Reading Boring Books

EdWeek just ran a long complaint about assigning boring books in English class, carrying some extra heft because it came from a school district superintendent. Erich May is currently superintendent of the Brookville, PA, school district, which is just down the road from me, which I guess means some day I may get the chance to meet him and tell him personally how far off the mark I think he is. 

He trots out the opening lines of The Scarlet Letter, the Nathanial Hawthorne warhorse and calls it ugly. And Wuthering Heights, too. And any author from then or before. Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Spencer, Browning, Blake, "and countless other playwrights, poets, and novelists from the 1500s through the 1800s." May says he doesn't "mean to reject the canon," but instead suggests we should "leave the canon to the English majors." 

May wants us to understand that Kids These Days have dumped books in favor of screens. May argues that "we are losing the Battle for the Book because teens and young adults are not reading books." 

For high school English teachers, the job used to be teaching students to read things that are rigorous and complex. But it is no longer a given that they will read at all. Now more than ever, the priority for high school English teachers should be instilling in students a love of reading—or even just a willingness to read.

May says we should be getting comprehension, literary analysis, interpretation and evaluation to students, but those goals are "more important than reading any particular piece of literature." 

There is, he asserts, "no excuse for assigning inaccessible or boring novels and plays" when there's other stuff out there that teens "would be more likely to enjoy." Oy.

I'm not unsympathetic to his point. Particularly with students who read little on their own, it's important to give them something with a good hook. But if we leave the canon to the English majors, where will the English majors come from?

More importantly, May, who taught English for about six years back in the Oughts before embarking on a series of administrative jobs, seems to be missing understanding of the English teacher's job. 

Annika Hernandez offers a good set of responses.

* English teachers mostly already emphasize modern works (if they teach complete works at all).

* An English teachers job is not just to assign works that students will enjoy most. Imagine, I'll add, that we told history teachers to teach only the parts of history that students like, or phys ed to teach only the games students already play, or band and choir directors to teach their ensembles only music they already know. Imagine if we told math teachers to teach only the interesting stuff.

* English class is not simply for teaching skills and the content with which the skills are taught doesn't matter. This skills-centered approach has been a huge bust for the past twenty-some years.

* The classic parts of the canon are not just for (probably snooty) elites.

May writes as if "assign" means toss the book at the students and wish them good luck. That's not the gig.

The job is to show students why a work is interesting, and to help them find their way into it. Sometimes that means helping them navigate difficult language. Sometimes that means helping them look for compelling ideas or themes. It always means pointing out the features that make the work compelling and interesting.

The Last Bookstore-- a must-visit in LA

This has always been a challenge for teachers, and one of the reasons that a narrow required reading list creates problems. I was required to teach Julius Caesar for a decade or so, and it took me years to find a way to sell it (How far would you go if you thought someone near you was about to be the next Hitler? How often has your life gotten derailed because you misread signals?). But there were also works that I was always excited to teach. We talk about teachers with "infectious" enthusiasm for a topic, but a closer examination will show that the teacher "infected" students by serving as a native guide to the territory. That's the gig. 

Please note-- the gig is not to "make" a work interesting. If you don't know what is interesting or compelling about it, you can't "make" it interesting, you shouldn't be teaching it. And the list of works that teachers find interesting and compelling will vary from teacher to teacher. 

My old teaching colleague finished a year with seniors by studying Paradise Lost. She loved that work so much that seniors would spend the last part of the school year--after their grades were set, after their diplomas were ensured, after their college admissions were guaranteed, even after they were released from a requirement to come to school at all-- would sit in her room and work feverishly on their final Milton project. I could never have done that unit in a million years-- I neither know nor love the work well enough.

On the other hand, one of my teacher boasts is that I got a group of non-college bound seniors completely absorbed with MacBeth, to the point that they confidently judged the AP seniors' MacBeth project. 

You prepare the ground. You introduce the ideas. You walk them through the hard parts and difficult language. You show them what is exciting and engaging about a work. On top of that, you also show them that there are different types of works out there, different cultures and styles and views of How The World Works, and that just because they don't like Dickenson, it doesn't necessarily follow that they will hate Browning. You can even teach them that just because they hate something, that doesn't mean it's awful, and that as sentient carbon-based life forms, they get to choose what they read. I always found it was supremely liberating for all of us in a classroom for me to say to a student, "I know you don't like this, and that is cool. Give me some time to explain why some people do, and then we'll move on to the next thing." Permission to dislike a work of literature without being told you have somehow failed is a magical thing. 

Every teacher has their own personal canon, and they should be making it wider and deeper every year, and certainly "does this have anything to say to my students" is an important question to be asking. And occasionally, when you are handed a work to teach that you find initially boring and uninteresting, you need to dig deep, do some homework, and find the hook. That's important, too, because sometimes "boring and uninteresting" as code words for "hard and confusing" and working through those barriers will help you as a teacher understand the barriers that your students are facing.

