ICYMI: Maple Syrup Edition (3/22)

A little field trip yesterday to a maple syrup producing farm, where they are boiling the last catch of the season. If you are used to the picture of a bucket hanging under a tap on a tree, I can tell you that more modern operations involve a tap hooked to a hose that runs through a network of other hoses to a main collection tank that uses some suction to collect the sap. Lot of technical steps after that, too, mostly involving some impressive machinery. However, I feel confident that AI will not take over the maple industry any time soon.

In the meantime, here's this week's reading list. In case you're new here, let me mention that A) this list generally doesn't include any pieces that I referenced or wrote about during the week and B) your mission is to take any pieces that you think are particularly valuable and amplify them through your own channels.

Public schools bombarded by families scrambling for special education assessments tied to Texas voucher money

Texas has a voucher system that incentivizes specials needs (if your child has them, you get extra taxpayer dollars). So now a bunch of parents want their public school to certify that their child has special needs so that those parents can pull that child out of public school.

The "Education Freedom" Myth Gets Its Wild West Makeover

Josh Cowen hates to say he told them so, but when it comes to Texas and their taxpayer-funded vouchers, he told them so. Includes lots of useful links to research.

Punishing Children: Why the Attack on Plyler v. Doe Is an Attack on America’s Core Values

You may not know much about Plyler, but you're going to hear about it plenty. Bruce Lesley explains why it's a big deal.

Highest performing Ohio Charter Schools still have 30% Ds and Fs on State Report Card. Public School Districts have 30% As.

Stephen Dyer breaks down some numbers, and they provide one more piece of proof of the mediocrity of Ohio charter schools.

Moms for Liberty’s “Toxic” Tiffany Justice Is Out at Heritage

Maurice Cunningham caught an interesting piece of news this week-- Moms for Liberty co-founder Tiffany Justice lasted less than a year in her cushy Heritage Foundation gig.

When Literacy Reform Meets the Classroom

Cooper Sved at the Albert Shanker Institute blog writes about the miserable crap that happens when someone wants to teach but they have to wrestle with tightly standardized curriculum in a box instead.

Massachusetts: Highest Court Says Charter School Must Comply With State Public-Records Law

Shawgi Tell checks in on another court case in which charter schools try to avoid the whole public-or-private question. 

A viral case against screens in schools is winning converts. Does the evidence hold up?

I am so glad that Matt Barnum is back at Chalkbeat. In this piece, he looks at the growing argument that points at screens as the culprits behind the great test score dip.

America’s math and reading scores tanked after schools ditched textbooks for screens—and AI could worsen the brain rot

Meanwhile, Sasha Rogelberg is helping push that same theory at Fortune.

KY bill pushing religion over school education is immoral

Kentucky is considering one of those bills that mandates letting students out of school to go attend a "moral instruction" class. Linda Allewalt argues this is, in fact, immoral.

Arizona ESA LEGO Spending

Jen Jennings has been digging through the Arizona taxpayer-funded voucher spending and fining some real whoppers. These graphics look at just the spending on LEGOs alone.

Conservative parents and teachers unions become unlikely allies fighting tech in schools

I told you a couple of weeks ago that M4L was sounding not-crazy on ed tech. Some state unions are deciding the same thing.

Our Experience with i-Ready

Not good. The experience was not good. But if you are wondering why people complain about i-Ready, this will give you plenty of specifics. If you already know, this will let you know you're not alone. This is painful.

Failing Up: From Nashville to Chicago

TC Weber provides a ground-level example of yet another one of these guys who never, ever suffer for their failure. Watch out, Chicago-- he's headed your way.

April 1st: Supreme Court Will Hear Oral Arguments on Trump’s Exec. Order to Deny Birthright Citizenship

Jan Resseger remains the queen of explaining what the heck is going on and what people have to say about it.

Grade Retention: The Debate Had Its Day, Now End It!

Nancy Bailey provides some final words on the eternal debate about holding students back a grade.

