David Labaree on Schooling, History, and Writing: What Schools Can’t Do

This post is the text of a lecture I gave in 2009 at the University of Berne.  It was originally published in the Swiss journal Zeitschrift für Pädagogische Historiographie and then found its way into my 2010 book, Someone Has to Fail.  Here is the link to the first published version. It’s about a longstanding problem in American educational policy:  We ask schools to pursue goals that are beyond their capabilities.  Schools are simply not very good at a lot of things we ask them to do.  They can’t promote equality, they can’t end poverty, they can’t create good jobs, they can’t drive economic growth, they can’t promote public health.  Yet we expect them to do all this heavy lifting for us. Part of the story is about why schools aren’t good at these things.  Another is why we keep giving them such assignments anyway.  The answer to the second, I suggest, is that we pass off on schools social problems that we are unwilling to accomplish through the political process, where the capability for success actually resides.  Instead of addressing these problems directly through political action, we foist them off on schools and then blame them for continually falling short of the desired goal.  Herein lies the reason why school reform has been such steady work.  Read and weep. Even if you’ve read this before, don’t miss the cartoons that I tucked into the text this time.  They’re worth a post all by themselves. WHAT SCHOOLS CAN’T DO: UNDERSTANDING THE CHRONIC FAILURE OF AMERICAN SCHOOL REFORM Americans have a long history of pinning their hopes on education as the way to realize compelling social ideals and solve challenging social problems.  We want schools to promote civic virtue, economic productivity, and social mobility; to alleviate inequalities in race, class, and gender; to improve health, reduce crime, and protect the environment.  So we assign these social missions to schools, and educators gamely accept responsibility for carrying them out.  When the school system inevitably falls far short of these goals, we initiate a wave of school reform to realign the institution with its social goals and ramp up its effectiveness in attaining them.  The result, as one pair of scholars has put it, is that educational reform in the U.S. is “steady work.”  In this lecture, I want to tell a story:  What history tells us about what schools cannot do. At its heart, this is a story grounded in paradox.  On the one hand, American schooling has been an extraordinary success.  It started as a small and peripheral enterprise in the 18th century and grew into a massive institution at the center of American society in the 21st, where it draws the lion’s share of the state budget and a quarter of the lives of citizens.  Central to its institutional success has been its ability to embrace and embody the social goals that have been imposed upon it.  Yet, in spite of continually recurring waves of school reform, education in the U.S. has been remarkably unsuccessful at implementing these goals in the classroom practices of education and at realizing these goals in the social outcomes of education. America, I suggest, suffers from a school syndrome.  We have set our school system up for failure by asking it to fix all of our most pressing social problems, which we are unwilling to address more directly through political action rather than educational gesture.  Then we blame the system when it fails.  Both as a society and as individuals, we vest our greatest hopes in an institution that is manifestly unsuited to realizing them.  In part the system’s failure is the result of a tension between our shifting social aims for education and the system’s own organizational momentum.  We created the system to solve a critical social problem in the early days of the American republic, and its success in dealing with this problem fooled us into thinking that we could redirect the system toward new problems as time passed.  But the school system has a mind of its own, and trying to change its direction is like trying to do a U-turn with a battleship. Today I will explore the failure of school reform to realize the central social goals that have driven it over the years.  And at the end I explore the roots of schooling’s failure in its role as an agent of social reform. The social missions of schooling in liberal democracies arise from the tensions that are inherent in such societies.  One of these tensions is between the demands of democratic politics and the demands of capitalist markets.  A related issue is the requirement that society be able to meet its collective needs while simultaneously guaranteeing the liberty of individuals to pursue their own interests.  In the American setting, these tensions have played out through the politics of education in the form of a struggle among three major social goals for the educational system.  One goal is democratic equality, which sees education as a mechanism for producing capable citizens.  Another is social efficiency, which sees education as a mechanism for developing productive workers.  A third is social mobility, which sees education as a mechanism for individuals to reinforce or enhance their social position. Democratic equality represents the political side of our liberal democratic values, focusing on the role of education in building a nation, forming a republican community, and providing citizens with the wide range of capabilities required to take part in democratic decision-making.  The other two goals represent the market side of liberal democracy.  Social efficiency captures the perspective of employers and taxpayers, who are concerned about the role of education in producing the job skills (human capital) that are required by the modern economy and that are seen as essential for economic growth and social prosperity.  From this angle the issue is for education to provide for the full range of productive skills and forms of knowledge required in the complex job structure of modern capitalism.  Social mobility captures the perspective of educational consumers and prospective employees, who are concerned about the role of educational credentials in signaling to the market which individuals should get the jobs with the most power, money, and prestige. The collectivist side of liberal democracy is expressed by a combination of democratic equality and social efficiency.  Both aim at having education provide broad social benefits, with both conceiving of education as a public good.  Investing in the political capital of the citizenry and the human capital of the workforce benefits everyone in society, including those families who do not have children in school.  In contrast, the social mobility goal represents the individualist side of liberal democracy.  From this perspective, education is a private good, which benefits only the student who receives educational services and owns the resulting diplomas.  Its primary function is to provide educational consumers with privileged access to higher level jobs in the competition with other prospective employees. So let me look at how well – or rather, how poorly – American schools have done at accomplishing these three social missions. Democratic Equality School systems around the world have been more effective at accomplishing their political mission than either their efficiency or mobility missions.  At the formative stage in the construction of a nation state, virtually anywhere in the world, education seems to have an important role to play.  The key contribution in this regard is that schooling helps form a national citizenry out of a collection of local identities.  One country after another developed a system of universal education at the point when it was trying to transform itself into a modern state, populated by citizens rather than subjects, with a common culture and a shared national identity.  For the U.S. in the early 19th century, the key problem during this transitional period was how to establish a modern social order based on exchange relations and democratic authority out of the remnants of a traditional social order based on patriarchal relations and feudal authority.  A system of public education helps to make this transition possible primarily by bringing a disparate group of youths in the community together under one roof and exposing them to a common curriculum and a common set of social experiences.  The result was to instill in students social norms that allowed them to emerge as self-regulating actors in the free market while still remaining good citizens and good Christians.  Creating such cultural communities is one of the few things that schools can consistently do well. So the evidence shows that at the formative stage, school systems in the U.S. and elsewhere have been remarkably effective in promoting citizenship and forming a new social order.  This is quite an accomplishment, which more than justifies the huge investment in constructing these systems.  And building on this capacity for forming community, schools have continued to play an important role as the agent for incorporating newcomers.  This has been particularly important in an immigrant society like the United States, where – from the Irish and Germans in the mid-19th century to the Mexicans and South Asians in the early 21st century – schools have been the central mechanism for integrating foreigners into the American experience. But the ability of schooling to promote democratic equality in the U.S. has had little to do with learning, it has faded over time, and it has been increasingly undermined by counter tendencies toward inequality.  First, note that when schools have been effective at community building, this had little to with the content of the curriculum or the nature of classroom teaching.  What was important was that schools provided a common experience for all students.  What they actually learned in school was irrelevant as long as they all were exposed to the same material.  It could have been anything.  It was the form of schooling more than its content that helped establish and preserve the American republic. Second, the importance of schooling in forming community has declined over time.  The common school system was critically important in the formative days of the American republic; but once the country’s continued existence was no longer in doubt, the role of the system grew less critical.  As a result, the more recent ways in which schools have come to promote citizenship have been more formalistic than substantive.  This is now embedded in classes on American history, speeches at school assemblies, pilgrim pageants around Thanksgiving, presidential portraits on classroom walls, and playing the national anthem before football games.  What had been the system’s foremost rationale for existence has now retreated into the background of a system more concerned with other issues. Third, and most important, however, the role of schools in promoting democratic equality has declined because schools have simultaneously been aggressively promoting social inequality.  One of the recurring themes of my book is that every move by American schools in the direction of equality has been countered by a strong move in the opposite direction.  When we created a common school system in the early 19th century, we also created a high school system to distinguish middle class students from the rest.  When we expanded access to the high school at the start of the 20th century, we also created a system for tracking students within the school and opened the gates for middle class enrollment in college.  When we expanded access to college in the mid-20th century, we funneled new students into the lower tiers of the system and encouraged middle class students to pursue graduate study.  