You're teaching not only reading and literature and culture and different ways of being human; you are also teaching how to be interested in something. That's work worth doing. 

American Federation for Children Ready To Cash In On Federal Vouchers

States continue to line up for the new federal school vouchers program, and Betsy DeVos's American Federation for Children is ready to make the best of it.

The vouchers are a feature of the Trump's Big Beautiful Bill; they're a tax credit scholarship set up where you can contribute to a scholarship [sic] grant organization (SGO) that manages the voucher money, and in return you get to stiff Uncle Sam for 100% of what you contributed. It's a dollar for dollar tax credit; there is no more generous tax dodge anywhere in the tax code.

Individual taxpayers can only donate up to $1,700, which will make racking up the big bucks a challenge in some states. But AFC thinks they've found a way around that.

AFC, you will recall, is a right-wing organization, well-connected to the DeVos family (Betsy had to quit being the chief of AFC in order to take the education secretary gig). They pushed hard for school privatization via "choice" for many, many years. Current CEO is Tommy Schultz, who has been with AFC for almost a decade.

Schultz went on the David Webb Show (Webb is a right wing talking head) to explain what AFC has in mind.

Webb notes that "as a scholarship granting organization" AFC is putting "real muscle" here.

Schultz explains the "transformational" tax credit scholarship bill allows people to donate up to $1,700 to a scholarship organization and get a "dollar for dollar tax credit." If you owe the IRS $2,000 in taxes, he explains, just give $1,700 to a scholarship organization and only owe the feds $300. Which is true, but doesn't leave any more money in your hands than you were going to have just paying your taxes. Schultz is pitching that as a reduction of your tax liability. This is not a surprise-- this will be and has often been the pitch, because it's more appealing than "You can personally add to the government's deficit." 

That will "free up billions of dollars," Schultz says. Frees from what? Being captured by the feds, I guess. He's going to keep pushing the notion that this will give students "access to a better education," which is the central lie of the whole program. Because first, there is no reason to believe that vouchers lead to better education, and lots of reasons to believe that they don't. Second, vouchers systems make sure that private schools retain the right to discriminate against LGBTQ persons, students with the "wrong" religious faith, students who have academic issues, students with special needs, and any students the school just doesn't want to accept for whatever reason. Laws are written to deliberately preserve that power to discriminate. 

Schultz notes that "the beauty and elegance" of this new voucher dodge is that it's a change to the tax code, and not, say, a piece of education policy with oversight and accountability attached. "There won't be any nefarious Department of Education strings attached to it." No accountability. No oversight. No rules. 

"We are very much invested in making sure that millions of kids can get access to the best education possible..." says Schultz, which, again, is baloney, because if that were the actual goal, one would call for vouchers big enough to cover tuition costs or require voucherfied schools to accept all students or demand oversight and accountability to insure that participating private schools were, in fact, best.

Oh, and tutoring, too, Schultz adds, because choicers are trying hard to sell the possibility that these federal voucher funds might be used for tutoring. Because if people who have no intention of moving their kids out of public schools can be convinced that they will gain something from this program, maybe that will broaden support for it.

Why is AFC getting into this. Schultz says they really want to scale the fundraising that this will unleash. "Our scholarship entity will be acting as a platform for other scholarship groups that they can tap into." A small, state-based SGO might be able to scrape together a few million in $1,700 increments, but AFC thinks they can sweeten that pot considerably, first by throwing $10 million into a "donor awareness, and marketing and acquisition campaign" to help scale the program "all across the country."

What does that even mean? Will this giant SGO focus on fundraising for smaller SGOs, and will that result in AFC having a controlling interest in the voucher program for many states? Will AFC have unlimited freedom to contribute as much as they want to state programs? Schultz doesn't explain more; AFC press materials indicate a partnership with Odyssey which is a company that...well...is

the only provider in the country that offers an automated, end-to-end school choice platform. Our best-in-class technology connects families with school choice programs that provide funding for school tuition and eligible educational resources that align with the unique talents, gifts, and needs of each student.

Everyone uses the word "scale" a lot. Webb says, "Again, real skin in the game" and I'm not sure whose skin in which game he means or who has been putting fake skin in there.

Webb talks about "guardrails against abuse." He swears he's a school choice OG, but there are good and bad charters and magnets and ideological, too; "it's not just about private and public." There isn't really a question here, but Schultz takes a pause and leaps in.

What this program, like state programs before it, is going to do is put "funds in the hands of families" and "really, the most accountable way to implement any policy at the state or federal level when it comes to education is to not have the bureaucrats involved." This is just dumb. The notion that parental response will be sufficient to keep private and charter schools from fraud and mischief and general incompetence has already been disproven many many many many times. Private and charter schools only have to snooker a small slice of the market in any given year, so losing "customers" is no big deal-- certainly not a motivator for higher quality. But more importantly, if we depend on parents saying, "Well, that year was a bust. We're not going back," then we are throwing away a valuable year of a child's education so that market forces can magically take effect.

