My Ex-Wife Makes Me Think Of AI

Let me explain.

Sometime in the last few days, an insurance salesperson stopped by my house. I wasn't here, but the salesperson left a note in the door, offering milestone congratulations to--well, let's say "Ethel," because my ex-wife is a perfectly exemplary human being who doesn't deserve to have her name dragged through this.

The thing is, Ethel doesn't live here. We split about thirty years ago. I've changed address twice, and she has changed considerably more often than that. We are both remarried. There is absolutely no reason for sales pitches to come after her at this address.

And yet, they do, with a fair degree of regularity. Sales pitches, calls from her alma mater, and now, salespeople knocking on the door.

I'm not mad about any of this. She's a perfectly lovely person, a great mother to our children, a respect professional in her field. 

But she doesn't live here.

Somewhere in Cyberlandia is some piece of software that today would be called AI that scrapes through records and phone numbers and addresses and follows connection to connection and spits out its conclusions about where marketeers might direct their attention, both commercial and political. And that software is only sort of good at its job. It makes mistakes, and once those mistakes are made, they shamble around the interwebs like a deathless cyberzombie. 

I have successfully corrected this bit of misinformation just once--after the third or fourth time some human being at her alma mater called for her here, at this phone number somehow, and explained to some poor embarrassed work-study underclassperson, some human being at the university fixed it, and I never heard from them again.

But that's because there was a human in the loop. For all the other mistaken organizations, I have no recourse. There's no place to contact, no center to complain, no manager who can be demanded to Get That Crap Out Of There. And as the various AI "agents" keep scraping and gobbling up whatever they find in cyberspace, I'm absolutely guaranteed that this error will exist in perpetuity.

And as the dead web disappears down the endlessly interconnected gullet of a bot centipede, all manner of errors, miscalculations, hallucinations, and errant crap will be scooped up, rinsed off, and spat back out into the web, and the live humans who are the butt of this self-perpetuating inaccuracy will have no recourse, no way to correct the record. 

This is one of the scary parts of the AI revolution. Not just that AI gets it wrong far too often, but that those errors become an irretrievable part of the record--and there's not a thing you can do about it. The tide of slop is rising and nobody has even the concept of an idea of a plan for a cyber-shopvac, let alone a reliable way to forward my ex-wife's mail.

Selling The House

It has been eighteen months or so since my mother moved into an assisted living facility, and so this summer we started the prospect of selling the house. 

It is not the house I grew up in. I tell the story as, "Yes, I went off to college, and while I was gone, the family moved." My parents married when they were babies, and we had lived in four different homes before they finally got to build and settle into the home that was what they really wanted, designed to fit on a slice of land in the country. They were, I realize with a bit of a shock, about the same age my grown children are right now. The house they built is now five decades on the planet.

I didn't grow up in this house, but my children did. It was where my daughter led countless cousin parades through the kitchen and around the living room, where my son and his cousins played on an ancient Flash Gordon pinball machine. I played with my nieces and nephews in that living room. Eventually another generation of small children also played there; there was always a collection of books and toys for the littles. The barn held the old cars, the restored 1914 fire engine, the rehabilitated roto-tiller, the riding mowers. There was a garden, a semi-successful blueberry patch (well, the deer enjoyed it, anyway). 

In college, this was where I brought friends to visit and eat Thanksgiving dinner and, at least once, sleep over outside on a large patch of comfy moss. When my first job ended, this house was my home for the year it took to find steady employment again. The house held a collection of oddities-- an old family heirloom grandfather clock, a large ship model, a massive collection of big band and jazz records, large numbers of my father's self-designed bookshelves. 

All of those items have been emptied out, dispersed to family or sold in auction. There are still two dressers left that I have to pick up. My grandfather bought them for my parents at a yard sale almost seventy years ago for some ridiculous price, like five dollars, with the understanding that they could replace them with something better when they were able. They never did. 

It's hard to see the place empty, harder than I thought it would be. A place is just a large physical object, and it gets most of its character from the people who are there, and when the people aren't there, the place isn't the same. When you go back to your old college without your old classmates there, it's just different, even unnerving, like sitting your foot down and unexpectedly finding no step beneath it. 

It's one of those challenges they don't tell you about in teacher school-- every year, your school, your classroom, is a new and different place. And on the flip side, if you stay long enough, you become a familiar part of the building, a thing former students can take familiar comfort from when everything else has changed. But for the teacher, every year the school morphs slowly into some other place entirely, similar physical settings repeatedly recast with new humans to give them life and breath.