The American school system is at least as much about social difference as about social equality.  In fact, as the system has developed, the idea of equality has become more formalistic, focused primarily on the notion of broad access to education at a certain level, while the idea of inequality has become more substantive, embodied in starkly different educational and social trajectories. Social Efficiency In the current politics of education, the goal of social efficiency plays a prominent role.  One of the central beliefs of contemporary economics, international development, and educational policy is that education is the key to economic development as a valuable investment in human capital.  Today it is hard to find a political speech, reform document, or opinion piece about education that does not include a paean to the critical role that education plays in developing human capital and spurring economic growth – and the need to reform schools in order to fix what’s wrong with the economy. Economists Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz have made a strong argument for the human capital vision of education in their recent book, The Race Between Education and Technology.  They argue that the extraordinary expansion of the American economy in the 20th century was to a large degree the result of an equally extraordinary expansion in educational enrollments during this period.  It is no coincidence, they say, that what turned out to be the American Century economically was also the Human Capital Century for the U.S. The numbers are indeed staggering.  In the United States education levels rose dramatically for most of the 20th century.  For those born between 1876 and 1951, the average number of years of schooling rose a total of 6 years, which is an increase of 0.8 years per decade.  This means that the average education level of the entire U.S. population rose from less than 8 years of grade school to two years of college in only 75 years.  The authors estimate that the growth in education in the U.S. accounted for between 12 and 17 percent of the growth in economic productivity across the 20th century, with the average educational contribution at 13.5 percent.  Put another way, they argue that increased education alone accounted for economic growth of about one-third of one percent per year from 1915-2005. One problem with this claim, however, is that the size of the human capital effect they show is relatively small.  On average they estimate that the growth in educational attainment accounted for less that 14 percent of the growth in economic productivity over the course of the 20th century.  That’s not negligible but it’s also not overwhelming.  This wouldn’t be a concern if education were a modest investment drawing a modest return, because every little bit helps when it comes to economic growth.  But that’s clearly not the case.  Education has long been the largest single expenditure of American state and local governments, which over the course of the 20th century devoured about 30 percent of their total budgets.  In 1995 this came to almost $400 billion in direct payments for elementary, secondary, and higher education.  In short, as costly as education is, it would seem that its economic benefits would need to be more substantial than they are in order to justify these expenses as a solid investment in the nation’s wealth instead of a large drain on this wealth. Another problem is that it is hard to establish that in fact education was the cause and economy the effect in this story.  The authors make clear that the growth in high school and college enrollments both exceeded and preceded demand for such workers from the economy.  Employers were not begging high schools to produce more graduates in order to meet the needs for greater skill in the workplace; instead they were taking advantage of a situation in which large numbers of educated workers were available, and could be hired without a large wage premium, for positions that in the past had not required this level of education.  So why not hire them?  And once these high school graduates were on the job, the employers may have found them useful to have around (maybe they required less training), so employers began to express a preference for high school graduates in future hiring.  But just because the workforce was becoming more educated didn’t mean that the presence of educated workers was the source of increases in economic productivity.  It could just as easily have been the other way around. Producing a large increase in high school graduates was enormously expensive, especially considering that the supply of these graduates was much greater than the economic demand for them.  But strong economic growth provided enough of a fiscal surplus that state and local governments were able afford to do so.  In short, it makes sense to think that it was economic growth that made educational growth possible.  We expanded high school because we could afford to.  And we wanted to do so not because we thought it would provide social benefits by improving the economy but instead because we hoped it would provide us with personal benefits.  The authors point out that the growth of high school enrollments was not the result of a reform movement.  Instead, the demand for high school came from educational consumers.  Middle class families saw high school and college as a way to gain an edge – or keep their already existing edge – in the competition for good jobs.  And working class families saw high school as a way to provide their children with the possibility of a better life than their own.  The demand came from the bottom up not the top down.  Administrative progressives later capitalized on the growth of the high school by trying to harness it for their own social efficiency agenda, as expressed in the 1918 Cardinal Principles report.  But by then the process of high school expansion was already well under way, with little help from them. The major accomplishment of the American school system was not necessarily that it provided education but that it provided access.  The system may or may not have been effective at teaching students the kinds of skills and knowledge that would economically useful, but it was quite effective at inviting students into the schools and keeping them there for an extended period of time.  Early in their book, Goldin and Katz identify what they consider to be the primary “virtues” of the American educational system as it developed before the civil war and continued into the 20th century.  In effect, these virtues of the system all revolve around its broad accessibility.  They include:  “public provision by small, fiscally independent districts; public funding; secular control; gender neutrality; open access; and a forgiving system.” Note that none of these virtues of the American school system speaks to learning the curriculum.  Instead all have to do with the form of the system, in particular its accessibility and flexibility.  I thoroughly agree.  But for the human capital argument that Goldin and Katz are trying to make, these virtues of the system pose a problem.  How was the system able to provide graduates with the skills needed to spur economic growth when the system’s primary claim to fame was that it invited everyone in and then was reluctant to penalize anyone for failing to learn?  In effect, the system’s greatest strength was its low academic standards.  If it had screened students more carefully on the way in and graded them more scrupulously on their academic achievement, high school and college enrollments and graduation rates never would have expanded so rapidly and we would all be worse off.  This brings us to the third goal of education, social mobility. Social Mobility In liberal democracies in general, and in the United States in particular, hope springs eternal that expanding educational opportunity will increase social mobility and social equality.  This has been a prime factor in the rhetoric of the American educational reform movements for desegregation, standards, and choice.  But the evidence to support that hope simply doesn’t exist.  The problem is this:  In the way that education interacts with social mobility and social equality, both of these measures of social position are purely relative.  Both are cases of what social scientists call a zero sum game:  A + B = 0.  If A goes up then B must go down in order to keep the sum at zero.  If one person gets ahead of someone else on the social ladder, then that other person has fallen behind.  And if the social differences between two people become more equal, then the increase in social advantage for one person means the decrease in social advantage for the other.  Symmetry is built into both measures. Although social equality is inherently relative, it is possible to think of social mobility in terms of absolute rather than relative position.  During the 20th century in the U.S., the proportion of agricultural, manufacturing, and other blue collar workers declined while the proportion of clerical, managerial, professional, and other white collar workers rose.  At the same time the proportion of  people with a grade school education declined while the proportion with more advanced education rose.  So large numbers of families had the experience in which parents were blue collar and their children white collar, parents had modest education and their children had more education.  In absolute terms, therefore, social mobility from blue collar to white collar work during this period was substantial, as children not only moved up in job classification compared to their parents but also gained higher pay and a higher standard of living.  And this social mobility was closely related to a substantial rise in education levels.  This was a great success story, and it is understandable why those involved would attribute these social gains to education.  For large numbers of Americans, it seemed to confirm the adage: to get a good job, get a good education.  Schooling seemed to help people move up the ladder. At the individual level, this perception was quite correct.  In the 20th century, it became the norm for employers to set minimum educational qualifications for jobs, and in general the amount of education required rose as one moved up the occupational ladder.  Youths overall had a strong incentive to pursue more education in order to reap social and economic rewards.  Economic studies regularly demonstrate a varying but substantial return on a family’s investment in education for their children.  For example, one estimate shows that males between 1914 and 2005 earned a premium in lifetime earnings for every year of college that ranged from 8 to 14 percent.  That makes education a great investment for families – better than the stock market, which had an average annual return of about 8 percent during the same period. What is true for some individuals, however, is not necessarily true for society as a whole.  As I explained about social efficiency, it is not clear that increasing the number of college graduates leads to an increase in the number of higher-level jobs for these graduates to fill.  To me it seems more plausible to look at the connection between education and jobs this way:  The economy creates jobs, and education is the way we allocate people to those jobs.  Candidates with more education qualify for better jobs.  What this means is that social mobility becomes a relative thing, which depends on the number of individuals with a particular level of education at a given time and the number of positions requiring this level of education that are available at that same time.  If there are more positions than candidates at that level, all of the qualified candidates get the jobs along with some who have lower qualifications; but if there are more candidates than positions, then some qualified applicants will end up in lower level positions.  