I don't know if Schultz is one of those people with a childlike belief in a magical invisible hand of the market, or if he's just blowing smoke because he's one of those folks who thinks business titans shouldn't have to answer to anyone, including government. Either way, his assertion is baloney.

But he will double down. When you see parents choosing the best schools for their sons and daughter, he argues, you really see a flourishing marketplace, including better test scores and lower incidences of fraud (like the bad stuff that has crippled our public education system for 30 or 40 years, he adds). He does not offer a specific example of this magic, because no such example exists. But he will rant about the public system, rail about low test scores (schools with no students proficient, he says, ignoring what "proficient" means). He cites Florida, Ohio, and Indiana as places with "booming" school choice ecosystems going on and it's true they have lots of unregulated unaccountable choice in those states, but nothing to suggest that it's helping education at all (also, bringing up Ohio in the context of fraud-free education is a bold choice). 

The claims just keep piling up. Taxpayers are saving money. Kids are getting better educational outcome with all the research. These are not true statements. Marketplace competition makes things better, because parents can vote with their feet. Feet-based voting does not help anything, and smart market-loving economists like Douglas Harris have explained why the free market does not fit with education. 

But Schultz is going to roll right through the usual talking points. These new vouchers will really help the schools, like the Catholic schools, that are trying to help lower and middle class families. He did make a mistake there and talking about helping schools instead of helping kids, but that really is one of the points of choice-- to funnel public taxpayer dollars to private schools. And we already know, in state after state, that vouchers are mostly serving well-off families whose kids were already in private, mostly religious schools. The "We'll save the poor kids" story is inspiring-- it's just not reality.

Webb wants us to remember that anyone can donate to the federal voucher program, not just parents. Schultz agrees. Call your tax professional and learn how you can get in on this. There will be other national SGOs besides AFC (count on it). "Every single American can become a philanthropist," Schultz says. "By giving us their money," he does not add. "This can bring billions of dollars off the sidelines," he says for about the third time, so we should note that this money was not going to sit on the sidelines, but was going to help the federal government pay its bills. 

By the way, we spend a lot of money on education and the test scores didn't go up, so we need to send money to unaccountable unregulated schools to make a better future for America. "We are the best, most free, most prosperous nation in the world," Schultz says, but if we have a mediocre education system, then boo. How we got to be the best nation in the world with that mediocre education system is a mystery he does not address. Also unaddressed-- how SGOs typically get a 5% to 10% cut of the money they handle. 

What Ever Happened To Snow Days

As I type this, the Board of Directors here at the Institute is having their second Flexible Instruction Day of the week.

As in many places, we kicked off the week with a snow-piling blizzard and moved immediately from there to intense cold. And as in many places, it provides a chance to reflect on the choices that districts make.

To begin with, we're seeing a result of the choice to start school early. In sprawling rural districts, that means students standing at the bus stop at 6:30 or even earlier. So sometimes that means a two hour delay just to give the sun time to come up and the temperature to get into tolerable levels.

We're also seeing the difference between district approaches to what a canceled day means.

No districts in my county use distance learning for snow days. For one thing, everyone hated it during the covid shutdowns. For another, these rural districts include too many students who do not have access to a reliable internet connection. "Remote instruction" during the shutdown meant teachers (like the Chief Marital Officer here at the Institute) spent part of their days hand delivering printed packets to homes. 

My district's Flexible Instruction Days are simple enough. Back during the first week of school, students were given a big folder with five Flexible Instruction packets inside. When a FID is called, I pull out the next packet and the boys do the work. Here at the Institute, I check their work and they fix any mistakes; I cannot guarantee that level of oversight is present in all homes. The packets take maybe a half hour and involve a smattering of each subject area. Having been created by teachers back at the beginning of the year before meeting the students and intended to be used sometime during the winter, if ever, the packets are not exactly loaded with rigor. But once the packet is completed, the student has the rest of the day for traditional snow day activities (right now the Board of Directors is battling with Pokemon cards).

For the district, the beauty of this system is that the day will not have to be made up. It provides roughly 0.02 % of a real school day, and yet counts for the whole thing, which, at a minimum, seems intellectually dishonest.

Meanwhile, some other districts do not allow for Flexible Instruction Days-- it's get the students to school or nothing. Their opposition to the idea is hard to explain, but I suspect it's leftover from Covid, when some local boards totally bought the idea that the shut down was an evil teacher union plot, and so they'd be damned if they would ever be tricked into any form of remote learning ever again. So when they cancel school, students get a true snow day, and lose a day of vacation later in the year.

Does it make a difference? My strictly anecdotal survey suggests that Flexible Instruction Days make it easier for the district to just go ahead and call things off. This week, everyone called off on Monday. But while my district has called two Flexible Instruction Days since, the most other non-FID districts have done is call one or two two hour delays. 

