The Unchanged Century Myth

There it was again. In a launch event for a new staffing program idea, the contention that schools haven't changed in a century. The Ford Model T “represented breakthrough technology more than 100 years ago that wouldn’t serve us well today,” says the slide (which shows, ironically, a photo of a 1934 Ford Coupe, stripped down for that hot rod look), and goes on to draw the parallel with how schools also haven't changed in a century.

Everyone with a education-flavored product or miracle reform to pitch likes to make this claim, unless, like Education Secretary McMahon, they are pitching the reverse-- 60 or 70 years ago American education was awesome, "a shining light guiding generations, built on faith, heritage, patriotism."

Both views are really wrong. To say that schools are basically the same is like claiming that, because they still use four wheel and seats, automobiles are fundamentally unchanged over the last century. To say that schools have devolved from an earlier golden age is to insist that you would like to trade your current vehicle for a Model T (complete with the hand crank for starting it). The argument about the unchanging century is like arguing that houses have not changed since colonial times, because they still have walls, a roof, and a door for getting in and out. 

A Department of the Interior, Bureau of Education report gives us some info on what schools were like in 1926. 

They were, of course, highly segregated. And not just in the ways you're thinking of-- depending on where you were in the country, there may have been a school just for Italians or other immigrant groups. But while segregation was still the law of the land, the report only shows 84 schools for Black students, located in 22 states. 

Nor were the schools particularly well-used. The report says that of those youths of high school age, only 53% actually attended school. The notion that these schools were intended to get students ready for industrial jobs doesn't make sense--the young humans intended for industrial work were already doing that work instead of going to school. "The public high school will continue to grow," said the report, "but probably at a rate not nearly that of the growth of population." The report also noted that big changes were underway, including the creation of junior and senior high schools, plus

The reorganization and enrichment of curricular material and the construction of buildings suitable to the needs of reorganization are being pushed forward at a rapid rate. All this is done in a serious attempt to make the secondary school better fit the needs of the pupil and of the community as well. 

17,710 high schools reported in 1926, compared to just over 10,000 in 1910. The schools reported just over 3 million students (2.6% of the total US population), up from 1.8 million in 1920. There were 4,873 school libraries (with just over 8 million books). Attrition rates were huge-- only 55% of first years made it to the fourth year. 

High school teachers in the 1925-26 school year? 163,555 in the whole country, varying wildly by state. New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio and California were the only states in five figures, while ten states had under a thousand. Some of those low counts are unsurprising (Arizona, 500; Nevada, 189; Wyoming, 550) but others-- Delaware reported 272 high school teachers!

The 1920s were actually a time of many shifts-- the 1920 census was the first to show more citizens living in big cities than in the countryside or small towns-- and the report pays attention to the differences between schools in places over 2500 population and those under 2500. 

There's a plenty of fascinating data in the report, but you get the idea. The Encyclopedia Americana 1920 edition noted that while fifty years ago, schools focused on basics of reading, writing and arithmetic, but were busy adding new subjects of study. "The vast changes in our social conditions have reacted on the whole theory and practice of education." Schools took on a social role as a means of improving one's circumstances through education. Two year teacher programs in college were replaced with four year programs; it was barely considered a profession. And in many places, there was a push back against those darn godless progressive ideas in education, as exemplified by the Scopes trial (1925). 

There were fewer students in school, but more students in individual classrooms. There was far less material to cover, but no accommodations to make for students with special needs, and those students mostly just dropped out. 

McMahon's Golden Age of Education circa 1950 was, of course, an age before Brown v. Board, so fully and deliberately segregated (as opposed to post-Brown deliberate and sneaky segregation). In 1960, enrollment of 5-13 year olds was hovering around 95% for white children, with nonwhite behind by around 2%. For 14-17 year olds, the enrollment numbers were around 90% for whites and 85% for nonwhites. In 1965, administrators reported that only about 40% of students with disabilities got an education (and if they did, it was while being warehoused in some corner of the building). 

The 1960s saw the beginning if international testing (like the PISA we now know and love) and back in those golden days the US was still below the median.

Classroom tools and materials were still rudimentary. Technology was expensive. Teachers were poorly paid. 

