AI, and meeting civic responsibilities with broadband and infrastructure, even as they brace for funding hits from the regime of Dear Leader.

I don't know when the report was actually written, but of course the slashing of library funding has already begun, which sucks. I've been a library guy my whole life. When we moved here, we had a library much more easily accessed than when we lived in the boonies. My mom would take us weekly, carrying a picnic basket with which we carted our selections back and forth. Getting to a book store was a rare treat in those days, but the library was always there, and I could sample all sorts of stuff and read my way through huge series. Between the public library and my school library, I had access to a whole world of stuff, and I took advantage. 

When I grew up (ish), I discovered the research section of the library and the miracle of newspapers on microfilm. I spent thirty years reading page after page, scouring the paper for details about our local band and constantly wandering down side trips; eventually a book came out of that. It became enough of a Thing for me that when I decided my honors students needed to do research from primary (ish) sources, the answer was local history, because I already knew what was there. For years, the public library was part of my curriculum. I volunteered to sit in that room on Saturdays and help people find what they were looking for (it was usually a family member).

A public library is a great thing, a community institution that lets every citizen have resources that would ordinarily be reserved only for the wealthy. Makes you wonder why some people are so bent on attacking libraries, an institution whose greatest sin is simply trying to serve as many people as it can.