So the economic value of education varies according to the job market.  An increase in education without a corresponding increase in higher level jobs in the economy will reduce the value of a degree in the market for educational credentials. This poses a problem for the chances of social mobility between parents and children.  After all, children are not competing with their parents for jobs; they’re competing with peers.  And like themselves, their peers have a higher level of education than their parents do.  In relative terms, they only have an advantage in the competition for jobs if they have gained even more education than their peers have.  Educational gains relative to peers are what matter not gains relative to parents.  As a result, rates of social mobility have not increased over time as educational opportunity has increased, and societies with more expansive educational systems do not have higher mobility rates. Raymond Boudon and others have shown that the problem is that increases in access to education affect everyone, both those who are trying to get ahead and those who are already ahead.  Early in the 20th century, working class parents had a grade school education and their children poured into high schools in order to get ahead; but at the same time, middle class parents had a high school education and their children were pouring into colleges.  So both groups increased education and their relative position remained the same.  The new high school graduates didn’t get ahead by getting more education; they were running just to stay in place.  The new college graduates didn’t necessarily get ahead either, but they did manage to stay ahead. So school reform in the U.S. has failed to increase social mobility or reduce social inequality.  In fact, without abandoning our identity as a liberal democracy, there was simply no way that educational growth could have brought about these changes.  School reform can only have a chance to equalize social differences if it can reduce the gap in educational attainment between middle class students and working class students.  This is politically impossible in a liberal democracy, since it would mean restricting the ability of the middle class to pursue more and better education for their children.  As long as both groups gain more education in parallel, then the advantages of the one over the other will not decline.  And that is exactly the situation in the American school system.  It’s the compromise that has emerged from the interaction between reform and market, between social planning and consumer action: we expand opportunity and preserve advantage, both at the same time.  From this perspective, the defining moment in the history of American education was the construction of the tracked comprehensive high school, which was a joint creation of consumers and reformers in the progressive era.  That set the pattern for everything that followed.  It’s a system that is remarkably effective at allowing both access and advantage, but it’s not one that reformers tried to create.  In fact, it works against the realization of central aims of reform, since it undermines social efficiency, blocks social mobility, and limits democratic equality. These three goals, however, have gained expression in the American educational system in at least two significant ways.  First, they have maintained a highly visible presence in educational rhetoric, as the politics of education continuously pushes these goals onto the schools and the schools themselves actively express their allegiance to these same goals.  Second, schools have adopted the form of these goals into their structure and process.  Democratic equality has persisted in the formalism of social studies classes, school assemblies, and the display of political symbols.  Social efficiency has persisted in the formalism of vocational classes, career days, and standards-based testing.  Social mobility has persisted in the formalism of grades, credits, and degrees, which students accumulate as they move through the school system. Roots of the Failure of School Reform to Resolve Social Problems In closing, let me summarize the reasons for the continuing failure of school reform in the U.S. The Tensions Among School Goals:  One reason for the failure of reform to realize the social goals expressed in it is that these goals reflect the core tensions within a liberal democracy, which push both school and society in conflicting directions.  One of those tensions is between the demands of democratic politics and the demands of capitalist markets.  A related issue is the requirement that society be able to meet its collective needs while simultaneously guaranteeing the liberty of individuals to pursue their own interests.  As we have seen, these tensions cannot be resolved one way or the other if we are going to remain a liberal democracy, so schools will inevitably fail at maximizing any of these goals.  The result is going to be a muddled compromise rather than a clear cut victory in meeting particular expectations.  The apparently dysfunctional outcomes of the educational system, therefore, are not necessarily the result of bad planning, deception, or political cynicism; they are an institutional expression of the contradictions in the liberal democratic mind. The Tendency Toward Organizational Conservatism:  There is also another layer of impediment that lies between social goals and their fulfillment via education, and that is the tension between education’s social goals and its organizational practices.  Schools gain their origins from social goals, which they dutifully express in an institutional form, as happened with the construction of the common school system.  This results in the development of school organization, curriculums, pedagogies, professional roles, and a complex set of occupational and organizational interests.  At this more advanced stage, schools and educators are no longer simply the media for realizing social aspirations; they become major actors in the story.  As such, they shape what happens in education in light of their own needs and interests, organizational patterns,  and professional norms and practices.  And this then becomes a major issue in educational reform.  Such reforms are what happens after schooling is already in motion organizationally, when society seeks to assign new ideals to education or revive old ones that have fallen into disuse, thus initiating an effort to transform the institution toward the pursuit of different ends.  But at that point society is no longer able simply to project its values onto the institution it created to express these values; instead it must negotiate an interaction with an ongoing enterprise.  As a result, reform has to change both the values embedded in education and the formal structure itself, which may well resist.  As I have shown elsewhere, three characteristics of the American school system – loose coupling, weak instructional control, and teacher autonomy – have made this system remarkably effective at blocking reforms from reaching the classroom. Reformer Arrogance:  Another problem that leads to the failure of school reform is simple arrogance.  School reformers spin out an abstract vision of what school and society should be, and then they try to bring reality in line with the vision.  But this abstract reformist grid doesn’t map comfortably onto the parochial and idiosyncratic ecology of the individual classroom.  Trying to push too hard to make the classroom fit the grid may destroy the ecology of learning there; and adapting the grid enough to make it workable in the classroom may change the reform to the point that its original aims are lost.  Reformers are loath to give up their aims in the service of making the reform acceptable to teachers, so they tend to plow ahead in search of ways to get around the obstacles.  If they can’t make change in cooperation with teachers, then they will have to so in spite of them.  They see a crying need to fix a problem through school reform, and they have developed a theory for how to do this, which looks just great on paper.  Standing in the state capital or the university, they are far from the practical realities of the classroom, and they tend to be impatient with demands that they should respect the complexity of the settings in which they are trying to intervene. The Marginality of School Reform to School Change:  Finally, we need to remind ourselves that school reform has always been only a small part of the broader process of school change.  Reform movements are deliberate efforts by groups of people to change schools in a direction they value and to resolve a social problem that concerns them.  We measure the success of these movements by the degree to which the outcomes match the intentions of the reformers.  But there’s another player in the school change game, and that’s the market.  By this I mean the accumulated actions of educational consumers who are pursuing their own interests through the schooling of their children.  From the colonial days, when the expressed purpose of schooling was to support the one true faith, consumers were pursuing literacy and numeracy for reasons that had nothing to do with religion and a lot to do with enhancing their ability to function in a market society. That very personal and practical dimension of education was there from the beginning, even though no one wanted to talk about it, much less launch a reform movement in its name.  And this individual dimension of schooling has only expanded its scope over the years, becoming larger in the late 19th century and then dominant in the 20th century, as increasingly educational credentials became the ticket of admission for the better jobs.  The fact that public schools have long been creatures of politics – established, funded, and governed through the medium of a democratic process – means that they have been under unrelenting pressure to meet consumer demand for the kind of schooling that will help individuals move up, stay up, or at least not drop down in their position in the social order.  This pressure is exerted through individual consumer actions, such as by attending school or not, going to this school not that one, enrolling in this program not some other program.  It is also exerted by political actions, such as by supporting expansion of educational opportunity and preserving educational advantage in the midst of wide access. These actions by consumers and voters have brought about significant changes in the school system, even though these changes have not been the aim of any of the consumers themselves.  They have not been acting as reformers with a social cause but as individuals pursuing their own interests through education, so the changes they have produced in schooling by and large have been inadvertent.  Yet these unintended effects of consumer action have often derailed or redirected the intended effects of school reformers.  They created the comprehensive high school, dethroned social efficiency, pushed vocational education to the margins, and blocked the attack on de facto segregation.  Educational consumers may well keep the current school standards movement from meeting its goals if they feel that standards, testing, and accountability are threatening educational access and educational advantage.  They may also pose an impediment to the school choice movement, even though it is being carried out explicitly in their name.  For consumers may feel more comfortable tinkering with the system they know than in taking the chance that blowing up this system might produce something that is less suited to serving their needs.  In the American system of education, it seems, the consumer – not the reformer – has long been king.

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Second Breakfast: Who Is Ed-Tech For?