In the past hundred years, schools have seen a multitude of changes that encompass what we teach and when we teach it. We have seen changes in how we teach, both in terms of pedagogical techniques and instructional technology. We have seen changes in who we teach, both in terms of trying to reach all students and in terms of trying to actually teach students who were previously ignored. And we have seen changes in the intent of education, of what we think it is for. 

Do schools still run on four wheel and seats for the passengers? Sure. Have they "failed to change" over the last 100 years? I don't think so.

That said-- are schools an institution whose inertia is frustratingly large? They surely are (and I say that as someone who many times tried to push change on the inside). They are by their nature small-c conservative institutions. 

And as much as I find that a pain when the change is something I want, I still think it's better that way.

Educational practices get to be tested by time, and tested carefully because it's best not to sacrifice an entire cohort of students to experimentation. When Bill Gates said it would take ten years to find out whether the Common Core was a good idea or not, hackles went up all over the nation because ten years is a generation's education, a too-big-to-lose gamble that can never be recouped. Reformsters too often talk about student achievement levels like they are just the rise and fall of the stock market or the tide, with everything staying in place, just moving up and down. But that's not it. A bad experiment with teaching reading to third graders results in a bunch of third graders who are shortchanged forever. It's why some folks are rightfully upset about the pandemic-forced experiment in distance learning at scale-- it was quick, unplanned, and not very successful.

The tech mantra of move fast and break things is not suited to education, because the things we're talking about breaking are the educations of young humans.

Experimentation is often slow and careful, and it should be that way. Does that mean that sometimes schools hold onto suboptimal practices longer than they should? Sure. But the argument that schools have never changed and the argument that schools have changed for the worse since the golden age are both specious and unmoored from reality. Changes in education come best with time and thought and testing and paying attention to the experts in the classroom, not from yielding to whichever brand of panic-mongering is trying to stampede education in a particular direction RIGHT NOW!

Education is a house that is always filled with young humans, so burning it down is not a viable option. Radical revolution has to be tempered by concerns for the people living in the house. And yet, over the decades, the house has added electricity, indoor plumbing, all sorts of climate management, new architectural ideas. A colonial walking into a modern smart home would be awestruck (even if Grampaw is loudly complaining "Well, my house and my neighborhood in 1950 was much nicer).

There will always be a push for revolution, and there will always be a pull to take the whole business backwards (e.g. cursive writing mandates). Somewhere between "you changed too much" and "you never changed at all" is the reality, and anyone who really wants to make a positive difference in education needs to live in that reality. Anyone tossing out the panicky extremes is just trying to sell something; anyone who is arguing both extremes at once is just running a con. 

A Federal Book Ban Bill

Well, you knew this was coming. 

Representative Mary Miller (IL-15), Chairwoman of the Congressional Family Caucus, has introduced a federal book ban bill. 

HR 7661, the "Stop the Sexualization of Children Act," seeks to amend the Elementary and Secondary Education Act by forbidding any federal money going to "develop, implement, facilitate, host, or promote any program or activity for, or to provide or promote literature or other materials to, children under the age of 18 that includes sexually oriented material, including any program, activity, literature, or material that exposes such children to nude adults, individuals who are stripping, or lewd or lascivious dancing."

The bill includes certain exemptions from the list of Forbidden Naughty Stuff.

Science stuff (there's an inclusive list of sciences), texts of major world religions, classic works of literature, and classic works of art. Those are all okay.

What counts as "classic" literature and art, you ask? About what you'd expect. 

Classic works of art are defined as anything in Smarthistory guide to AP Art History. That's not bad.

Classic works of literature? The official lists are from three sources. The 1990 Encyclopaedia Brittanica Great Books of the Western World. Emphasis mine.

Also, two articles. "Classics Every Middle Schooler Should Read" by Thomas Purifoy, Jr., and "Classics Every High Schooler Should Read" by Mary Pierson Purifoy. These are from Compass Classroom, a Christian homeschool support company that calls you to "Teach your kids to think Biblically about the world with our video courses." They even have a handy guide to using taxpayer-funded voucher money to pay for their stuff.