The house is currently empty, hollowed out, not actually anyone's home, for much of my family a sort of phantom limb. It looks like it will sell, that it will become a whole other place for a whole other family, and that is how houses work. The house I'm typing this in, my home, was once someone else's home, only the faintest trace of those folks here. That is how houses work. 

We like to think of the large physical pieces of this world as comfortably permanent, and we are periodically reminded that they are not, and that the living people who animate them will come and go and change and grow. I don't want my daughter to be dressed up and commanding her brother and the rest of the tiny troops to line up-- I don't want that to be forever, but I feel a tinge of loss that the physical location of those parades will be scrubbed of their imprint. It's fine. That's what memory is for-- to hold onto the threads and breath of the past. Physical objects, places-- they can promise to hold the imprint of events and people, but their grip never turns out to be as tight as we imagine it will be.

The road back to the house used to be dirt; in wet seasons, there would be three ruts, the middle one to be used by traffic in either direction. Pray you didn't meet one of the neighbors headed the other way. In winter the road would freeze, and if you couldn't quite make it to the top of the hill, you'd have to back out, head craned back over your shouldre, trying not to end up in the ditch. In my '79 Opel I perfected a mid-hill 180 spin. Over the years that road got better, and just a year or two ago the township paved it. So soon I won't be needing to drive back that twisty, treacherous dirt road anymore, but then, that road doesn't exist any more. 

ICYMI: Cross Country Edition (10/12)

The Board of Directors has developed a real taste for the long distance run, and we are lucky enough to be in a district with an elementary cross country program. This is their second season, and they remain into it. They like to run and run and run and it turns out that running is best with a bunch of other kids to run with. Yesterday was the big invitational that usually marks the end of the season. There might be one more small meet next week, but that's it. They will be sad to be done. "I'll bet they're tired after all that running," say other parents, with unspoken acknowledgement that a tired child at the end of the day can be a real blessing. But no. No, they are not. Just cranked up and ready for more. There aren't many things cooler than watching a young human do something they love.

The list this week is, for some reason, huge. Dig in.

Neighborhood schools are closing across Arizona. It’s because of vouchers.

Beth Lewis points out just some of the damage being done by Arizona's taxpayer-funded voucher program.

Mississippi towns say ‘no’ to school choice as state-level push continues

Privatizers in Mississippi are getting extra-pushy about taxpayer-funded vouchers, but plenty of regular folks on the ground are saying , "No, thank you." Devna Bose reports for Mississippi Today.

Debunking David Brooks on Education

It's a delight to have Mark Weber ("Jersey Jazzman") blogging again, and this piece that dismembers David Brooks' attempt to pile up some baloney about NCLB and Democrats and test scores--well, it's a delight, too. 

The Inconvenient Success of Mississippi

Jennifer Berkshire looks at why Mississippi's push for vouchers is a little complicated. For one thing, it calls to abandon public schools just as Mississippi is touting a miraculous leap forward in those very schools. 

Wyoming library director fired amid book dispute wins $700,000 settlement

Terri Lesley was fired--and harassed-- because the library system she directed was found to have Naughty Books that made some folks Very Sad. And now the county will have to pay a pretty penny for their mistreatment of her, Mead Gruver at the Associated Press.

Lawsuit: South Carolina book ban regulation is unconstitutional

Meanwhile, in South Carolina, folks are suing the book banners in federal court. Steve Nuzum has the details.

If You Use AI to Grade Student Writing, Stop or Quit Your Job

John Warner with some straight talk. Companies have been pushing computer assessment for student writing for years (I think I've written about it a gazillion times here) but the marketing of AI has goosed robo-grading again. Don't do it. 

Work Hard, Burn Out, Repeat: The Culture Schools Won’t Quit

TC Weber on the teaching culture of trying to Do It All while you Suffer For Your Art. A lot to chew on here.

Making America Hungry Again

Andy Spears wants to know what is healthy-making about policies that starve food banks and students.

‘Hostile takeover:’ Charter operator files to occupy three Sarasota schools

Florida keeps dealing with the fallout of a policy that says public schools must hand over taxpayer-owned property to private charter school companies. Make it make sense. Reported by ABC7.

School Vouchers Cost States Like Florida a Fortune. They Don’t Improve Education, Either.

At USA Today, parent Scott Olson explains why taxpayer-funded school vouchers are a big fat money-sucking mistake. 

As book bans decline, concerns mount over librarian and teacher self-censoring

This is from The Hill, so I'm not sure I buy the "bans are waning" line, but the continued chilly atmosphere and self-censorship in schools definitely deserves discussion. Lexi Lonas Cochran reporting.