The False Promise of Education "Miracles" and Misunderstanding Standardized Test Scores

Paul Thomas looks at the history of education miracles, and what it can tell us about any current reading miracles, like the one in Mississippi.

AI Is Coming For Your Job (and Mine Too)

Jennifer Berkshire checks to see if her job is in danger, and if the dream of retraining and education can protect anybody.

AI ‘Slop’ Is Flooding Children’s Media. Parents Should Be Very Alarmed.

Emily Tate Sullivan at The 74 has an important story about the tidal wave of AI slop aimed at children who are using Youtube or other video platforms. If you are the parent of such a child, you need to read this.

Heather Cox Richardson talks to Josh Cowen

It's an interview on Youtube with America's leading daily historian talking to one of the biggest experts on the problems of school vouchers. Well worth 40 minutes of your time.

Measles Is Back on the Faculty Meeting Agenda

Matt Brady goes down the measles rabbit hole and bring backs information about the disease and advice about how to deal with it in school.

Massachusetts Fiscal Alliance: Kochtopus Flunkey

Maurice Cunningham, the dark money expert, finds the Koch machine spreading its tentacles again in Massachusetts.

This High School Student Invented a Filter That Eliminates 96 Percent of Microplastics From Drinking Water

Just a reminder that high school students can accomplish pretty extraordinary things.

Meanwhile, at Forbes.com, I looked at a measure of teacher morale across the country, and a court case that used some interesting ju jitsu to keep prayer out of the classroom in Louisiana.

I like music that finds new ways to re-create itself, and I love musicians who are having fun doing their thing, so I love this version of a song that is not exactly a classic.

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NE: Trying To Get Vouchers Past Voters

Nebraska's voucher fans are bound and determined, like legislators in many states, to get around the voters so they can get vouchers installed.

In May of 2023, Nebraska’s Governor Jim Pillen signed into law LB 753, creating tax credit vouchers for subsidizing private schools.

The concept has been floated in Nebraska before, notably turning up more than once in 2022’s session. In 2023, it finally progressed through the legislature. But NSEA political action director Brian Nikkelson told the Nebraska Examiner that the public did not support the vouchers, and if the bill was passed, there would be a petition drive to force the bill to go on the ballot for voters to decide.

And so there was. It was a heck of a battle, with the pro-voucher forces have attracting a mountain of money, some of it from outside the state. Paul Hammel at the Nebraska Examiner reported that big money contributors include C.L. Werner, an Omaha-based trucking company executive ($100,000), Tom Peed and his son Shawn of a Lincoln publishing company ($75,000 each), and former Nebraska governor U.S. Senator Pete Ricketts ($25,000). Governor Pillen himself has contributed $100,000 to the campaign to save vouchers from a vote.

At the same time, Hammel reported, the American Federation for Children, the school choice advocacy group founded by Betsy DeVos, has contributed $103,000 in in-kind services and $583,000 in cash to the campaign.

It didn't matter. Support Our Schools needed 60,000 signatures to force a referendum. They ended up with about twice that number (that's roughly 10% of all eligible voters in the state). So this November, the voters of Nebraska were supposed to have their say. So you'd expect that voucher fans, who keep telling us how much everyone loves vouchers, would just sit back, secure in the knowledge that their program would win the referendum handily.

Well, no.

Instead, legislators cooked up LB 1402. This bill proposed to repeal the Opportunity Scholarships that were created under LB 753, and then to replace them with a new version of Opportunity Scholarships. This version would have been an education savings account (ESA) style super-voucher that hands over taxpayer money to send a student to a private or parochial school. It was more sketchy than last year's bill because it appropriates state funds (rather than tax-credited contributions) to pay for the vouchers.

But mostly what it did it render the petition drive moot, because it repealed the version of vouchers that the public was going to vote on. "Ha," they apparently thought. "That'll stop those damned voters."

In 67 days, the coalition of opponents gathered the necessary signatures—again. That repeal passed in November 2024, with 45 out of 49 legislative districts voting to repeal, and Nebraska's voucher law was toast. The voters had sent a clear and unequivocal message. 