Their "classics" lists are just what you would expect. The middle school list is 29 items long, and includes The Scarlet Pimpernel, Treasure Island, Robinson Crusoe, The Scarlet Letter, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, and its most modern entries, All Quiet On The Western Front and To Kill a Mockingbird. Several are tagged as maybe "a little violent for some audiences" (Huckleberry Finn, Animal Farm) while others are marked as having "sexual content that may be a bit mature" (Mockingbird, Scarlet Letter, The Odyssey). 

There's some very heavy lifting for middle schoolers in there, and I have real concerns about someone who finds sexy parts in the Hawthorne, but the real tell among these two-sentence blurbs is the one for the Last of the Mohicans, which declares "This incredibly moving novel tells the story of the impossible love between an Indian brave and a British girl despite the war raging between their people." There's no such romance in Cooper's novel, however, the 1994 film has that plot element. 

The high school list is longer, and comes in four sections. Antiquity hits all the ancient dead white guys (plus CS Lewis's retelling of the Cupid and Psyche myth, Till We Have Faces). Then we get Christendom, covering more recently dead white guys, Bede through Shakespeare. Then American History, which throws in some Dickinson and Bradstreet with all the dead white guys. Nobody from after the 19th century, unless you count Robert Penn Warren's history of the Civil War. Finally Modernity, which also is mostly 19th century with a few 20th century authors thrown in (Tolkien, Huxley, Faulkner, Fitzgerald).

You get the idea. Strictly Western literature, relentlessly white, almost exclusively male. That's your list of classics that are okay to use. And anything else that doesn't have sexy parts.

"Sexually oriented material" is banned, as defined by Section 2256 of Title 18 of the US Code, which includes any kinds of depiction, description or simulation" s of any kind of sex plus any "lascivious exhibition" of a person's naughty bits. Which takes us a bit past actual pornography, which was already not allowed for minors.

And there is one more big kicker. 

This bill also defines "sexually oriented material" as any material that "involves gender dysphoria or transgenderism." So a federal law that requires transgender persons to be rendered invisible.

But thank goodness we've outlawed strippers in school, because that was surely a problem that needed to be solved. Also, there is no exemption for historical documents, so I guess history students don't get to study the Epstein files.

Miller offered this comment in her news release about the bill:

Parents deserve complete confidence that their tax dollars are being used to promote academic excellence — not to expose children to harmful and explicit material that undermines their innocence. My legislation draws a clear and enforceable line to ensure our schools remain focused on education, not explicit ideological agendas or radical indoctrination.

The line is not particularly clear at all, and in fact offers no guidance on how it would be enforced-- who reports the allegedly naughty book, and who on the federal level decides if it is, in fact, naughty. 

The American Library Association responded swiftly to the bill

Parents, not politicians, should guide their children’s reading. In our school, campus, and public libraries, materials are selected by trained literacy professionals who understand child development and community needs. Their work is grounded in one clear purpose: helping young people become lifelong readers.

H.R. 7661 isn’t fundamentally about protecting kids. It’s about giving politicians broad authority to restrict whose stories are allowed on our shelves. That should concern anyone who believes in the freedom to read and the right of families to make decisions for themselves.

That sounds pretty much on point. 

The bill has a bunch of familiar names for co-sponsors (Fine, Gosar, Tenney, Roy, Self, among others). I have no idea whether the bill has traction or if it will die a well-deserved death, but if you've got a spare minute this weekend, you might give your Congressperson's office a call. The Capitol switchboard is 202-224-3121. 

Federal Voucher Myths

The folks at the Network for Public Education have released a quick explainer about the federal voucher program, the program that Betsy DeVos always dreamed of implementing. Share this with someone who's wondering why your state shouldn't just go ahead and opt in.

 

Is Teacher Quality Portable?

You may be old enough to remember this awesome idea from the annals of reformsterdom--

Let's use magical VAM scores to evaluate teachers. Then we'll take the super teachers with awesome VAM scores and we'll move them to struggling schools, and they will cause test scores at that school to go up and up and up. 