Is it better to have a traditional snow day? Hard to say. Historically we are more likely to call school off over temperature than over snowfall, which means students are mostly trapped inside rather than soaring over Rockwellesque snowdrifts with their sled-shaped plastic sheets. One might argue that the act of going through the motions of a pretend work day while nature has dropped a pile of chaos on the world is good prep for the work world, but I've never been a fan of the Your Life Is Going To Suck Later So It Might As Well Suck Now family of school policies. 

FID is either the best of both worlds (You get some education-flavored stuff with plenty of time left over to play) or possible the worst (Neither a true day off or a functional day of education). Maybe we should stop trying to have pretend school and just suck it up, admit that nature has beaten us, and get an actual day of school in later. 

Emanuel: Not The Education Candidate

This is where we are these days-- a politician who says that public schools are an okay thing to have still lands to the left of the MAGA party. Which may be why Rahm Emanuel is somehow managing to draw press as an "education guy" who might be running for President, some day.

Emanuel was part of the Obama administration, an administration that doubled down on the bad education policies of the Bush II administration. Then he became mayor of Chicago and took an ax to public schools there, in a move that has not been vindicated in the years afterwards. 

Emanuel appears to understand just a part of the Democrat problem on education. From Matt Barnum's Chalkbeat piece about the maybe-candidate:

Whatever the flaws of the prior reform era, Emanuel says, at least Democrats had a clear agenda. Now he dings his party for extended virtual schooling during the pandemic and for allowing Republicans to own education issues. “You know that the Republicans are for vouchers. You can’t tell me what the Democratic calling card is,” said Emanuel, who served as ambassador to Japan under Joe Biden.

Well, yeah, Dems had a clear education agenda. Of course it was A) indistinguishable from the GOP agenda and B) a lousy agenda. But he has half a point. Democrats continue to be feckless and aimless when it comes to public education, and GOP/MAGA education policy has moved on from reform-era policies to now look for the end of public education, replaced by an unregulated marketplace navigated by on-their-own parents and marked by forced taxpayer support of private christianist schools. 

Somehow this shift has resulted in a bunch of reformsters from both tribes waxing nostalgic for the days of No Child Left Behind and high stakes testing and charter schools. Like all nostalgia, it rests on selective amnesia about what those days were really like. They were abusive of teachers and schools, injected a toxic testing culture from which schools have still not recovered, and opened the door to the anti-public education policies that are now attacking the US system. 

Being nostalgic for the days of NCLB reform is like wistfully saying, "You remember how, right after we stepped off that cliff, there was a moment that felt kind of like weightless floating? I wish we could go back to that."

But here's Emanuel being "alarmed" that neither party's leaders are making it a priority to get Big Standardized Tests back up. “Nobody’s going to break a sweat trying to solve it,” he told Barnum, not bothering to explain why anybody should assume that this battery of student-numbing mediocre assessments should drive anybody's policy. 

Emanuel shares some ideas for school improvement, all underlining his lack of actual engagement or understanding of schools and the people in them. Let's imitate Mississippi, he says, and since people are going to keep bringing this up, I'm going to keep saying that any call to imitate Mississippi that doesn't acknowledge that understanding what Mississippi actually did and what they actually accomplished is complex and nuanced-- well, they're just whipping up slogans and not making a serious attempt to create education policy. 

Emanuel also says that high schools should require students to have a clear plan for when they graduate, which is exactly the kind of policy that sounds good to someone who has never paid attention to what goes on inside a classroom. What would such a policy look like? Will schools say, "Well, you passed all your courses and got all your credits, but we don't have your Future Plans paperwork, so no diploma for you"? Who will determine whether the student plan is clear or not? Is there any reason that students will not interpret the requirement as "You just write some BS about future stuff and you graduate"? 

Another policy proposal is right out of the old NCLB-era playbook. Emanuel suggests, says Barnum, that funds be cut for schools with high absentee rates. This makes non-sense on so many levels. We've got the old NCLB notion that if a school is struggling, you give it fewer tools to work with. We've got the old reformster premise that all problems are the fault of the school. Can somebody ask him if he thinks the Minneapolis schools experiencing high absentee rates during the ICE occupation should have funding cut? 

There's a certain mentality that believes that the only way to motivate people--or at least Those people-- is a combination of threats and punishment. That mentality is always problematic in positions of power. 

Emanuel can call himself an education candidate if he wants, I suppose. Voters rarely elect politicians because they are education candidates, and when they do-- well, lots of folks thought Obama was going to reverse the anti-public ed policies of Bush II and instead we got more of the same, harder. The latest New York Times/Siena Poll shows that fewer than 1% of voters think that education is the most important problem in the United States today-- and that holds across all age groups, genders, and ethnicities. If you want to ride to the White House, the education bus is probably not the one to ride-- certainly not the one Emanuel is proposing. 

Paper: AI Destroys Institutions

From its title-- "How AI Destroys Institutions"-- this draft essay pulls no punches. It's heavily researched (166 footnotes) and plain in its language. I'm going to hit the highlights here, but I hope you'll be motivated to go read the entire work yourself.