Surely the state's leaders would say, "Well, the voters have spoken, so that's that."

Fat chance.

Voucherphiles were back with a new proposal in January 2025. “I’m not dissuaded by the fact that it was defeated at the ballot box,” said freshman State Sen. Tony Sorrentino of Omaha. 

To nobody's surprise, Governor Jim Pillen was first to jump on the as-yet-rule-free federal school voucher proposal. Okay, it was a small surprise, because Nebraska is not known for grabbing federal dollars, but hey-- this is Free Federal Money for private schools. In fact, U.S. Rep. Adrian Smith, R-Neb., helped Congress usher the tax credits provision onto President Donald Trump’s desk, even though his home district was among those shooting down vouchers in 2024. 

Pillen's new idea is to sell vouchers for the "gap" year, the year between the time when Nebraska's vouchers are required to end and the time when the federal vouchers are supposed to kick in. The proposal is being sent through the state's Labor Department rather than the Department of Education because that would skirt the requirement for any sort of hearing or debate, probably because voucherphiles have a pretty good idea of how that would go. 

Nebraska is one of those states where rural Republicans have opposed all attempts at vouchers, and they aren't sounding any friendlier about this one. Zach Wendling at Nebraska Examiner talked to State Sen. Tom Brandt of Plymouth, a Republican who opposed Linehan’s previous proposals; he said he is opposed to using any public money for private school choice. He’s still waiting to see how the federal tax credit program includes public schools (because, remember, there are no actual rules yet attached to the federal voucher program). 

“The referendum simply eliminated that. Period, end of story,” he continued on the state policy. “There’s no other interpretation you can draw from that.”

The gap funding would cost about $5 million for around 2,500 students. Of course, with no rules in place, it's possible that not all of Nebraska's current voucher students would qualify for federal vouchers. Nor can we predict what slice of the federal money pie Nebraska would be entitled to. If it comes to that, we could expect voucherphiles to argue that more gap funding is needed to cover new gaps, or maybe to expand above and beyond the federal offerings. 

Nebraska voucher fans are making a lot of "think of the children" noises, but families have plenty of time to look for new arrangements (i.e. finding the student a new school or going back to paying the full tuition with their own money). 

This is the same story we've seen over and over again. Vouchers never win when voters have a chance to be heard. Every single taxpayer-funded voucher program in this country has been created without giving the taxpayers a say or ignoring the say they had already said. Taxpayer-funded vouchers are all the result of legislators backed by deep-pocketed voucher fans deciding they are going to inflict these on the taxpayers. Nebraska's taxpayers just happen to have a few more tools to fight back with, but Nebraska's voucherphiles just keep looking for a way to avoid that whole pesky democracy thing. 

PA: An AI Safety Bill

In Pennsylvania, a bipartisan group is pushing SB 1090, a bill "providing for disclosures and safeguards relating to the use of artificial intelligence." 

It's short and sweet and doesn't go far enough, but it's something. The meat of it is in these next few bits:

Disclosure of nonhuman status.--If a reasonable person interacting with an AI companion would be misled to believe the person is interacting with a human, an operator shall issue a clear and conspicuous notification indicating that the AI companion is artificially generated and not human.

"Reasonable person" is doing a hell of a lot of work here. 

The bill would also require AI "operators" to "maintain and implement a protocol" to prevent its bots from producing suicidal ideation, suicide, or self-harm content to users, or content that directly encourages the user to commit acts of violence. That protocol should include suicide hotline or crisis text line if the user expresses thoughts about self-harm.

Even better, the bill would require that if "the operator knows or should have known" that the user is a minor, they must provide notification that the user is not interacting with a human being. They must also provide a "clear and conspicuous notification" at least once every three hours that the user should take a break and, again, that they are talking to a non-human bot. The AI should also be prevented from producing sexually explicit images or giving the minor instructions on sexually explicit conduct. 

Bots also have to come with a cyber-label saying "this might not be suitable for minors."