It was always a dumb idea in so many ways. For one thing, VAM scores are a big pile of baloney that are only slightly more reliable than evaluating teachers by giving horned toads Ouija boards to operate under a full moon. For another, it assumes teacher excellence is portable, that a teacher who does well in one school will be equally awesome in any other school. Give that teacher a different boss, a different school culture, a different type of student, a different surrounding community, and different co-workers and it won't matter a bit.

This is a bit like arguing that the teacher in the classroom with no roof keeps getting wet during the rainy season, so let's get a teacher who is always dry in her classroom and move her to the roofless classroom. Will she stay dry? 

As Matt Barnum reports in Chalkbeat, some research from 2013 said yes. They were looking at the federal program that offered "effective" teachers (aka "teachers of students with good test scores) to move into a low-performing high-poverty school. The federal Ed Department's research wing (back before Dera Leader gutted it) found that test scores went up a bit. But now new research suggests that the 2013 paper missed something.

This new working paper-- "Is Teacher Effectiveness Fully Portable? Evidence from the Random Assignment of Transfer Incentives"-- uses some dense and, honestly, off-putting language, but the results are simple enough-- when you move the dry teacher into the roofless room, she might stay a little bit dry, but not nearly as dry as she used to be. Or as the academics put it--

Using a difference-in-differences framework, we estimate that incentivized-transfer teachers’ value added dropped by 0.12 student standard deviations.

Meaning that the effective teacher did not bring all of her effectiveness with her. Maybe she pulled the class up a bit, but not nearly as much as she was elevating her class in her former classroom. The study looked at 80 high-rated teachers; when they moved, their effectiveness rating fell from the 85th percentile to the 66th. 

Why did this happen?

This decline appears to be driven by lower match quality, negative indirect school effects, and the loss of student-specific human capital.

I told you their language was sometimes off-putting. Lord save students from anyone who refers to them as "student-specific human capital." But the point is sound. Different (and new) teaching colleagues, different students (aka students at a struggling school with fewer resources), and different context in which one might not fit as well-- in other words, any teacher you put in the roofless room gets wet. If they're very good, they may be able to get teaching done while they're getting wet. The old notion that you don't have to repair the roof-- just stick a dry teacher in there-- is and was a terrible theory.

I don't want to pay a lot of attention to a study that relies so heavily on the notion that the Big Standardized Test is a valid and reliable measure of educational quality, and I note that one of the co-authors is from TNTP, creators of the execrable "Widget Effect" paperish thing. But if research like this will convince some folks that teaching is, in fact, a "team sport" and context and specifics do matter and that we can't "fix" struggling schools by porting in Very Special Savior Teachers, then by all means, let's put this research in front of those people. 

Google's AI Push For Schools

Google has scored another chance to get its products into schools in the form of a "sizable investment" in AI training. As Greg Troppo reports at The74, training will be offered through ISTE+ASCD (that's the fused Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development and the International Society for Technology in Education). 

The justification will seem familiar. Per Troppo:

“We have just heard so much feedback from teachers that are just saying, ‘We are not prepared,’” said Richard Culatta, ISTE+ASCD’s CEO. “‘We don’t have the training, we don’t have the background that we need for the realities of teaching in an AI world, both teaching in the classroom and also, secondarily, but equally as important, preparing students for the world that they’re going to be in.’”

Sigh. I do believe that teachers are feeling swamped by the ongoing wave of AI stuff, the students who are using it, and the folks (including all too often administrators) hollering that they have to get on this bandwagon Right Now. I do believe that teachers need plenty of training to help them cope with this toxic tide of anti-human plagiarism machines.

You know what would be lousy source for that training? The company that has bet the farm on being able to rope in a mountain of money to support that toxic tide. The company that has a vested interest in selling its product to every carbon-based life form on the planet. That company. Google.

Not that other education folks haven't made similarly terrible deals (looking at you, American Federation of Teachers). But why keep falling for this same pitch?

Particularly from Google, a company that was just caught referring to its work in education as "a pipeline for future users." Did we not already do this with the tobacco industry's attempts to enlist customers while they were still young enough to be enticed by cartoons? "You get that loyalty early, and potentially for life," said A) Google or B) RJ Reynolds. Is it bad for them? Who cares. Rake in those dollars!