The Genius of Our Students

Who knew that gifted and talented programs would become an issue in the NYC mayor's race? Jose Luis Vilson takes that moment to consider some of the issues wrapped up in gifted and talented programs, and the genius of students who never get to show their genius.

Perverse Incentives in Florida’s Middle School Math Acceleration

Sue Kingery Woltanski has found some accountabaloney so stinky that even Patty Levesque can tell something's not right. 

Five Ways the Department of Education Is Upending Public Schools

I've already written about the dynamite ProPublica article by Megan O'Matz and Jennifer Smith Richards. Now check out a follow-up piece they wrote about federal education shenanigans.

Toward the Higher- and Secondary-Ed Alliance

Anna E. Clark considers if K-12 and higher ed could benefit from teaming up to deal with fallout from the Trump regime.

‘It feels like I am being forced to harm a child’: research shows how teachers are suffering moral injury

Okay, so this is from June and Australia. But I've long been interested in the idea of how moral injury--the injuries suffered by being required to do something you know is wrong--affects teachers. So I can't pass up this article about actual, research on the question.

Success Academy rally and their history of violating laws

Leonie Haimson reports on some September shenanigans from Eva Moskowitz and Success Academy. Do it Eva's way, or else.

South Bend forum speakers see charter schools and vouchers as threats to public education

In Indiana, some public discussion about the problems with privatizers in education.

New Book Documents Trump Administration’s Actions to Destroy Diversity in Higher Education

Jan Resseger reviews The Fall of Affirmative Action; Race, The Supreme Court, and the Future of Higher Education. Some scary stuff here.

Silencing Mockingbirds

Jess Piper was a high school English teacher before she became a political activist, and this story from the classroom illustrates again the effects of the Big Standardized Test on how literature is taught in this country.

Observations of Young Children Writing Undermine Goldenberg and The “science of reading” Contention that “Phonics is the On-Ramp to Reading”

Denny Taylor's latest post is long and wonkish, but it has a lot to say about how children may really learn to read and write (and about the "science" thereof).

Petition Panic: The Manufactured Outrage Against Two ASD Teachers

From Alaska, Matthew Beck provides another example of using culture panic to harass educators.

Public Education Shaped by 19th Century Dispute

Thomas Ultican provides some history about public education and battles centered on religious differences.

SecEd Maddow Makes College Presidents an Offer They Can’t Refuse

Rick Hess uses some satirical edge to point out that conservatives may well rue the day that using bribery and extortion to shape college teaching became a policy idea.

1 in 5 high schoolers has had a romantic AI relationship, or knows someone who has

Lee Gaines at NPR reports on some new research and yikes! And if that stat in the headline seems alarming, note also that there appears to be a correlation between school use of AI and students having a social "relationship" with AI.

Why Smart People Believe Stupid Things

An interesting take from Chris Stewart (yes, that Chris Stewart) and the study of Stupidology.

Let's Talk About AI Art

The Oatmeal offers a take on AI art, and it's a pretty good one. Not just about the choice to create it, but how it makes us feel as an audience. With pictures!

Robin Williams’ Daughter Tells Fans to ‘Stop Sending Me AI Videos of Dad’: It’s ‘Gross’ and ‘Not What He’d Want’

Yeah, using AI to bug folks with AI fake zombies is now a thing. Don't let it be your thing.

The quantum of intelligence

Ben Riley loves to dive into the deep end. This time, he considers quantum physics, cognition, and AI and then tries to connect some dots. Real thinking stuff (and I mean that in all the ways). 

How the Humanities Can Disrupt AI

I stumbled across this piece from way back in early 2023, roughly a thousand years ago as AI goes, but it's worth a read. Lauren Goodlad and Samuel Baker at Public Books contemplate the crap that would come from the automating of writing.

School offers hikes instead of detention. Teachers are seeing results.

Paywall free, this piece by Kyle Melnick profiles a school in Maine that has tried something different for problem students, and it's not terrible.

Celebrating and Remembering David Berliner

One of the first books I latched onto when I started wading into the world of education reform was 50 Myths and Lies That Threaten America's Public Schools by David Berliner and Gene Glass. When I was asked to contribute to a Berliner-edited collection of essays about public ed, it felt like a huge step up for me. NEPC offers some remembrances. Diane Ravitch also noted his passing.

At Forbes.com this week, I wrote up the defeat of New Hampshire's anti-DEI law by a federal judge. May the courtroom losses continue.

For this week's music, let's go back to 1977 and that other re-visioning of The Wizard of Oz. 

You can keep up with my education stuff by subscribing to my newsletter. It's quick, simple and free. 

Should Students Get Help From AI, Or From Bob?