The Attorney General gets to enforce this. The state can fine an operator up to $10,000 for each violation (on top of any other remedies provided by law). $10K is, of course, couch cushion money for most tech companies, but this whole law is a hell of a lot better than one more chorus "Everyone better get their kids on AI before they are left behind in the awesome world of tomorrow that AI is going to launch any day now." Dragging them into court is the only thing that might get our tech overlords' attention, so it's encouraging to see legislatures showing a willingness to make that happen. 

The Mystery of Eighth Grade Test Results

Jill Barshay at Hechinger took a look at the Mississippi "Miracle," specifically the question of why the miraculous 4th grade test results have not been matched by the 8th grade. She shared many theories about what might help, a conversation that Mike Petrilli continued in his substack. But I think, as always, the discussion of this topic skips an important point. I'm going to skip my usual Big Standardized Test rant and save the Mississippi thing for another day. Let's just talk about the 8th grade test scores and what they tell us about 13-year-olds and testing.

The 8th grade test dip is not news to anyone who has been paying attention. One of the great unstudied effects of the BS Test era is just how many districts reorganized their elementary. middle, or high schools in order to put their 8th graders under the same roof as another test group and hopefully blunt the effects of their lousy grades on the specific school. (If your middle school is just grades 6-8, then your 8th grade scores are the school scores, but if, say, your high school is grades 7-12, then the 8th grade scores get lumped in with 11th grade scores).

But any discussion of 8th grade scores needs to consider the Giving A Shit factor.

8th grade is the year when everything breaks loose for students. Their bodies betray them, becoming ungainly and hard to manage. They have whole new sets of feelings, whole new drama-fraught social lives to manage. They have to work out how to deal with their parents, who have somehow become way more dumb and obnoxious than they used to be. School gets hard because learning gets hard, harder than in elementary school when it just sort of happened, and it begins to dawn on students that adults are not always reliable or trustworthy.

Testing has, of course, given rise to a new set of springtime traditions. The pre-test pep rally. The pre-test hype video. The pre-test earnest talk. The elementary students may still get some inspiration from these, but now you've got eighth graders who have been through this year after year, test after test, practice test after practice test. 

The entire foundation of test-based accountability is the assumption that students will sit down to take the test and actually care and actually try. Elementary kids? They are game to throw themselves at whatever you give them to do. 11th graders? They have learned that there is some senseless baloney you have to work through in the adult world. But 8th graders? Nobody has fewer shits to give about your adult nonsense than an 8th grader.

Every time this discussion comes up, I just imagine some bureaucrat in a suit standing in front of a bunch of 8th graders telling them, "I know every one of you is going to do their very best, because while this test has no stakes at all for you, how else will researchers and policy makers and academics  be able to have data-based discussions about the educational effects of instructional techniques and curricular policies?"

Don't get me wrong. 8th graders can be awesome, the energy and heart of elementary students combined with the knowledge and sense of high schoolers. 8th graders will absolutely give their blood and guts and hearts to an endeavor when they can see an authentic, real reason, a reason they can see and feel in their bones. 

Where in the battery of the Big Standardized Test do you think they'll find that? 

All the discussions of other factors-- the screens, the social media, the knowledge-based learning, the high-quality instructional materials, test designs, the leveling of reading materials-- that's all worth having. But I wish everyone worked up about testing would--well, you know what I wish when it comes to testing, but at least I would like them to ask themselves one question:

You want students to give their best, most intense and serious effort when it comes time to take the test.

Why should they want to do that?

The More Reforms Change

So here's the story.

The Secretary of Education sends the President a memo (91 pages!) arguing that the Department of Education should be dismantled as part of plan to get education sent back to the states. In its zeal to promote national security and reduce inequality, argues the secretary, the federal government has adopted "an overly intrusive federal role.”

The details of the proposal include moving department functions to other departments, such as sending Pell Grants  and loan programs to Treasury and the Office for Civil Rights to the Justice Department. Indian Education programs could go to Interior. The secreary explained that the move of the OCR would be with the aim of “making local and state resolution of complaints the first recourse.” Let Alabama and Georgia decide whether they are violating anyone's civil rights by promoting inequality in education.