This is Google, the folks who brought schools Chromebooks (described in education circles as "What if a laptop, only broken?"). We've have let advanced computer tech run loose in schools, a solution in search of a problem, like a puppy looking for a good place to pee. 

When the tech has a purpose, it can be great. I spent much of my career on the front lines of using desktop publishing tools to create yearbooks, and it was absolutely awesome. It was also purposeful and useful and sold itself exactly because it had utility, helping us do a job better than we could without it.

But that was not all of ed tech. And the high tech revolution was a nightmare of moving fast and breaking things, bringing us to headlines like the recent Fortune piece by Sasha Rogelberg-- "The U.S. spent $30 billion to ditch textbooks for laptops and tablets: The result is the first generation less cognitively capable than their parents."

Soooo many parents have handed their too-young children high tech tools, soothed at least in part by the fact that such tools were in their child's classroom, and surely the school would only use these tools because they knew the tools were safe and effective. Meanwhile, schools had no damned idea.

So AI is a chance to turbocharge this whole ed tech mess by injecting fantasy, magic, and more desperate profiteering into the equation. 

Do schools and teachers need someone to help them cope with these dangerous bots? Do they need to learn how to help students and families cope with a revolution whose outlines we can barely grasp and whose story is a jumbled mash of fantasy, magical thinking, and utter bullshit? Should they be getting those answers from a company whose primary concern is selling as much of the AI service to as many people as possible for as much as they can collect? Gee, that's a stumper. 

Meanwhile, we have the steady drumbeat of tech-fueled ecstasy and agony. Everyone should sign up for i-Ready! Oh, no-- turns out that i-Ready is terrible! The idea of putting students in front of a teaching machine is a century old, and yet has not produced a win for students yet-- just the occasional money for investors. And AI companies increasingly don't even try to pretend that they are aimed at helping students learn. 

So can organizations that claim to care about education please just take a breath and slow down before selling out. Maybe take a moment to think about how to best serve the interests of students and society before signing up for the latest barely-disguised sales pitch from an AI company whose biggest concern is not education, but how they're going to make back some of the gazillion dollars they've poured into AI. 

Is This The Most Bullshitty AI Product Bullshit So Far?

I apologize for the language, Mom. But some days. 

I'm not sure anybody can pick the absolute worst AI company; it's like trying to pick the worst toxic waste dump. But this one is certainly a candidate. Here's the pitch for Companion's Einstein:

He logs into Canvas every day, watches lectures, reads essays, writes papers, participates in discussions, and submits your homework — automatically.

What the actual hell. The pitch is broken down into areas, so you know that Einstein can log into Canvas, watch videos, covers every subject, works while you sleep-- everything. In the FAQ section, it promises that your professor will never know, and will in fact get better at meeting the course expectations (well, you know, except the expectation that a human student will learn by doing the work). The FAQ even answers the question, "What if I want to do an assignment myself?" You can tell it to skip that assignment, though you can of course set the bot to auto-submit everything. 

But hey-- as the website says:

Stop stressing. Start acing.

Einstein does the busywork so you don't have to.

You know, the busywork, formerly known as "the actual coursework." 

There's no veiled language about efficiency or speed or anything other than the pitch of "Here's a bot that will do all your schoolwork for you--every last bit-- so that you, the student, don't have to do a damned thing." Not even the pretense that handing over the work to a bot might somehow help you learn.

What is even the point? What do the people who work at this company tell themselves? "We are making the world a better place by creating more humans who have good grades and are preternaturally ignorant!" 

The company behind this is Companion Inc, and I can't tell you more than that because feeding a that generic term into a criminally enshittified search engine yields nothing useful. Their claim is a "personal OS" and their "about" page is deeply absurd baloney. It starts with some over the top AI woo-woo:

Today's most powerful AI systems can reason through PhD-level problems, write production code, and generate entire applications from a sentence. They are, by any meaningful measure, brilliant.

Narrators voice: They cannot do those things.

Yet every conversation starts from zero. Bad advice carries no cost, misunderstood values get forgotten by next session, and a decision that derails your month goes unnoticed and unlearned. Nothing compounds—including the responsibility.