Who is ed-tech for? The marketing copy -- whether on websites or in PowerPoint or in TED Talks and the like -- will all insist that ed-tech is, at the end of the day, for "the students." Even the products that are pitched to make teachers' and principals' and professors' lives easier do so with the promise that, at the end of the day, it's all in the service of helping students learn better -- making education, in the words of Daft Punk, "harder, better, faster, stronger," although we'd sure want to add in "cheaper" as well. But ed-tech has largely and consistently failed to do that. The reasons are many. But one of them may just be that ed-tech isn't actually designed or built for students (or teachers); it isn't often bought by students (or teachers). While the stories about what ed-tech can do might appeal to lots of people -- ah, that genial robotic rhythm: "harder, better, faster, stronger" -- there's often a massive gulf between the ed-tech imaginary and a real educational experience. Who is ed-tech for? I haven't stopped thinking about this question lately -- in part because it gets at the heart of what I think* is going to be the history I cover in my next book. (More to come on that soon / someday, LOL.) I haven’t stopped thinking about this question since I read the story about the "lifelike" robot teacher purchased by Salamanca Central School District -- I wrote about this in last week's newsletter: a classroom technology built by a company that previously sold sex- and companion robots. Who sat in the meeting where this idea was pitched? Who thought that this was a good idea? Who looked at the mock-ups for Sally the sexbot and thought “great idea!” “Let’s do this for the children!” Who is ed-tech for? I haven’t stopped thinking about this question since the release of Claude for Teachers, which has been received with a fair amount of pushback and derision -- and in the case of one district, blocking it altogether. Indeed, it’s right there in the name of the product, isn’t it: this is for teachers. But as Ben Riley asks, “why?” Why, particularly when much of Anthropic’s success has come from a pitch made to “the enterprise,” to the managerial imagination of big business, do this for teachers -- that is, why build for and market to individual teachers? Why bypass district decision-making and district governance? And importantly here, why make teachers (and not schools or districts as the law dictates) be the ones responsible for protecting student data and student privacy? Of course, we might read Ben’s question “why” in a more existential light too: like, why does this even exist? And we might channel my friend David Golumbia -- may he rest in peace -- and answer, with full confidence, that it should not. But here, as with so much of ed-tech (and arguably almost all of “AI”), we can see that this effort really only works for the company itself. This is about gaining access to public funding but more importantly to classroom data, as the “AI” industry needs to continually aggregate and extract more and more realms of human-created data so that their models don’t collapse. This is about cornering a market (or preventing their competitors from doing so); this is about trying to establish the ultimate in vendor lock-in, one that is not simply the cultivation of brand loyalty but of cognitive dependence as well. Who is ed-tech for? As it stands, “AI” has yet to find its killer app, in education or anywhere. (Other than plagiarizing essays and cheating on homework, I suppose.) We’re years into this so-called revolution, and there really isn’t anything other than a bunch of anecdotes about how so-and-so found a nifty way to do such-and-such a bit faster, a lot wordier (although certainly not more cheaply). These stories of small bureaucratic victories -- and golly, congrats if that’s you, LOL -- aren’t really enough for an industry that has promised to change everything forever, to do everything forever. In schools, “AI” promises to be the teacher, the tester, the grader, the therapist, the librarian, the researcher, the administrator, the security officer, the bus driver, the office secretary, the coach, and the student. Anyone who knows anything about education knows that that means this technology actually works for no one but the storyteller (the hustler) himself. Elsewhere... “Some Kids Will Never Think AI Is Cool,” Elana Klein reports in Wired “I think that [AI] should stand for artificial idiot” – Marian Agnew, age 9 “Can you rewire your brain?” -- what the “brain is a computer” metaphor gets wrong “When A.I. Is a Member of the Family” -- well, this piece by Jessica Contrera in The New Yorker was just wildly depressing Also depressing: “AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making” by Nikhil Suresh -- “Fight the good fight, and don't let the bastards grind you down. Godspeed.” Sometimes it’s the cooing over “AI” in education that drives me to despair; other times, it’s when someones starts a sentence with the phrase “I listened to a podcast called Sold A Story...” Anyway, please “Stop Saying Kids Can’t Read” writes Megan Greenwell in Wired “The effect of ChatGPT on educators’ lives is catastrophic. Whether you intended to do it or not, you’ve made every teacher’s life infinitely more difficult than it was two years ago. So, just let that settle in . . . “If students are using it to compose, which is the biggest tragedy of all, they’ll never learn to write. And their voice is stolen from them. They’ll never have the ability to say their truth and tell their own story. And that’s silencing an entire generation or two.” -- Dave Eggers, speaking truth to power to their faces at OpenAI “AI” is just a symptom of a much deeper rot that’s wearing away at trust and accountability and yes, democratic education. It’s a rot bound up in white supremacy and imperialism and fraud. It plays out in ways big and small, such as in the National Civics Contest, as Sam Fortier writes about in NOTUS “‘We Started Calling It Baby Prison’ -- A pattern of horrific alleged child abuse has marred Bright Horizons’ image. Why are parents still signing up?” – what privatization, and particularly private equity, does to education. But yeah, I'm sure this time things'll be different with ed-tech (Image credits) Today’s bird is the laughing gull. So named for its call, this bird is an opportunistic scavenger. And I’m not pointing fingers or naming names here, but yeah. Maybe I am.  

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Nancy Bailey's Education Website: The Many Ways to Set Kindergartners Up to Hate Math!

Math is a wonderful subject! It opens doors to incredible careers in science and to life’s great mysteries. But if it’s not approached right, early learners could become frightened of it. I’ve known students who dread the sound of the word math. Of course, dozens of books offer help to conquer math anxiety. For teachers, getting math instruction right is critical, starting early. The way math instruction is handled could make or break a child’s spirit and teach them to either love or hate math. Here are a few points I hope you’ll consider. High-stakes testing and the word rigor have no place in kindergarten. Rigor hearkens back to NCLB and no-excuses. It goes even further back to A Nation at Risk, which falsely made public schools appear unsuccessful. It implies that teachers fail. Rigor has no place in kindergarten or introducing math to a five-year-old. States shouldn’t hop on the rigor train. California is an example. Concerned with children failing math in third grade, the focus there is on a math test to see if they [kindergartners] can face the rigors of first grade! But throwing assessment at California’s kids isn’t new. Kindergartners there haven’t exactly been rambunctiously enjoying play in the California sunshine. They’re not test-deficient, as California frameworks from 2023 show, and the state had standards long before this. So let’s say children aren’t understanding math or doing well in it. Does it make sense to get tougher? Wouldn’t it be wiser to revisit the standards? If Californians already know their students aren’t doing well in math, why not learn if students like it and, if not, why? It seems like it’s time to look closer at the standards for age appropriateness. How are girls treated when it comes to learning math? Gender gaps have existed in schools for years. Concerns still flourish that teachers hold biases that girls have lower mathematical ability than boys. Today’s anti-women climate doesn’t help. Who’s considering this issue in public schools? If expectations are a concern, where’s the change in schools to encourage and help females better understand math? What about the effects of Common Core State Standards? Standards in general have focused primarily on reading and math, and mostly reading, ignoring many other subjects that children would find interesting. The Overview of California’s Approach to Mathematics from 2024 shows that California implemented the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics in 2010. It was updated in 2013. Remember, 500 early childhood specialists originally described the CCSS as developmentally inappropriate (Strauss, 2013). If students aren’t doing well, why aren’t so-called experts reconsidering the CCSS? Not all children get preschool, setting up differences in math understanding. A critical point across the country is that not all students have been attending preschool or kindergarten. It’s obvious that some children will know counting and math concepts better than others when they have earlier exposure to math. California is working to offer Transitional Kindergarten to more children, which could raise math skills as long as it involves age appropriate math and consideration of student ability. Children who understand various math concepts when they enter kindergarten should not have to relearn those skills (Engel et.al, 2013). But that’s what might happen if teachers teach direct math instruction to the whole class. Then again, if students miss preschool and later in kindergarten or first grade are identified as behind, when they simply haven’t learned the material, they could be seen unjustly as math failures. Reardon and Galindo (2009) found that first and second generation immigrants from mostly non-English speaking homes, might start kindergarten with low math and reading skills, but showed the greatest improvement with assistance. Also note, just because preschoolers learned math concepts early, doesn’t mean that they enjoyed it. Help children see math in other subjects. Over the years the separate and heavy focus on reading and math has been detrimental to children’s learning of other subjects. While each subject deserves its own serious study, showing children how math fits in other subjects makes it more real. How many books that children can read celebrate math like, Michael Whaite’s 100 Cats and Norman Juster’s The Phantom Tollbooth? If children don’t have access to reading books they enjoy, math too could suffer. Do children get the kind of science instruction that creates curiosity, or is there just pressure to master skills for tests? How many children face screens to learn math? Many math programs involve online instruction. While some online math programs might be fun for early learners, a little goes a long way. And it doesn’t appear to help children do better in math or reading. A 2025 report from JAMA showed that higher parent-reported total screen time and TV and digital media time were associated with lower reading and math achievement on standardized tests in elementary school.   What’s meant by developmentally appropriate for kindergarten? The problem with stating that early learners can do higher level mathematics is that it may be true for some children, but not all. Standards that sweep all children up with the same expectations to understand higher level math concepts earlier than ever will find many children failing. How can a child be behind if they are doing the developmental work that used to be the norm for kindergarten ? It’s wrong to expect all children to be at the same point in learning and aligned with standards, and it certainly isn’t a reason to disgrace California’s kids by plastering headlines about their dismal scores! Kindergarten math should be flexible, permitting children to move along at their developmental rate of speed. The Science of Math emphasizes explicit instruction aligning to standards.   Controversy surrounds the Science of Reading, used to sell many unproven usually online programs. Now there’s the Science of Math which will likely align standards to children even further and sell more online programs. Will such negative attention to learning math so early create math anxiety? Math anxiety is real for young children, and once they build up fear it will be hard to generate their interest in math in the future. Children hear adults and they understand when all they hear is math crisis talk. No one likes a subject they suck at. This is especially true for students with generalized anxiety, who could develop anxiety surrounding math, especially girls (Svraka et. al., 2024). ______________________ Standards have dominated public education for years. Instead of being a simple guide to steer children’s learning, they’ve been used negatively, aligning children to the tests and pretending there is one right way to learn at X time for all. Children who don’t align with the standards may be forced to undergo remediation, made to feel like they are lacking, where they were simply working according to their age and development. What are math activities that match a child’s development, that kindergarteners will respond positively to, and which will help them to learn more math in the future? Ask a qualified early childhood educator who has studied child development and how young children learn from a reputable university education school. They will be able to tell you. References Engel, M., Claessens, A., & Finch, M. A. (2013). Teaching Students What They Already Know? The (Mis)Alignment Between Mathematics Instructional Content and Student Knowledge in Kindergarten. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 35(2), 157–178. https://doi.org/10.3102/0162373712461850 Svraka, B., Álvarez, C., & Szücs, D. (2024). Anxiety predicts math achievement in kindergarten children. Frontiers in Psychology, 15, 1335952. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1335952 Reardon, S. F., & Galindo, C. (2009). The Hispanic-White Achievement Gap in Math and Reading in the Elementary Grades. American Educational Research Journal, 46(3), 853–891. https://doi.org/10.3102/0002831209333184 Strauss, V. (2013, January 29). A Tough Critic of Common Core on Early Childhood Education. The Washington Post, Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2013/01/29/a-tough-critique-of-common-core-on-early-childhood-education/  

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Curmudgucation: 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?  