The essay is from two Boston University law professors. Woodrow Hartzog focuses on privacy and technology law; Jessica Silbey teaches and writes about intellectual property and technology law (she also has a PhD in comparative literature--yay, humanities). Their forty-page draft essay breaks down neatly into sections. Let's go.

Institutions are society's superheroes

When we use the term “institutions,” we mean the commonly circulating norms and values covering a recognizable field of human action, such as medicine or education. Institutions form the invisible but essential backbone of social life through their familiar yet iterative and adaptable routines across wide populations in space and time.

These are really important because these "bundles of normative commitments and conventions" help to reduce "uncertainty while promoting human cooperation and efficacy of mission." In other words, they keep things flowing smoothly, particularly for people involved in moving a certain mission forward. 

However, they note, "People both inside and outside an institution must believe in its mission and competency for it to remain durable and sustain legitimacy." Institutions also rely on expertise which helps because it "values and promotes competence, innovativeness, and trustworthiness."

So, institutions really matter, and they depend on certain factors. And here our trouble begins.

The destructive affordances of AI

Hartzog and Silbey explain that we'll be using AI to mean main generative AI systems (chatbots), predictive AI (facial recognition), and automated decision AI (content moderation). They can tempt institution folks by promising to be both fast and correct.

So surface-level use cases for AI in institutions exist. But digging deeper, things quickly fall apart. We are a long way from the ideal conditions to implement accountability guardrails for AI. Even well-intentioned information, technology rules, and protective frameworks are often watered down, corrupted, and distorted in environments where people face powerful incentives to make money or simply get the job done as fast as possible.

Perhaps if human nature were a little less vulnerable to the siren’s call of shortcuts, then AI could achieve the potential its creators envisioned for it. But that is not the world we live in. Short-term political and financial incentives amplify the worst aspects of AI systems, including domination of human will, abrogation of accountability, delegation of responsibility, and obfuscation of knowledge and control.

But despite the seductive lure of AI, the authors point out that it "requires the pillaging of personal data and expression, and facilitates the displacement of mental and physical labor." But mostly it reproduces existing patterns, amplifies biases, and just generally pumps harmful slop into the information ecosystem, all while pretending to be both authoritative and objective.

And its faux-conscious, declarative, and confident prose hides normative judgments behind a Wizard-of-Oz-esque curtain that masks engineered calculations, all the while accelerating the reduction of the human experience to what can be quantified or expressed in a function statement.

What we end up with is the "outsourcing of human thought and relationships to algorithmic outputs." And that means that AI does some serious damage in three main ways.

First, AI undermines expertise

First, AI systems undermine and degrade institutional expertise. Because AI gives the illusion of accuracy and reliability, it encourages cognitive offloading and skill atrophy, and frustrates back-end labor required to repair AI’s mistakes and “hallucinations.”

This doesn't just substitute unreliable bot answers for the work of human experts; it also "denies the displaced person the ability to hone and refine their skills." We get this in education; if you have someone or something do your assignment for you, you don't develop the skills that would have come from doing the work yourself. Same thing in the workplace. Would you rather have a nurse who can say "I have seen this kind of problem a hundred times" or one who can say "I have referred this kind of problem to a medibot a hundred time."

Hartzog and Silbey also remind us that AI can only look backwards; they are bound by pre-existing information. As Arvind Naryann and Sayash Kapoor point out in the AI Snake Oil, predictive AI won't work because the only way it can make good predictions is if nothing else changes. AI is your mother explaining to you how to get a job in today's market based on how she got her job thirty years ago, as if conditions have not changed since then.

AI may appear "hyper-competent," but the authors correctly point out that hallucinations are not a bug, but an inevitable feature of how these systems are designed. Remember, the "stochastic" in "stochastic parrot" means "randomly determined," a guess. When the guesses are correct, the humans in the institution lose skill and value; when the guess is wrong, the institution has to compensate for that failure,

AI short-circuits decisionmaking

Important moral decisions get sloughed off to AI, justified by the notion that they are somehow objective and efficient and therefor not involved in making any moral choices.

To start, the decision to implement an AI system in an institution in any significant way is not just about efficiency. Technologies have a way of obscuring the fact that moral choices that should be made by humans have been outsourced to machines.

When your insurance company uses AI to approve or deny your claim, it is making a moral choice, and furthermore, it's making that choice based on rules that are hidden inside the black box of AI. Then, the authors note, "When AI systems obscure the rules of institutions, the legitimacy of those rules degrades." 

The authors further argue that AI is incapable of "a willingness to learn, engage, critique, and express yourself even though you are vulnerable or might be wrong." Humans can stretch beyond what is known, make big jumps or wide connections. Those kinds of creative leaps are beyond AI, which gives us more of what is already out there. 

The authors also argue that AI cannot challenge the status quo "because its voice has no weight." In other words, humans might speak up, confront management, or even resign loudly in protest, creating pressure for the institution to be better. Raise your hand if you think that this is exactly why some leaders think AI employees are an awesome idea. But the authors argue that "moral courage and insight" are "necessary for institutions to adapt and survive." One would hope.