There are a variety if "guides" out there to try to provide some sort of structure and sense to the question, "Should a student use AI on this assignment?" None of them are very useful.

Let's take this example:

That "Generative AI Acceptable Use Scale" has been run in EdWeek and used by at least one actual instructor. It was adapted by Vera Cubero (North Carolina Department of Public Instruction) and based on the work of Dr. Leon Furze, Dr. Mike Perkins, Dr. Jasper Roe FHEA, and Dr. Jason Mcvaugh. That's a lot of doctors. And yet.

The disclosure requirements are cute, in that way that classroom teachers recognize not so much as "I'm sure you will follow these requirements" so much as "I'm going to express my expectations clearly so that later, when you try to ignore them, there will already be a foundation for my complaints about what you've done." 

But lets expand on the guidelines themselves. Because in my rural area, I can envision a student who lives without enough reliable wifi to connect to ChatGPT, but happens to live next door to a smart graduate student-- let's call that grad student "Bob."* 

So with the AI guide in mind, let's craft some rules for Acceptable Use of Bob for assignments.

No Bob Use, also known as the Don't Cheat option, is of course the preferred default.

Bob-Assisted Idea Generation and Structuring. In this option, Bob would come up with the idea for your paper, and/or provide you with an outline for your work. The continued acceptance among AI-mongers that idea-generation and structuring are not really part of the writing process, and therefor it's okay to have Bob do that part for you--well, it makes me cranky. In fact this touched enough of a nerve that I'll make an entire separate post about it. You can read that now or later-- TL:DR, having Bob doing all the start-up work for your assignment is not okay.

Bob-Assisted Editing. In this option, Bob reads over your work and tells you what to fix. He can't add whole new sections, but he can do anything else to "improve the quality" of your work. 

Bob for Specified Task Completion. Maybe when I gave you the assignment I said, "Go get Bob to make your charts" or "Have Bob collect all your research materials" or some other specified task. Why this is Level 3 when it seems like potentially the least objectionable use of Bob I do not know. But this is probably a good time to mention that while Bob is smart, he also has a serious drinking problem, and whatever task he completes for you, you'd better check over carefully, because I'm going to hold you responsible for the part of the assignment that I told you to have Bob do.

Full Bob Use with Student Oversight. In this option, you just have Bob do the assignment for you. How having Bob as your "co-pilot" as a way to enhance your creativity is beyond me; maybe the creativity part comes when you explain why you should get credit for Bob's work. If Bob screws anything up, it's on you, though I cannot for the life of me figure out what I am assessing when I give you a grade for Bob's work. 

In fact, that's a problem for most of this. I am trying to assess certain skills and/or knowledge of you, the student. Bob isn't even in my school, let alone in my gradebook. So how do I award a grade to student based on Bob's work?

If you agree that the thought of a student running off to have neighbor Bob complete some-to-all of that student's assignment seems like an ethical and assessment problem, then someone explain to me why using AI is any different or better. I have no doubt that it will be some-to-all degree of difficulty to keep some students from getting Bob to help them complete their assignment, but that doesn't mean I should create a formal structure for how much of what kind of cheating they will be using in my class. 

*I generally default to "Pat" or "Sam" or other gender non-specific names, but "Bob" is objectively more funny.

No, AI Should Not Write Your Outline

When folks go casting about for some use for AI in schools, the two items that frequently come up are brainstorming and outlining. This is a lousy idea.

You can convince me that AI brainstorming is no worse than handing a student a list of possible topics for an assignment, though not as good as a suggestion or two from a teacher who is familiar with the student's interests and strengths. 

But outlining the work? No, no, a thousand times, no.

Part of demonstrating understanding of complex ideas is showing that you have a grasp of how they fit together, how one connects to another. That structure and connection is what drives the organization of a piece of work. The structure and organization also reflect the process of deciding what to include and what to leave out. Without selection and structure of ideas, you end up with a pile of unvariegated details in a paper best entitled (as I often told me students) "A Bunch of Stuff About This Topic."

This has been my eternal beef with the traditional shake and bake "research" assignment in schools. You know the one-- go find some sources about your topic, then write a paper in which you re-state what they say, but in such a way that you aren't technically plagiarizing. 

What is always taken from sources (usually just one) is not simply facts and data, but organization and structure. When an author goes to write, say, the sixty gazillionth biography of Abraham Lincoln, the author's most important work is to first decide what the point, the thesis, of their book will be, then to use that filter to select which details and source materials from Lincoln's life to include (a process that is often looplike-- search through materials, develop a thesis, look at more materials, modify the thesis, and on and on) and then figure out how to best arrange the details to support that thesis. There may be more looping back; in the writing, the author may decide that Source Material X doesn't really fit, so it's rejected. The author may also decide that to build a bridge between Point A and Point C they need to do additional research to find material out of which that bridge can be built.