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Diane Ravitch's Blog: Freddy DeBoer: No, American Schools Are Not Failing

Freddy DeBoer challenges the oft-repeated claim that American schools are failing. We have heard the same lament since 1983, when the Reagan administration published a pamphlet titled “A Nation at Risk.” That publication, the work of the National Commission on Educational Excellence, proclaimed that America’s schools, once the envy of the world, were caught in “a rising tide of mediocrity.” The report gathered every possible negative statistic about public schools and turned them into a jeremiad. Governors formed task forces and agreed that what the nation needed most was lots more testing, which eventually turned schools into a cash cow for the testing industry. Worse, it made test scores the goal of education, not a measure. George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind law, passed in January 2002, made the pursuit of higher test scores a federal mandate, accompanied by harsh and punitive measures for schools that were unable to produce the ever higher test scores. NCLB was followed by Obama’s equally punitive Race to the Top in 2010. Not only were schools targeted for not raising test scores, but individual teachers were singled out and punished. Schools were closed, teachers were fired, charter schools became a new panacea–which failed as panaceas tend to do. The Bush brothers–President George W. and Florida Governor Jeb–claimed that accountability was the ultimate key to success. But in the absence of dramatic test score gains, Jeb and other Republicans decided that vouchers were the ultimate panacea: no accountability, just choose any school you want, be it religious, private, online, or homeschooling. Quality no longer mattered. Accountability no longer mattered (except for the majority of students who continued to enroll in public schools and continued to take the standardized tests). Just choice. Go back to the beginning: that infamous report called “A Nation at Risk.” One of the staff members who wrote the report was a young man named James Harvey. In 2023, on the 40th anniversary of the release of that influential report, James Harvey wrote an article declaring that the conclusions of the report were vastly overstated. He wrote an article in The Washington Post about “how we cooked the books.” Freddy DeBoer probably didn’t read James Harvey’s brilliant and disturbing article. But he writes from the same perspective. Our public schools have been the target of a huge smear job. The smear was a fake. It was used to promote charter schools and vouchers. Many of our public schools are excellent. Some are in desperate need of desperate measures, like reduced class sizes, wraparound services for students and families. They are not worse than they used to be. Ninety percent of our population attended public schools. Their graduates created the most powerful nation in the world. Can we do better? Of course, especially for children with the greatest needs. Are public schools failing? No. This is what DeBoer thinks: The belief that American public schools are an international embarrassment, sites of endless failure, is one of the few things our polarized political system seems to agree on. After all, the transition from George W. Bush’s presidential education policy to that of Barack Obama was one of remarkable continuity, based on a shared premise: Our schools were in a broad state of emergency. Today, politicians of both parties still tell that story, as do op-ed pages and nonprofit organizations and bipartisan cable panels. The notion has hardened into an axiom, a claim so familiar that the people making it no longer feel obligated to back it up with evidence. But we don’t have to buy this narrative, and we shouldn’t — because the evidence tells us that the narrative just isn’t true. The best way to consider a country’s educational performance is in relation to the performance of international peers, and the most authoritative international benchmark is the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) exam, which tests 15-year-olds across 81 education systems. In the most recent results, from 2022, American students tested better in reading than 68 of the 80 other systems and well above the international average. In science, they bested 56 of 80. Math is our weakest subject, but even there we outscore 43 systems and tie with a dozen more, meaning that on our worst day we still do better than more than half the developed world. Our top performers look particularly good on the PISA; for example, 14 percent of American teenagers scored at the highest level in reading, double the OECD average.  Some critics note that our education system is expensive and say that we should demand better results for our money. But this demand implies that there’s a straightforward relationship between per-pupil spending and test scores; decades of evidence demonstrate that there is not. And the results show that we produce many sterling students for our money.GLOBE STAFF; ROB Z/ADOBE Indeed, the students at the top of our system aren’t merely fine; they’re the best on earth. American teams have placed in the top three at the International Mathematical Olympiad every year for a decade and won or tied for first in 2015, 2016, 2018, 2019, and 2024. In 2025, all five members of the US physics team won gold at the International Physics Olympiad, making the United States the only country to sweep gold that year. Our chemistry, biology, informatics, linguistics, and other teams collect medals year after year. These are overwhelmingly public-school kids from ordinary suburban and urban districts, outcompeting the best academic talent the world can produce. You rarely read about them because their success doesn’t fit the declinist story. But scores are dropping, aren’t they? Yes, and that’s exactly why international context matters. The 2022 PISA results showed an unprecedented worldwide collapse, with average scores across the OECD falling roughly 10 points in reading and 15 in math. When students in Germany, Norway, and New Zealand decline in lockstep with students in Arizona and Connecticut, the cause is plainly not American teachers, unions, or curricula. (My own guess is that the smartphone is to blame, but I can’t prove it.) Even as our raw scores fell, our international rank rose in all three subjects because our peers’ scores fell further. Again, when was the last time you heard that in our media? None of this is to deny that some American schools are in crisis. But those failures aren’t spread evenly across our system; they’re concentrated in a small number of places suffering from poverty, structural racism, and institutional decline. The United States has the highest child-poverty rate in the OECD (roughly a quarter of our children live in poverty, versus less than 10 percent in top-scoring nations like Finland and Denmark) and our socioeconomic and demographic stratification is pronounced. As such, our aggregate scores on assessments like PISA are weighed down disproportionately by disadvantaged students.  In Detroit, which sits at the bottom of every large urban US district tested, two-thirds of students were chronically absent in a recent year, speaking to a lack of stability and resources at the family level. What teachers could succeed in those conditions? Cleveland, Baltimore, districts in the impoverished rural areas of West Virginia — they all tell a similar story. The American schools that struggle the worst share no common curriculum, union contract, or pedagogy. What they share is extreme poverty, segregation, and decades of disinvestment — in local labor markets, transportation, and health care. Imagine swapping the students of Detroit with those of wealthy Bloomfield Hills next door, where the schools have excellent performance metrics. Does anyone believe the students from Detroit would suddenly excel?  Simply shoveling money at urban schools is not the answer. In fact, poorer, higher-minority schools in the United States receive significantly more per-pupil funding than richer and whiter schools. As it stands, the teachers in the Detroit public school system are asked to achieve similar results to the ones in the Bloomfield system, despite the vast disparities in living and learning environments of the students they teach.  I’m known to be very skeptical about the influence of schools and teachers on test scores, which tend to reflect the socioeconomic conditions of groups and the variation in talent levels between individuals. But you don’t have to share my views in that regard to acknowledge that our worst-performing schools face conditions that no amount of teaching quality can overcome. And consider a fact that’s almost never reported: America’s most disadvantaged students, those in the bottom international decile in socioeconomic status, rank sixth out of 64 comparable nations in math. In other words, even in the midst of all that poverty and dysfunction, our poorest kids outperform almost all of the world’s other poorest kids. The problem is not that our schools fail poor children at an unusual rate. It is that some of our communities are deprived to a scandalous degree. In sum, our median student does just fine, our best students are the envy of the world, but our worst-performing students drag down our averages in a way that makes our overall performance look much worse than it is — and those extreme negative outliers are almost universally found in communities with intense socioeconomic challenges. This resolves a puzzle that has baffled pollsters for 40 years. American parents consistently rate the nation’s schools quite poorly while giving their own children’s schools high marks. Average grades for the American school system writ large typically fall in the C or D range, but more than three-quarters of parents typically give their own kids’ schools an A or B. Often this is regarded as a kind of cognitive bias, of irrationality on the part of those parents; surely, they must be viewing their own schools with rose-colored glasses, or so the conventional wisdom has long held. In fact, that attitude makes perfect sense when you reflect on the quantitative reality I’ve described: Most American K-12 schools and students really are doing quite well, which is reflected in the high marks parents give to their own local schools, but like all of us, parents have heard the relentless doomsaying about the country’s schools. Parents judge their own schools from direct experience and the national system from what they see on television. That is, on the question they actually know something about, about which they have the best evidence, they’re quite positive, and they have every reason to be. The myth of universal failure didn’t come out of nowhere, and for the record I don’t think it was born entirely in bad faith. Some of the people who spread it were no doubt animated by a real and decent impulse to improve the lives of American children, saw the awful conditions in our inner cities, and overextrapolated their impression of school failure. Others were likely so motivated to attack public schools for ideological reasons that they didn’t care much about misrepresenting the data. Whatever the motives, over time it became far too common for politicians, pundits, and members of the media to take data that showed a handful of distressed communities dragging down otherwise strong averages and present it as proof that American education was rotten from root to branch. An honest reading pointed toward investing in poor places and pursuing avenues for shared prosperity other than just schooling; the sensationalist reading pointed toward dismantling public schools. Many people chose the sensationalist one and repeated it until it became something “everybody knew.” The stakes are significant. If the failures of American education really are systemwide, the response has to be wholesale reform — new national mandates and perhaps a federal takeover of local education policy; even more standardized testing; the criminalization of teacher unions; private school vouchers for all. But the reality is that our educational failure is concentrated, and it’s concentrated in predictable places, which means the remedy must be too: Serious investment for the communities where poverty has done its damage, not merely for the schools that sit inside them, along with an effort to build more pathways to middle class stability for those who are not academically motivated. There is some evidence that such investment, for example in environmental cleanup or direct financial assistance for poorer families, can improve learning outcomes. There too, though, the evidence is contested and the effects unclear. But this investment offers obvious advantages: Even if bringing more money and development into poor communities does not close academic gaps, the direct economic advantages will endure.  These efforts are both harder and more expensive than yet another round of complaining about teachers and their unions, but they have the advantage of potentially solving real problems. If we have a moral duty to improve our schools, as the school reformers insist, then that begins with a moral duty to tell the truth.