AI isolates humans

Finally, AI systems isolate people by displacing opportunities for human connection and interpersonal growth. This deprives institutions of the necessary solidarity and space required for good faith debate and adaptability in light of constantly changing circumstances. AI displaces and degrades human-to-human relationships and—through its individualized engagement and sycophancy— erodes our capacity for reflection about and empathy towards other and different humans.

If an institution isn't working out roles and the rules that guide the roles, the rules that make the institution function start to waste away. Then "there is only institutional chaos or the rule of the powerful." 

This strikes me as a drawback that people are really blind to. The consistent assumption in every single plan to have students taught by an AI bot is the assumption that those students will react to the bot as they would to a human teacher, that they will behave as if a real live teacher is in the room, and not, instead, simply throw out the rules about what it means to be a student in a classroom.

The institutions on AI's death row

Hartzog and Silbey offer DOGE as a prime example of an institution that rotted from AI dependence, but they see many areas that are susceptible.

For instance, if the rule of law is handed to AI, we've got trouble. The idea of enforcing rules is that enforcement makes the rules visible and therefor easier for everyone to follow. But when the rules are obscured or unclear or simply hidden in the black box of AI, nobody knows what the rules are or what we are supposed to do. 

Imagine, they suggest, you get a notice that the IRS AI has determined that you owe $100,000 in back taxes. Nobody can tell you why, exactly, but they assume that the efficient and unbiased AI must have it right. Or a judge who hits you with a fine far above the recommended range, based on AI recommendation. Again, without explanation, but with the assumption of accuracy.

I'm imagining an AI that grades your student essay, but can't answer any of your questions about why you got that particular grade. 

It's all much like having someone in charge of government who sets rules based on his own personal whims and quirks from day to day and offers no explanation except that it's what he wants and he will use power to force compliance. Imagine how much that would suck. AI is also an authoritarian bully, except that its mechanized nature allows folks to pretend that its rule is unbiased and accurate. 

Hartzog and Silbey unsurprisingly also see trouble for higher education. AI taking over the cognitive load needed for learning. AI producing mediocre and homogenized content. AI shifting the questions researchers ask "from qualitative mysteries to quantifiable puzzles." If your main tool is an AI hammer, you are going to look for only nails that it will work on. 

And then there's trust, emerging more and more as an AI issue in education. Can you trust your students' work? Can they trust yours as a teacher? And what does all this do to the human connections needed for education to work? More distrust means more vulnerability to outside authorities trying to control the institution.

Then there's journalism...

As AI slop, the cheap, automatic, and thoughtless content made possible by AI, contaminates our public discourse and companies jam AI features into all possible screens, few institutions are more vital to preserve than the free press.

Too much slop and junk, particularly when it devalues expertise and knowledge, leads to a "scarcity of attention" and a lessened ability to respond to misinformation and disinformation. Everyone trying to do journalism of any sort knows the problem-- how do you get anyone to actually pay attention to what you have to say. We suffer from a collective thirteenth clown problem-- if there are twelve clowns on stage frolicking about, you can jump on stage and start reciting Shakespeare, but to the audience, you'll just be the thirteenth clown.

 Plus, the generation of mountains of slop means that AI is both generating and feeding on slop, and slop made out of slop is--well, not good. 

Journalism is defined by its adaptive, responsive dialogue in the face of shifting social, political, and economic events and by its sensitivity to power. But AI systems are not adaptive in a way that is responsive to human complexity, and they are agnostic to power. AI systems are pattern matchers; they cannot discern or produce “news.” 

Democracy and civic life 

Hartzog and Silbey pull out Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone, a standard on my list of books everyone should read. 

One key concept necessary for a society to function is the idea of “generalized reciprocity: I’ll do this for you without expecting anything specific back from you, in the confident expectation that someone else will do something for me down the road.” Putnam wrote, “[a] society characterized by generalized reciprocity is more efficient than a distrustful society. . . . Trustworthiness lubricates social life.” As people become isolated and withdraw from public life, trust disappears, and social capital along with it. 

If we continue to embrace AI unabated, social capital and norms of reciprocity will abate, and our center—democracy and civil life—will not hold. Because AI systems undermine expertise, short-circuit decision-making, and isolate humans, they are the perfect machines to destroy social capital.

There is an irony in the AI industry's attempt to solve the "loneliness crisis" by offering chatbot companions-- which is looking more and more like a very bad idea. Nor does it seem helpful for society if everyone sits at home and has AI agents handle everything from shopping to email correspondence. Working stuff out with other humans requires social capital, and your handy AI agent cannot do that for you. And again-- every scenario in which an AI agent replaces a human assumes that the transaction will go on as if it still involved a human. You'll use AI to answer emails and, the assumption goes, people will respond to those emails as they would had you written them yourself and not, say, dismiss and ignore them because they did not come from a human. Meanwhile, how does one build empathy and reciprocity when two AIs are talking back and forth on your behalf?