The point seems to be that companion won't forget you, like those other goldfish-powered bots (though ChatGPT is among those that is now supposed to remember your other "interactions" to better mine data better meet your needs). But it just gets more and more bizarre--

Oh for crying out loud. I suppose an AI can be "bound to a human," though "bought by a human" seems more accurate. But "loyal"? Nope. Able to figure out a human's long interests and align itself to them? Bullshit. How do I know it's bullshit? Because humans can't figure out their own long term best interests. How else do I know? Because it would not be in the long term best interests of a human to ditch an entire course and dodge an education by having a bot fake it!

But hey-- the company promises that "your companion knows what you're working toward and how you think." This is also bullshit, because no program knows how any human thinks. It does not even "know" what "thinking" is. The pitch here is also that your companion has a "private virtual computer"  so that anything a human with a computer can do, your companion can do. I don't even know what to make of that, other than it may be the most effort yet put into trying to anthropomorphize a computer program. "No, this bot isn't a computer! It's a little tiny person, sitting inside the computer working on its own tiny little computer." I mean, damn-- how do I know that my companion isn't even logging onto its virtual computer, but has hired a companion of its own to do the work. I'm envisioning a series of ever-smaller digital Russian nesting dolls, each sitting at tinier and tinier computer desks.

An extension of you so you can be more of you.

Yes, they say that, too. That seems to raise a larger question of what the more of me is doing if I have outsourced being me to the bot. 

If this seems like a lot of bullshit justification for a company whose main product seems to be a plagiarism machine designed to facilitate cheating, well, you ain't seen nothing, yet. Because there's a "why this matters" section, and it has some striking ideas, some big ideas, some big, deep, bullshitty ideas--

Human morality rarely begins as an abstract love for all of humanity. It begins with someone specific. Your child. Your partner. Your team. Your friend. Through concrete responsibility, care expands to the rest of the world.

This may, in fact, how the sociopaths of Silicon Valley go about developing a moral sense, though let me suggest that if loving other humans doesn't start until you have a partner and a child, you may be a very troubled human being. This goes right up there with the Sam Altman quote circulating today

People talk about how much energy it takes to train an AI model … But it also takes a lot of energy to train a human. It takes like 20 years of life and all of the food you eat during that time before you get smart.

But Companion isn't just talking about the origins of morality for humans, because "AI should develop the same way." Here's the wrap-up:

A companion shaped by one human life over time develops something closer to genuine responsibility. It learns your boundaries by crossing them and being corrected, your values by watching which suggestions you take and which you ignore, what trust means by earning yours slowly over months.

We believe an AI that cares for one human life is more likely to care for humanity itself.

So while you may think that Companion Inc is just offering an AI bot that can take classes and cheat effectively for you, it is actually a program that will save the entire damned human race by teaching the bots to care about us. Letting Einstein take your class, do your homework, and write your papers will lead it to love you and care for you, and through you, all of humanity. That sounds wonderful, and if we could somehow get the tech overlords who design these bots to care about human beings half as much, the world would be a better place. 

I came across Einstein thanks to a former student who is now a college English professor at one of those places where administration thinks teachers should Get With The Program because AI Is The Future and students are going to use this stuff anyway, so maybe take a few minutes to teach them about Using AI Ethically. Which is bullshit on bullshit. Look at this product, AI-friendly administrator, and tell me how it should be used ethically, because ethical use of Einstein strikes me as absolutely impossible. Unless, I guess, you believe that using Einstein will teach our Robot Overlords to love us and care for us in a deeply moral way. But I have my doubts that even a college administrator could wade through that much bullshit. 

ICYMI: Ice Jam Edition (2/22)

My area made some national news this week when the ice started piling up on the Allegheny River and threatening communities. We can watch the river out our back window, but if it ever rises high enough to touch the house it would be signs of a waterpocalypse. We used to have bad winter floods in the region-- a epic ice jam and flood 100 years ago went on for three months-- but a large dam and some smaller bits of technology have made the area safer. It's one of those things where you don't think about what is keeping you safe because the result is a bunch of Not Happening. 

Plenty to read this week. Here we go.