When some high school student grabs the resulting biography for their own paper about Lincoln, they are taking not just facts from the book, but the thesis, the organization, all the decisions about what to leave in and what to take out. And that student is unaware of it all, because if the author did the job well, the book will seem like it just had to be the way it is, that there could be no other way to write about Lincoln. 

Except that, of course, it is the result of deliberate choices made by the author, including uncountable choices that all other Lincoln biographers chose to make differently. It's not just the bricks you collect, but how you choose to put them together. 

The foundation one builds decides much of what house can be built atop it. To imagine that AI can build the foundation and that leaves the student free to make any sorts of choices about the structure built atop it is just silly. The notion that structuring the product is a minor part of the job, and the actual marking of words on a page is the major portion is just wrong. If the writer has been thorough with the selection and structure of the work, the actual writing portion is a smaller part of the labor or creation. 

Most writing problems are thinking problems, and a major portion of the thinking takes place before the actual placing of words on the page begins. To outsource that to a machine that doesn't even think is a recipe for bad writing, and worse, for a product that cannot be reasonably used as an assessment of the student. Which takes us back to the post I was writing when I started writing this one.

The Push To End Public Schools

Despite the fact that the words "school choice" still get tossed around, most of the noisiest figures in the school choice movement have no actual interest in choice, no desire to see traditional public education existing side by side with a variety of different education options. Instead they're pushing for institutional capture, a system of taxpayer-funded private schools that push right wing christianism and christian nationalism alongside a public system that has been largely dismantled even as it has been brought into line with that same right wing ideology.

If you want to see this laid out, I cannot recommend enough a new ProPublica piece by Megan O'Matz and Jennifer Smith Richards. What they make exceptionally clear is that Linda McMahon did not go to Washington to shut down the Department of Education, but to dismantle public education entirely.

You should read the article. Really. And let me tempt you with some highlights that show where McMahon and her crew of joyful vandals are headed.

O'Matz and Richards note that McMahon has brought on at least 20 appointees from way out in right field including, as we have noted before, Lindsey Burke, the education chief at the Heritage Foundation who's serving as Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy and Programs (even though she's still listed in her Heritage Foundation post). She was the author of Project 2025's education plan, which (spoiler alert) looks a lot like what is happening. 

Burke remains a huge fan of voucher programs; O'Matz and Richards correctly describe a recurring theme of getting more families to leave public school. Quoting Burke in a speech last year, "I'm optimistic that, you know, five years from now a majority of kids are going to be in a private school choice program."

Noah Pollack was a co-founder of Jewish Voices for Trump and an "advisor" to multiple right wing groups; he's now a senior advisor of the Ed Department. O'Matz and Richards found this quote from a 2024 podcast appearance, at which he bemoaned what he sees as progressive control of schools:

And so the work that I do is trying to come up with creative policy ideas to stop that, to turn back the tide, to figure out ways that conservatives can protect these institutions or build new institutions.

The writers also track McMahon back to her work with the America First Policy Institute, an advocacy outfit formed in 2020 as a sort of holding pen for Trump admin folks and other MAGA. AFPI produced a paper in 2023 that rejects the notion of any sort of collective responsibility for educating all children argues that “the Bible makes it clear that it is parents alone who shoulder the responsibility for their children.” That message is very much at the heart of the dismantling movement, which is all about a policy of "I'll take of my own kids and what Those People do is not my problem." This aspect of vouchers is not discussed nearly enough-- when you accept a voucher for your child, everyone else gets to wash their hands of you. You are on your own and your child's education is your problem, and not the government's or anyone else's.

There's lots more-- did I mention that you should read this piece-- but I want to highlight one more. One of the few figures in the story that was willing to talk to O'Matz and Richards was Tiffany Justice, co-founder of Moms for America who was featured prominently in the department's "End DEI" initiative and is hooked up with Heritage these days. 

Asked what percentage of children she imagines should be in public schools going forward, Justice, who is now with The Heritage Foundation’s political advocacy arm, told ProPublica: “I hope zero. I hope to get to zero.”

“If America’s public schools cease to exist tomorrow, America would be a better place.” 

That's what they want. Not choice. Not diversity. Not a broad expanse of many educational approaches and ideas. Just one choice. Theirs. And an end to public schools.  

Liberal Redneck - School Voucher Scams

This is from a year ago, but comedian Trae Crowder captures the reality of taxpayer-funded vouchers. Some salty language, but it's always nice when someone outside the education world gets it.