The section ends with a reporting about the techbro dream of a world in which AI runs everything (and they run AI), a new brand of technofacsism. They quote Jill Lepore's NYT story from last fall:

More recently, Mr. Altman, for his part, pondered the idea of replacing a human president of the United States with an A.I. president. “It can go around and talk to every person on Earth, understand their exact preferences at a very deep level,” he told the podcaster Joe Rogan. “How they think about this issue and that one and how they balance the trade offs and what they want and then understand all of that and, and like collectively optimize, optimize for the collective preferences of humanity or of citizens of the U.S. That’s awesome.” Is that awesome? Replacing democratic elections with machines owned by corporations that operate by rules over which the people have no say? Isn’t that, in fact, tyranny?

Well, it's not tyranny from Altman's point of view. It's just him living with absolute freedom from anything that would impede his will or that would involve him actually dealing with meat widgets. Meanwhile, Oracle is shopping around AI to help run your local municipal government

So, this paper

It's not a pretty or encouraging picture, but it is a thorough one and a compelling articulation of the argument against indiscriminate AI use in our institutions. I'm not sure how many people are really listening, but I recommend the essay as a worthwhile read. You can get to it here. 

 

ICYMI: Big Frozen Blizzard Edition (1/25)

We are getting hammered this morning, but my nephew and his wife in Minnesota are expecting negative twenties--cold enough to put the area under an exploding tree warning, as if Minnesota wasn't suffering enough already. May all the unwelcome visitors in that state have a truly miserable weekend-- they've earned it.

In the meantime, I have some education reading for you. Here we go. 

Excerpts Are Anti-Knowledge: Not Always, But Often Enough to Matter

Say Amen! Laura Pantranella has more patience than I to lay out some solid and specific reasons that training students on reading excerpts is a really bad idea. 

Children as Collateral Damage

God bless Bruce Lesley, who read through the Heritage Foundation's latest big fat slab of malignant baloney about saving America by saving the children. Only they don't really want to save children. 

Florida lawmakers debate what’s ‘harmful to minors’ in school books, again

Florida once again tries to keep works from escaping the long hand of censorship by closing loopholes that allow for considerations like "artistic merit." Merit, shmerit. Let's get that statue of David a robe.

‘What Sort of Nation Terrorizes Children?’: A Teacher’s View From Minneapolis

Italia Fittante teaches high school literature in Minneapolis, and her students are having a rough time. EdWeek has the piece, and it is worth your time.

When School Stops Feeling Safe: Librarians Supporting Immigrant Students in Real Time

The AI School Librarian has some concrete thoughts and suggestions about what schools and staff can do (and not do) to help their students in this extraordinarily terrible time.

The Ruffled Mind

AI and ICE are birds of a feather, argues Audrey Watters. Plus her usual assortment of useful links. Have you subscribed yet, because you should.

Fear, arrests and know-your-rights: How one school district is grappling with ICE coming to town

Alexandra Villarreal  at Hechinger looks at how schools in New Haven, Connecticut, a district that has worked hard to build relationships with the immigrant community, are dealing with ICE. 

Dear Ohio Anti-Property Tax Campaign, the State of Ohio should NOT pay for education alone

Stephen Dyer continues to explain how Ohio's school funding system is in the weeds.

Why 'symbolic' ICE resolution in Sarasota matters more than you think

Mark Rochester of the Sarasota Herald-Tribune writes about Bridget Ziegler's dumb resolution and how it represents something bigger--the nationalization of local issues.

Google's work in schools aims to create a 'pipeline of future users,' internal documents say

This may be the least surprising news ever. Tyler Kingdale reports for NBC News that Google is in your school in hopes of recruiting future customers. Also, they have known for a long time that Youtube can be unsafe and distracting.

Teacher Education in (Another) Era of the “Bad Teacher” Myth

Remember the whole myth of bad teachers being responsible for all education ills? Paul Thomas does.

I Can't Change Your Kid

Matt Brady points out that the power of teachers is not exactly what popular mythology says it is.

At nine, I disappeared into home schooling. No one came looking

Memoir of a home school kid, by Stefan Merrill Black

Ed tech is profitable. It is also mostly useless

You may want to sign up for a free trial of The Economist to read this, but the headline stands pretty well on its own.

Bellwether and K12 Coalition Published Misleading Report\

It's about math. It's also about selling some wares. Thomas Ultican breaks it down.

Deception: How the 100,000 Studies Lie and the “Five Pillars” Lie are Jeopardizing the Future of Children in America

This very long and wonkily detail-filled post by Denny Taylor takes on some of the sacred texts of supposedly settled reading science. 

McMahon’s Troubling School Patriotism Fails to Address The Needs of Children

Nancy Bailey looks at Linda McMahon's Big Patriotism Tour as it asserts that all children need from their government is exhortations to cheer the flag.