Defending the Promise: Public Education and the Fight for Democracy

Greg Wyman has been writing a series celebrating traditional public education. This new entry looks at education and its struggles with recent policy decisions.

What Would It Mean if Ohioans Voted to Eliminate Property Taxes?

Jan Resseger looks at one of those bad ideas that just won't die.

Hempfield School District ends partnership with religious rights firm

Really hoping this is a trend. The Independence law Center has been peddling anti-LGBTQ policies to school boards across PA. It is great to see someone firing them.

Sex Education, v. 2026.0

Nancy Flanagan looks at new sex ed revisions in Michigan, and why the feds have decided to go after them.

Ten Commandments could go up in Tennessee public school

More performative anti-religion religious law, this time in Tennessee. Sam Stockard reports for Tennessee Lookout.

Parents are opting kids out of school laptops, returning them to pen and paper

Tyler Kingkade reports on a trend that is, I suspect, maybe not that much of a trend, but still worth reading about.

The Impacts of Immigration Actions on Students and Schools

Steve Nuzum has some info on how the immigrant crackdown is affecting schools in South Carolina.

No Public Funds for Secular or Religious Charter Schools

Shawgi Tell reminds us that some folks really want to start religious charter schools, and it's a really bad idea.

Top teachers’ performance drops in high-poverty schools, showing school context is key

One persistent neo-liberal idea is that we can pluck good teachers out of one school, plug them into another bad school, and magical test improvements would ensue. This was always a dumb idea, but as Matt Barnum reports for Chalkbeat, we now have research to prove that it's a dumb idea.

How One Rural District Used College Students to Keep English Learners in School

Lauraine Langero at EdWeek reports on a school where college students come mentor English Learners-- and it seems to be helping the dropout rate in this Virginia school.

“The Time Had Come to Find My Work”: Diane Ravitch’s Authentic Autobiography

The indispensable Mercedes Schneider reviews Diane Ravitch's memoir. If you need one more opinion to convince you to get a copy, here you go.

Immigration trigger bill would require Tennessee schools to track, report student status

Melissa Brown at Chalkbeat reports on an ugly law being considered in Tennessee. Should schools be forced to help the government target immigrants?

“I Have Been Here Too Long”: Read Letters from the Children Detained at ICE’s Dilley Facility

ProPublica put a whole team of reporters on this story, and it's a tough read. (It's also apparently the reason ICE goons have been confiscating children's letters)

Earn the Seat: What a School Board Is — and Why Mine Failed

Have school board elections in your district lost the plot? Matt Brady looks at the problems in his own district caused by people who don't understand the assignment.

A New National Reading Panel? It Depends

Should we try having a national reading panel again? Maybe, says Nancy Bailey, but only if we avoid some of these major problems.

120 Champions and Defenders of Children: The Lawmakers Who Show Up for Kids

The First Focus Campaign for Children has issued its annual report on which legislators are doing right by young humans. Learn more (and see if your Congressperson made the list).

Vouchers' growth will be their demise

Stephen Dyer explains the quirk in Ohio's legal debates over vouchers. They have to stop looking like they are funding a second, unconstitutional school system.

UT Board Policy Asks Faculty to Avoid ‘Controversial’ Topics in Class

University of Texas joins the list of colleges offering vaguely worded bans on Bad Language. Inside Higher Ed has details on this baloney.

Teacher-centered vs. student-centered instruction: mitigating the socioeconomic achievement gap through differential access and returns

It's an academic paper with some dense language, but it concludes that teacher-centered instruction may be superior to child-centered. Wade through at your own risk.

In defense of stochastic parrots

"Large language models are useful," says Benjamin Riley, "and that's the problem." Lots to unpack here.

The Hidden Cost of Ceding Government Procurement to a Monopoly Gatekeeper

If your school district has made a deal with Amazon, or is planning to, you might want to look at this research that shows just how much Amazon is shafting government bodies and school districts who have made this deal.

Can We Please Stop it with the AI Woo-Woo?

John Warner asks for an end to baloney-pants over-hype on AI.

Two pieces are out at Forbes.com. One deals with Arizona's latest voucher reform battle, and the other with how Kentucky's supreme court shut down yet another charter funding scheme.

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