The "large scale funding" of the department needs to be reversed because it is "one of the factors responsible for the present imbalance of the federal budget." Cutting around 27% of the federal budget should provide “encouragement to the states to shoulder a greater share of the responsibility for delivering educational services.” 

And what funding remains should be provided to the states in no-string block grants, piles of money that the states can spend as they wish.

The federal governmentj has no business managing educaation, particularly because under Certain Administrations, the department serves certain special interest groups. Also, dismantling the department would be in line with the President's campaign promises.

The Secretary of Education was Terrel Bell, the President was Ronald Reagan, and the year was 1981.

In other words, Trump-McMahon policies are 45 years old. They didn't start with Trump, and they won't end with him. The dismantling of the department--particularly the disempowerment of the OCR-- and the slashing of funding and funding oversight -- that's been the dream of some folks on the right since about fifteen minutes after the department was created. 

Note: I came across the story playing with a new EdWeek feature that lets you search for the big stories from the year you started in education. It does not actually go back to the year I entered the classroom, it got close enough to cough up this reminder that some parts of the anti-public education hustle are plenty old.

ICYMI: Out Of The Office Edition (3/15)

I am away from the Curmudgucation Institute home base this weekend, off to a whirlwind trip to the Seattle branch office, so the reading list may not be as rigorous as usual. And the time difference may factor in as well. 

How Did This Happen???

Jennifer Berkshire observes that as backlash against ed tech grows, some folks seem to have conveniently forgotten who pushed some of this stuff in the first place.

Nebraska braces for latest private school funding, vouchers fight, now eyeing $3.5M

Let's throw more money at private schools, declares Nebraska's governor. Zach Wendling reports for Nebraska Examiner.

One-third of Arizona school districts at financial risk amid ESA growth

In the race to privatize public schools into oblivion, Arizona is a leader. A new report shows how many school districts are in trouble in the voucher state. Steven Sarabia has the story for Arizona's Family.

Taxpayer-funded school vouchers used for Disneyland trips

Speaking of Arizona's taxpayer-funded vouchers, Craig Harris at 12News has been doing outstanding work as the news unit digs into what, exactly, those Arizona taxpayer-funded vouchers are being spent on (spoiler alert: not education).

Demand for student teacher stipends outstrips supply as Shapiro proposes boosting program

Pennsylvania started giving student teachers a stipend, and that program is going pretty well. Yes, there's an old farty part of me that says Kids These Days should just suck it up like we did Back in My Day. But as a Pennsylvanian who wishes we were way better at attracting and retaining teachers, I have to admit this makes sense.

Teaching Writing is Personal.

The indispensable Mercedes Schneider writes about teaching writing.

Are public schools part of the government, civil society, or both?\

This week, in the Posts Worth Reading By People I Generally Disagree With, Mike Petrilli says folks should stop calling public schools "government schools." 

MAGA Promotes “Same Old” Dangerous School Vouchers with a New “Culture War” Frame\

As always, Jan Resseger does a fine job of bringing together some excellent commentary on the continuing trouble of privatizing school.

Hate Definitely Has a Home Here

Nancy Flanagan wonders where we are as a nation, and how teachers are supposed to deal with it.

The Alarm Bell Experiment (n=1)

Matt Brady tries consuming a teen style online video diet, and he learns a few things in the process.

The AI Education Grift

Thomas Ultican has some doubts about the intentions of the AI-in-education crowd.

When Correlation Repeats Across 50 States

Jared Cooney Horvath is an author and scholar who did some research looking at the connection between those drooping NAEP scores and a state's digital adoption, and the results are... not good.

Logged In, Tuned Out

Meredith Coffey walks us through the last fifteen years of ed tech in this piece for the often=ignorable Education Next. But this piece has some solid sections (at last, someone who agrees with me that "digital natives" are not all that tech savvy). 

‘I wish I could push ChatGPT off a cliff’: professors scramble to save critical thinking in an age of AI

Alice Speri at The Guardian collects a few pointed reactions to the rise of AI and the attempts to resist.