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First Fish Chronicles: Beware the EdTech Industry Rebrand: Part 2

In Part 1 of Beware the EdTech Industry Rebrand: Extreme Makeover: EdTech Edition, we highlighted how the EdTech industry is not only aware of the growing grassroots backlash to their products, but attempting to reframe the narrative and cast themselves in a more favorable light. We can see right through it. Image source:u/SklounceDraxer / Via reddit.com, www.vintage.es, www.cchd.net, Stockcake “Screenwashing”: Out, Out Damn Spot The backlash to EdTech is not actually about “screentime” (too much vs. too little). The backlash is in response to the fact that the business model of Big Tech and EdTech companies is in direct conflict with healthy child development. Parents and schools want advice about how to use technology with children–that’s a good thing. Problems arise, however, when that advice is given by groups who benefit from children using their product. Just like the term “greenwashing” in which a company attempts to appear “earth-friendly“ by coloring their product green or using phrases like “all natural,” the term “screenwashing” describes “the phenomenon whereby social media platforms, such as YouTube and Instagram, pretend to be more socially responsible than they actually are.”1 We are now witnessing “screenwashing” happen in the EdTech world too. In fact, there’s a pretty predictable pattern that occurs when growing resistance forces these extreme makeovers or rebrands. As our friend Jodi Carreon of Schools Beyond Screens notes, the “screenwashing playbook” is easily identifiable: Flatten parents’ concerns down to “screentime.” Insist that we’re confusing or conflating consumer tech with “evidence-based, purpose-built” EdTech. Frame grassroots solutions as extreme, “all-or-nothing” approaches or outright bans. Point to rare or genuinely necessary uses of technology that don’t reflect the day-to-day reality of how tech is actually implemented in schools. Remember, EdTech is just Big Tech in a sweater vest and we are confident that the lawsuits being filed against EdTech companies will reveal similar issues to those found in consumer tech companies– leaders knowingly compromising children’s safety in order to acquire data and increase engagement because the business model requires it.2 Our grassroots efforts are not anti-technology. But we know that the best preparation for a digital future is an analog childhood and an analog education. EdTech is not Tech Ed. We would love to see a return to computer labs or laptop carts and a dedicated (non-digital, non-tech-funded) technology education curriculum implemented in K-12 immediately. Children need technology education more than ever, but just like we teach teens about drugs and alcohol without giving them drugs and alcohol, so too should we teach all children about technology without giving them internet-connected 1:1 health-harming products that benefit technology companies, not children. Why the Screenwashing? So who is doing the screenwashing and why? As we wrote about in Part 1, ISTE3 is leading the screenwashing efforts. Their newly released “Summary of Evidence for Technology in Education: From Screentime to Screen Value” immediately proposes a new false dichotomy in the title– “screentime” vs. “screen value.” Before we dig in, some context: First, ISTE considers Google and Meta both proud funding sponsors and partners. That alone should stop anyone genuinely concerned about children’s use of such products from reading the rest of the document. Google and Meta are not going to partner with, let alone fund, an organization that will actively discourage use of digital products in schools. We should know that by now. But of course, ISTE does not make such recommendations. Screenshot from ISTE’s website Second, ISTE would like us to believe that the research is clear and that EdTech products “benefit learning when it is well-designed, well-implemented, and aligned to clear learning goals.”4 Even if we could look past their funding (we can’t), we would still have questions about this “research.” Just saying “research shows” tells us nothing about who funded and completed the research, what they studied, if the research is replicable, what the effect size is, or what we should or could interpret from this “research.” (Emily has an entire essay here about vetting EdTech research.) Un-washing ISTE’s “research” Because so many school districts cite ISTE’s “research” as evidence of EdTech product effectiveness, let’s look at what ISTE claims are the “four themes [that] consistently emerge across the evidence.” Screenwash 1: “Quality matters more than quantity.” Reality: Quality learning requires a teacher and traditional tools. While “quality matters” might be true when talking about friendships or food, when it comes to EdTech products this is a marketing ploy. “Quality” teaching and learning requires a multisensorial world built on human relationships, something an EdTech product can never offer. ISTE argues that quality matters more than quantity when it comes to educational technology. We assume they mean that there are better quality EdTech products out there, and those are the ones children should use. However, the scientific study they cite (Støle et al., 2020) to prove their claim that “poorly built EdTech adds unnecessary cognitive load, thus inhibiting learning and academic performance,” is a study that concludes this (bold ours): “Our finding that students across all skill levels perform more poorly on a digital test than on paper, is an urgent call for a more nuanced perspective on implementation of digital technologies in elementary education, and a signal to policy makers, school administrators and educators that the medium matters, especially for reading comprehension.” This study doesn’t support the claim that there are differences in quality between high and low quality EdTech products; this study supports the claim that reading on paper is superior to reading digitally.5 As the parent-led child advocacy group Child First Policy Center recently noted at the Power of Parents Summit: “Big Tech has deep pockets, but parents have deep purpose, and Big Tech will never be able to compete with that.” Screenwash 2: “EdTech is particularly impactful for underserved students.” Reality: EdTech is particularly harmful for underserved students. The argument that EdTech will decrease inequities is pervasive and dangerous. Of course, technological equity in education is a complex topic. Historically, underserved students lacked access to computers and technology, and efforts were made to “close the digital divide.” But in 2026, the pendulum has swung too far. Today, underserved students spend disproportionate amounts of time on screens, which increases their exposure to harmful content, data and privacy violations, and interferes with optimal learning experiences.   As a result, new digital divides have emerged, and we will increasingly see underserved students provided with “personalized learning” via artificial intelligence,6 robot teachers, and low-quality products, while better resourced schools and communities will ensure their students have human teachers and high quality learning materials. As academic, teacher, writer, and consultant on educational technology and policy Dr. Velislava Hillman notes, a “troubling divide is emerging: mass, app-based instruction for the many, and human tutoring and intellectual exchange reserved for the elite. What is sold as the ‘democratisation’ of education may be entrenching further inequality.” Worse, teachers and speech-language pathologists like Denise are seeing increased requirements in IEPs and 504s that provide accommodations for more technology-based “solutions” for students with diagnosed learning disabilities, but the impact of the overreliance on these tools for these students is taking a devastating toll. Developing brains need exercise just like any other muscle in the body. But the use of EdTech products claiming to serve as “accessibility tools” in the name of personalized learning actually reduces the opportunity for children to practice and develop their skills on their own. This instead builds dependency on technology-based products and puts an algorithm in charge of evaluating and supporting a child’s learning, rather than a human teacher.7 One of big concerns is that as grassroots efforts continue to grow, districts will acquiesce and reduce EdTech for mainstream students, but double down on students whose learning needs “require” technology, as we are seeing happen in LAUSD: Screenshot from LinkedIn, May 29, 2026 But this is concerning too, as the research that ISTE cites includes one study with a sample size of only three students diagnosed on the Autism Spectrum. The method of the study investigated those students’ performance using technology on a pre-test/post-test for a science vocabulary lesson on amoebas. The other research cited includes a meta analysis of 72 research studies, but only eighteen of the 72 studies used in the analysis are from the United States and of those, fourteen were completed over a decade ago and five occurred prior to 2010. That isn’t reliable, recent, or representative research. We’re not the only ones noticing that orgs like ISTE are cherry-picking research and hoping that no one will really look at it. As Dr. Horvath points out in his article, The Equity Illusion of EdTech, “lower-performing students’ [scores] declined far more sharply than their high-performing peers” since the “digital inflection point” of EdTech in schools, around 2012. Other researchers have presented similar findings, noting that since the mid-2010s, the “gap between higher- and