Trump Administration Awards Grants to Promote Patriotic Education

Speaking of patriotism-flavored education, the Trump regime is backing some other attempts to rewrite history for students in K-12.

The Timing Tells You Everything

TC Weber continues to provide an invaluable ground-level view of education shenanigans on the state and local level. This time: NFL player/vendors, and a school shooting anniversary.

The Power of Life

Ben Riley talks to science historian Jessica Riskin about life, intelligence, AI and a bunch of other stuff. Some beautiful and intelligent conversation here.

At Forbes.com, I looked at the year-long saga of the Trump regime's attempt to ban DEI from classrooms and how they just backed away from one of their first big tools. 

Here's the National Children's Symphony of Venezuela, having a ball with Leonard Bernstein's Mambo from West Side Story. 

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Banning T-Birds: Your Tax Dollars At Work

If you've been worried that the federal Department of Education Office of Civil Rights has been napping-- fear not. Yesterday they announced that after an investigation, they have determined that Connetquot Central School District in Long Island, NY, has been Very Naughty.

Specifically, they changed their mascot's name from "Thunderbirds" to "T-birds." This was the end result of a lawsuit against the state over the state's rule that schools had to get rid of their Native American mascots. CCSD was one of the districts that sued the state, and the mascot change was part of the eventual settlement of that suit. It was a contentious decision, made just last fall, which Native Americans argued didn't change nearly enough to comply with the state order to drop school mascots based on Native American images, possibly because, as near as I can tell, the change seemed to involve going from a bird to, apparently, a bird with a slightly different name (a name that the school had often used in places where the full name wouldn't fit). It raised enough noise to attract coverage by Sports Illustrated. (This, mind you, is a district that has banned Pride flags.) 

But the feds have declared that this mascot change shall not stand. 

See, New York was already in trouble because the state education department had banned Native American mascots, which touched off a kerfluffle in Massapequa over the school's traditional "Chief" mascot. That earned them a visit from Education Secretary Linda McMahon, some noises of support from Trump, and a so-speedy-one-might-suspect-no-investigating-was-done investigation that determined that the state was violating the Trumpian interpretation of Title VI. Why could some schools call themselves, say, "Dutchmen," but not some kind of Native American (hint: some communities actually include people of Dutch descent). It's a complicated issue, but I suspect that for the Trump regime, it's no more complicated than "White people should get to use Native American imagery as mascots if they want to."

At any rate, CCSD was under "investigation" by the department months before they made a final decision. Almost as if the department was using the threat of an investigation to intimidate the district into a particular decision, a sort of agency level use of Dear Leader's fondness for lawfare and threats of lawsuits to bend opponents to his will.

But the department has now reached their conclusion. The announcement came from Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Kimberly Richey:

Today, we found Connetquot Central School District in violation of Title VI for erasing its Native American heritage to comply with a discriminatory New York state regulation. We will not allow ideologues to decide that some mascots based on national origin are acceptable while others are banned. Equal treatment under the law is non-negotiable. We expect the District to do the right thing and comply with our resolution agreement to voluntarily resolve its civil rights violation and restore the Thunderbirds’ rightful name. The Trump Administration will not relent in ensuring that every community is treated equally under the law.

Richey's background as announced by the department on her confirmation mentions that she "has consulted for various organizations, including Parents Defending Education, and previously served at the U.S. Department of Education from 2004-2009 under the George W. Bush Administration and more recently under the Trump Administration from 2017-2021." It also calls her a "certified teacher and attorney," though her LinkedIn account shows no signs of an actual teaching job. She has lawyered for the Oklahoma department of education, worked as managing director for federal advocacy and public policy for the National School Boards Association, deputy secretaried for Virginia's department of ed, and served as senior chancellor for Florida's department of education. 

OCR has "offered" the district the chance to sign off on a resolution agreement that would require them to "reverse its discriminatory erasure of Native American imagery by readopting the name 'Thunderbirds' for its sports teams," logos, mascots, etc.

This call to reverse this dreadful "erasure" comes the same week that the Trump administration removed the informational signs about slaves at the President's House in Philadelphia, attempting to erase the memory of Washington's slaves. It is also the week that, of course, the Department of Homeland Security continued its efforts to erase immigrants. So I'm not sure the high dudgeon over erased Native American sports mascots rings very authentically. 

The district has told news media that it is looking at its options. And while some community members think the old Thunderbirds mascot is just fine, Carolyn Gusoff of CBS in New York though to ask an actual Native American.

Chief Harry Wallace of Long Island's Unkechaug Nation disagrees. "It's a total fallacy to say that it honors the Native American people," he said.

He said the imagery is a desecration of their symbols and harms students.

"As they grow up from children into adults, they carry with them that stereotypical image of hurt and harm and shame," he said.

Despite the mention of funding loss in some coverage, the Ed Department release mentions no actual financial threat. Perhaps that is because district leaders and the feds are on the same side, and this is mostly a swipe at the state government. It's a whole situation with no winners.