Against Maxxing

John Warner looks at the bizarre world of maxxing and shares some thoughts (including education maxxing). "We are just fine as we are, my fellow humans."

Gullible, Cynical America

Adam Serwer at the Atlantic writes about how many of us have become both disbelievers and suckers all at the same time.

Class Action Alleges That Grammarly Misappropriated the Names of Journalists and Authors Through its “Expert Review” That Lets Users Get Feedback on Writing From Experts

The grifters at Grammarly have unloaded a new scam, and this time they're getting taken to court over it. May they lose, big time. More details here. 

Some music is best played on the back porch, maybe even with a dog. 

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Zuck's Ed Tech Baby Goes With A Whimper

A new chapter in the long story of Summit Learning.

Summit Schools were an early entry (2003) into the world of charters, with founder Diane Tavenner trying to do personalized learning the low tech way. Tavenner was reportedly a former teacher, asst. principal and a graduate of the Broad Faux Academy of Superintendenty Stuff: she served as the board chair for the California Charter Schools Association, a board that includes Joe Williams, head of DFER as a member). 

Mark Zuckerberg, fresh off a disastrous attempt to finance an overhaul of New Jersey schools,  ran across the Bay area school in 2014 and decided that he would give it not just an infusion of cash, but an infusion of technology. Including engineering support to "make this better." Summit became one of Zuckerberg's pet projects, and it was also beloved by that other well-connected super-rich education amateur, Bill Gates, who has some of his Top People promoting hell out of it.

Summit handed off its "education. in a box" program to all sorts of schools (about 400 at its peak) and it was yet another experimennt in large scale education-via-screen. 

Many folks did not love it. . Take a look at some of the comments in this piece "The Inherent Racism of Summit 'Public' (Charter) School." And many schools have backed away from the Mass Customized Learning Program (a term that deserves a place on the oxymoron shelf right next to Jumbo Shrimp and Peacekeeper Missiles).

Indiana, Pennsylvania schools tried to quietly implement Summit programming, and parents began to squawk almost immediately. After just one month

parents began telling the school board that their kids were not adjusting to the new learning style, that they found questionable and objectionable material in the recommended online resources in their classes, and that their children were spending too much time in front of computer screens

NY Magazine just profiled Cheshire, Connecticut, another town that fought back when the mass customized learning program came to town (or rather, the town came to them, since the Summit model involves logging on to the Summit website). The Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative had paid for the 130 Chromebooks needed, but once again, reality got in the way of CZI dreams.

Students rarely met with teachers, but instead had lots of screen time with a computer program that was reportedly easy to trick (just skip the lessons and go straight to the tests). The program still has glitches, including questions that cannot be answered correctly (maybe some nerdy programmer decided Summit needed its own Kobayashi Maru?) And there's the problem of the open-sourced playlists themselves:

Nothing about the platform said Silicon Valley more than the open-source approach to the “playlists.” Teachers were encouraged to customize them, to add and subtract — and Cheshire’s teachers were working on this, Superintendent Jeff Solan said in an email — but the base material was often just a bunch of links, to sites ranging from Kids Encyclopedia to SparkNotes to the BBC. I interviewed several educators who were involved in developing the platform in 2014, and when I mentioned this to one, he agreed they were “shoddy.” “We knew it,” he said. They were in such a hurry, he said, “we were just throwing things in there, that, at least from a Google search, looked reputable.”

Yikes. It's almost as if the actual education piece is secondary to some other part of the operation. I wonder what that could be...

And there was the question of data. Summit is clear about the 18 partners it shares its data with, and subjects itself to its own strong privacy agreements in addition to the legal protections around student data already in place, but parents and other locals were nonetheless concerned. “The Chromebooks were free. Nothing’s free. There’s always a reason,” said Mary Burnham, a retired educator who was part of the campaign against Summit. “If somebody’s giving you something free, chances are, they want something back, or they’re already getting something from it. As best I can tell, with Summit, it’s data.