lower-performing students has consistently widened across subjects, grade levels, and demographic groups, in all of the best surveys of educational performance in the United States.” If EdTech products are positively impactful for underserved students, as ISTE claims, wouldn’t we see these students performing better? Wouldn’t those gaps be closing, not widening, with increased access to EdTech products since 2012? Screenwash 3: ISTE states, “Consumer technology and EdTech are not the same.” Reality: EdTech is Big Tech, but EdTech isn’t Tech Ed. True to the wording of Step 2 of the screenwashing playbook (“Insist that we’re confusing or conflating consumer tech with “evidence-based, purpose-built” EdTech”), we see continued effort to present a false binary when it comes to technology– good vs bad, educational vs. entertainment, “consumer tech” vs “EdTech.” As we discussed in our last essay, Instructure8 created a report to help us understand ISTE’s attempt to differentiate “consumer tech” and “EdTech.” A glimpse at the Big Tech companies who partner with Instructure should be enough to immediately prevent us from seeing their report as independent or useful in advising schools or policymakers about EdTech issues: Screenshot of Instructure’s corporate “partners” Again, if we were to ignore the extremely problematic funding ties (and we can’t and we won’t), looking deeper into Instructure’s report we see another screenwashing attempt to confuse the consumer and differentiate their products as “Good Tech.” In spite of this attempted reframe, however, the report shows that only 40% of what they deem as the “top EdTech tools” they analyzed have any level of ESSA evidence and and even worse, the majority have only Tier 3 which describes research that shows “promising evidence” and Tier 4 isn’t even research - it’s a rationale! Screenshot from Instructure’s report  Every Student Succeeds Act, or ESSA, is a national education law which replaced No Child Left Behind in 2015. Their “tiers” of “evidence” are (theoretically) used to “provide districts and schools with a framework for determining which programs, practices, strategies, and interventions work in which contexts and for which students.” If we assume that ESSA’s framework is rooted in guidance that focuses on what is best for children and learning, then how is it that only 2% of EdTech products show strong evidence of effectiveness? Only 2%! It’s not like this 2% finding is coming from an organization critical of EdTech; it’s coming from a report on EdTech products written by an organization who is funded by the tech industry itself. Can you imagine if this level of ineffectiveness applied to other consumer products? Sorry, your Clorox bleach cleaner only kills 2% of bacteria, not 99%. Or, your child’s car seat meets the federal safety standard only 2% of the time? It is shocking to see these numbers and know that most school districts are still choosing to deploy hundreds of EdTech products anyway. As if those numbers weren’t bad enough, the report also attempts another reframe by posing the question: “What can consumer technologies do to be more effective in schools?” We would find this question far more useful to answer first: “Why are consumer tech products in schools in the first place?” We know why, of course (the business model again), but if the EdTech industry can repackage the same product with a new purpose, perhaps school leaders won’t ask the second question, and life can continue as normal. Screenwash 4: ISTE says “Teachers are doing it all wrong–they just need to learn from us how to use the products the right way!” Reality: This is pinning the problem on teachers, when in reality it’s a product problem. Ok, that isn’t exactly what ISTE states in their fourth theme, but it is what they imply. As we would expect from an industry who continues to shirk responsibility, teachers are a convenient scapegoat. If we blame the teacher for failing to implement a product “with fidelity” then we do not have to admit the product is terrible. Thus, their logic follows, teachers actually need more training and professional development on how to teach while using these products, which, what a surprise, conveniently requires districts to pony up even more money to these companies. Obviously, blaming teachers is the opposite of what is true and what we believe. Of course, technology companies like OpenAI and Microsoft have complicated the solution by partnering with one of the largest teachers unions, offering the AFT millions of dollars in funding to create a National Academy of AI Instruction that will provide AI training to teachers. This “groundbreaking $23 million education initiative” will provide access to “free AI training and curriculum for all 1.8 million members of the AFT, starting with K-12 educators.” A familiar pattern here– criticize the user for failing to implement the product effectively, partner with their largest union to provide the “right” training, and come out looking like the (increasingly wealthy) problem-solver. Don’t forget– in January of 2026, the AFT and NEA, two of the largest American teachers’ unions, signed on to a letter written by yet another tech-friendly “organization” in an attempt to preemptively counter the testimony that Emily and Dr. Horvath provided for Congress. The letter stated that the signatories saw a difference between “unsupervised, entertainment-driven technology use at home” and the “intentional, monitored, and carefully curated use of technology in schools.” In many ways, this letter marked the start of the industry-backed groups rebranding efforts. We saw through it then, and we will continue to call it out now. An AI-generated image from Realbotix showing a likeness of their humanoid robot in a classroom setting, which was until recently proposed for use in a district in New York state, where one-third of students live below the poverty line So what can we do? We propose four useful actions to counter EdTech screenwashing. Get informed. Learn to identify the four steps of the Screenwashing Playbook and call them out each time you hear one from your district leadership, skeptical parents, an EdTech executive, or even members of the media. Here are a few resources we recommend: From Bans to Recalls: A Public Health Framework for AI Companion Bots (Gaia Bernstein of the Brookings Institute A Product Safety Playbook for the Digital Age (Lisa Levasseur of Internet Safety Labs) Get active. This fall will be unprecedented in EdTech resistance. Ride the wave. Email your school board directors, testify at school board meetings, challenge the pro-EdTech messaging you hear at Back-to-School Night, contact your local representatives. Express your concerns and ask them for the evidence they use to justify the costs and risks. Then look at that research and challenge it if it is industry-funded. Respectfully, of course, but with conviction. Here are a few resources we recommend: Emily has a lot of sample public testimony on her Substack. The Distraction-Free Policy Project hosts weekly action-oriented calls Join Fairplay’s Screens-in-Schools Action Network (Emily is co-chair!) Get together. There has never been more pushback on EdTech than there is right now. The wind is at our back. Don’t accept “You can’t opt out” or “This platform isn’t optional” as an ending; see it as the opening salvo for further conversation. Other parents are asking these same questions. Find each other. Work together. Here are a few resources we recommend: Download Emily’s free Unplug EdTech Toolkit Our friends at Schools Beyond Screens can help you open a local chapter Check out the model legislation at The Distraction-Free Policy Project Get optimistic. Don’t give in. Don’t settle for “this is just the way things are now.” Don’t accept that GenAI and EdTech products are a foregone conclusion. They are not. These companies are worried, as evidenced by the hate mail and death threats we’ve both gotten for speaking up and out about this. But it’s because they know we are right, and they see the pushback growing from all over the world. We have to keep swimming. Photo by Rachel Hisko on Unsplash  1 See: From greenwashing to screenwashing? 2 There is also a new lawsuit against Curriculum Associates, parent company of iReady, alleging false advertising. Curriculum Associates is having a rough summer, but these cases are just the tip of the iceberg. More will follow. 3 ISTE is formerly known as the “International Society for Technology in Education.” They merged with Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD) in 2022 and recently rebranded themselves as the International Society for Transforming Education. 4 See: A Summary of Evidence for Technology in Education 5 For those who want to learn more about “the quality of the product” mattering “dramatically,” check out the book, The Digital Delusion, by our friend and colleague, Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath, which provides a detailed breakdown of the research and clearly articulates how technology impedes the learning process. 6 It is called "artificial" intelligence. We want our kids to have something "artificial”— and in schools, no less? 7 EdTech product use is especially harmful– not helpful– to our most vulnerable students. Denise has written about how the overuse of technology can impede struggling learners, including in her easy, We Can't Ignore This for Another Decade. Denise also wrote about how the EdTech industry intentionally attempts to confuse well-meaning educators and instill fear in parents with claims that removing technology will harm their learning here: Be Leary of EdTech Industry Narratives. 8 Parent company of the EdTech product Canvas and actively being sued.  