Like the equally tech-heavy and success-light Altschool, Summit seemed to be one part market research and one part experiment on human lab rats, with the goal of finding proof of concept for computer-managed education. But mostly Altschool lost truckloads of money, and it eventually faded away into various other products and companies (Altitude Learning was one piece, apparently part of Guidepost Learning, another edu-prenuer undertaking that has since gone bankrupt). 

Traction was not happening for Summit, either. Chalkbeat found that 1 in 4 schools dropped the program by the 2018-19 school year.

In 2018, Summit spun the digital program off into a non-profit entity whose initial four-person board included Diane Tavenner, Summit founder; Priscilla Chan; and Peggy Alford, the CFO for CZI.It seemed suspiciously like a subsidiary of the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative. The program was designed to follow what has now become the familiar model-- students getting their education from a compter-manab=ged algorithm while (low-cost) "coaches" provided some human oversight in the room. Maybe not so much oversight as "accountability sinks," because somebody has to be responsible when things go south. But Summit even went so far as to create its own special farm for training "facilitators."

The National Education Policy Center took a look at Summit's learning system, and found that it was a lot more hat than cowboy (and it was also extraordinarily reluctant to submit to any examination of their work or results). 

So in 2023, CZI (not really pretending it hadn't swallowed Summit whole) spun Summit off again, this time an outfit called Gradient, which the CZI blog said "we can help these important research-based resources more consistently reach students and educators, by focusing on coherence for educators." "Consistency" and "coherence" come up a lot in the history of Summit, because Zuck and his friends repeatedly concluded that the reason the computer-managed curriculum in a box wasn't working better and winning hearts and minds was that teachers were not implementing it faithfully enough. Damned mat widgets.

Gradient was yet another company whose promised whiz-bangery invokes the the "whole student" and a "unified learning platform," and while it can be hard to see through the smokey argle bargle, it sure looks like Trascend also wants to make computer-managed software-delivered education a thing. With a "dedicated coach." 

Gradient was going to have things chugging along by the 2024-2025 school year, but in Februarty 2026, Gradient announced its "next chapter,"

Expanding the scale and impact of this work is more important than ever. After much deliberation with our board, we are pleased to share that the future of the Gradient Learning program will move to a new home at Transcend, a nonprofit dedicated to supporting schools and systems to create extraordinary experiences and outcomes for all students. Transcend brings the expertise to take our program to the next level, as well as the ability to amplify a community of education innovators working for lasting change.

Transcend is about "model sharing" and "community innovation." They want to "reimagine educator roles" and their Leaps toward Extraordinary Learning for All is just the same old "school hasn't changed in a century" and educatyion should be relevant and a lot of nice words about what education should be like that nobody should disagree with, given that they offer nothing in the way of specific techniques that teachers should use. They jpin. a whole long line of edu-prenuers who offer pretty ideals about what education should be like without addressing any of the nuts and bolt specifics, which is where teachers live and do their work. Agency! High expectations! Rigor! Not one size fiots all! I have no evidence, but it is entirely possible that Transcend is actually headquarterd on a farm upstate, where tired old reform mcliches can run and play and are definitely not euthanized.

There is a certain symmetry to this story, however. I didn't follow up on the various team members of Transcend, so who knows-- maybe none of them were in Teach for America. The board is largely investment and business types. The CEO is Aylon Samouha, whose previous jobs include  Chief Schools Officer at Rocketship Education and several years as a Senior Vice President at Teach For America, and I feel compelled to note, lists jazz guitar as one of his pursuits, so God bless him for that.

But the kicker. The board has two lifetime members. One is Stacey Childress, former CEO of New Schools Venture Fund, and the other is Diane Tavenner, currently listed as CEO and Co-founder of her latest ventures, Futre.me.

These are the stories I think of every time some reformbro tries to argue that in the private sector, when you fail there are consequences-- not like in public education. Maybe. But it sure seems that in the private sector, the invisible hand doesn't cut failure loose so much as it just shuffles it around, to kick back and forth from one doomed enterprise to another. Will the ghost of Summit ever be laid to final rest? It may take decades to find out.