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First Fish Chronicles: Beware the EdTech Industry Rebrand: Part 1

Note from Emily and Denise: We are noticing that EdTech companies seem to be shifting uncomfortably in their metaphorical chairs these days— increasingly so as the school year approaches and concerns about their products’ presence in schools grows. We believe we are witnessing an “EdTech industry rebrand” and we’re here to call it out. This is Part 1 of a two-part essay. Photo by Maksim Shutov on Unsplash From summer conference themes to repurposed terminology to doubled down efforts to insert AI into more classrooms this fall, educational technology companies and their ilk are feeling the heat from the growing backlash of parents, teachers, neuroscientists, lawmakers, and advocates opposed to the overreliance on for-profit products in schools that do not improve learning outcomes, threaten the teaching profession, and expose children to serious risks. In response, instead of pulling their health-harming products from the classrooms or seeking external audits and independently verifiable scientific research to prove their claims, they’re getting a makeover. But the trouble is, “Children do not need tech; technology companies need children,” as Emily pointed out recently in her testimony to the Kentucky State Senate on education and screentime. At the end (and beginning) of the day, EdTech is an industry– a massive one worth nearly $200 billion currently, with some projections putting it at nearly double that over the next ten years. (Can you imagine if schools had budgets like that?) “How do we grow when the easy money is gone?” EdTech products are heavily pushed into school districts by an industry that is well-funded and skilled at marketing. As one example (and there are many), the Tech & Learning EdExec Summit scheduled for September 2026 is pitched to attract: CEOs & Founders “who need to steer the ship through economic uncertainty”; Sales & Marketing Directors “who need to shorten complex sales cycles and bypass gatekeepers”; Product Managers “who need to build for ‘Evidence-Based’ compliance and interoperability”; and Strategic Partnership Directors/Business Development “looking to build relationships with key industry players.” This “learning” summit promises that attendees will have access not just to industry executives, but “school district administrators” too. The “two-day strategic summit” will seek to answer one question: “How do we grow when the easy money is gone?” The hosts of the Tech & Learning EdExec Summit say the experience is built to “deconstruct the real friction points in today’s district sales cycle—guided by the leaders who control the budgets.“ Attendees will “get valuable insight into the education market in time for the Back-to-School buying season.” Who are these attendees? Here’s a list: Who attends the Tech & Learning EdExec Summit? Lots of companies who stand to profit from potential business deals! It seems to us that the only “learning” occurring here is how to keep milking the cow even when she’s gone dry. Profits are clearly the motive at such events, not education. Which is What the Backlash to EdTech Really Threatens Activists and teachers and concerned parents like us often get painted as “anti-tech”-- but this couldn’t be farther from the truth. Yes, we are deeply concerned about the kinds of content our children can see on their school-issued Chromebooks and yes, we see the potential for serious risks to the mining and selling of their personal data, and yes, we would much rather see kids engaging in classrooms with human teachers and books and pencils. But we do not believe that all technology is inherently evil— we just see a big difference between EdTech and TechEd, for example. The problem is the business model of the EdTech companies. These companies rely on “time on device” and “engagement” to compete for a piece of that $200 billion pie, but this business model is fundamentally in opposition to healthy child development. It doesn’t matter if an EdTech company has a noble mission, or if they have high quality materials, or if they swear they do not collect and sell student data— at the end of the day, if their business model depends on children spending time on a device this is no different than the business models of social media companies. That’s why we say “EdTech is just Big Tech in a sweater vest”— the business models of Instagram and Snap and Meta are the same as iReady and Seesaw and Canvas. (Which may explain why Emily is also finding she has to fight to protect her intellectual property and trademarks from being co-opted by the very industry she is battling.) This is how we find ourselves in the middle of Extreme Makeover: EdTech Edition. The EdTech Industry’s New Look: “Purpose-Built EdTech” The EdTech industry has taken notice of our movement…and they are concerned. They’re seeing and feeling the impact (and trolling us on social media). They are trotting out the same tired talking points that we’ve come to expect. But a new report from Instructure reveals a new tactic: “purpose-washing.” You may remember Instructure as the parent company of Canvas, an EdTech company that was the target of a massive data breach in the spring of 2026. Canvas is used by over 40% of higher education in North America and the breach nearly paralyzed institutions around the country. Instructure’s newest report claims to have analyzed the evidence, compliance and interoperability, and accessibility and usability of the top 150 EdTech products used in K-12 schools during Fall 2025. Before we dive into their report, we should point out that Instructure’s partnerships with companies like Google and Microsoft render such a “report” as scientifically compromised. According to Instructure, “families, communities, and policymakers” are starting to ask if “all this screen time is beneficial for students.” Screenshot from Instructure’s report As a result of these questions being asked, Instructure believes, school leaders will need to defend their use of technology in the classroom to “boards, families, educators, and their communities.” Of course, the most burning question is “Why weren’t they doing this before?” Screenshot from Instructure’s report Instructure, of course, has a “solution”: school leaders should make a distinction between “purpose-built” screentime and “consumer products,” and be sure parents and policymakers see Instructure products as the former not the later. By attempting to put distance between “purpose-built EdTech” (which Instructure claims includes Kahoot! and iReady) and “Consumer Tech” (YouTube and ChatGPT), Instructure attempts to weave a story that “purpose-built” products like these offer more evidence of effectiveness and are safer. Except we know from research, journalistic deep-dives, and lawsuits that products like iReady are anything but “effective” or “safe” or “legal.” Real-Time Rebrand: What It Looks Like A recent LinkedIn post by Curriculum Associates, creators of the troubled iReady Math program and current defendant in a lawsuit about data privacy concerns, is a great example of an EdTech company attempting to assuage parental and school administrator anxiety by claiming that by partnering with “Digital Promise,” Curriculum Associates will be able to provide a “framework” to justify inserting AI into schools. Screenshot of LinkedIn post by Curriculum Associates The only problem is that Digital Promise, an organization that describes itself as “a global nonprofit working to expand opportunity for every learner,” has numerous funders and partners with the tech industry.1 Emily and Denise were both lead authors on Fairplay’s recent Call for a Pause on AI in PreK-12th Grade and we firmly oppose the use of any AI products in education. We reject the notion that in an era of “rapid AI experimentation” that a “framework” given out by tech-funded “non-profit” and bestowed by a problematic EdTech company facing lawsuits for taking kids’ data without parental consent should be the arbiters of such designations. At the same time, the language now being used by Curriculum Associates (and other EdTech companies) sounds very similar to the “Tech-Intentional” framework created by Emily. We’re seeing this in multiple places, and as Emily has written about, it appears to be a growing issue. Screenshot of a LinkedIn post by Curriculum Associates It’s Not just EdTech Companies. It’s the Organizations Who Defend Them, Too. We have written previously about the need to follow the money, not just behind EdTech companies, but the organizations that defend them, too. One well-known example is ISTE, formerly the International Society for Technology in Education, who merged with ASCD (the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development) in 2022 and recently rebranded themselves as the International Society for Transforming Education. In a not-so-transparent attempt to distance themselves from the growing skepticism of the products they push in schools, note how the word “Technology” has been replaced with “Transforming.” ISTE also offers an “ISTE Seal”2 for EdTech products that “align” to their ISTE Standards.3 However, the ISTE Seal, which seems to require only a self-audit, appears to be a pay-to-play rubber stamp for well-funded EdTech companies to lend their for-profit products false merit. To “receive” an ISTE Seal, companies must pay $5K to apply and pay a $3K fee every two years. ISTE also targets educators through tech-funded conferences sponsored by tech industry giants such as Microsoft, Google, META, Pinterest, Intel, Epson, Logitech, Samsung, Dell and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. ISTE is obviously tech-funded, but claims to be a “non-profit” serving educators and administrators. They’re doing quite well for a non-profit. In 2024, ISTE announced that Google had invested $10 million “to support ISTE+ASCD in its efforts to provide AI skills training to educators and students across the country.” According to CauseIQ, in 2024 ISTE had a revenue of approximately $46 million. What the Makeover Reveals ISTE is attempting to reframe the conversation around screentime in schools. Language in a recent document titled “From Screentime to Screen Value”4 cites research that is a decade old or comes from compromised, tech-funded organizations; pitches four “themes” rooted in industry myths and propaganda (more on this in Part 2); and implies that parents just don’t understand the value of “quality” screentime. ISTE has it all wrong, of course. This is not just a conversation about “quality” screentime or “consumer tech vs EdTech.” What the industry doesn’t seem to understand is that the growing backlash from parents, teachers, lawmakers, and a few brave school administrators is not about what type of screentime children are getting at school; it is driven by the fact that children can and should experience quality learning experiences without the use of technology products created by for-profit companies in the first place. As criticism grows, EdTech companies will continue to dig into their deep pockets and spend their marketing budgets to “purpose-wash” their products in the best light possible. But we know what this makeover really shows— that the EdTech industry is worried enough that a hasty remodel seems the best path forward to protecting their bottom line. Just like slapping a coat of paint on a mold-infested wall only hides the dark spots temporarily, however, attempting to rebrand the same old EdTech products as somehow new and improved does not hide the problem— it reveals it. In Part 2, we will break down ISTE’s “Four findings that cut across the evidence” and challenge the dubious research they cite to defend these “findings.”   1 “Digital Promise Global has a diverse and independent governing board comprised of individuals with relevant expertise to the mission and operations of the Digital Promise Global, including fundraising, financial, controls and subject matter expertise in innovation in education, education technology and research to support education. Digital Promise Global board members, both current and former, include university presidents, education technology entrepreneurs and key researchers in the fields of education and learning. Digital Promise Global has a broad fundraising campaign and actively seeks new donors. Finally, Digital Promise Global’s mission is to accelerate innovation in education to improve opportunities to learn which is a charitable purpose with broad public appeal” From 2024 public tax documents 2 Formerly known as the “Seal of Alignment.” 3 “A framework that guides educators in using technology to create high-impact, sustainable and scalable learning experiences for all students.” 4 A “summary of evidence for technology in education.”  

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The Reliable Narrator: Misunderstanding Third-Grade Reading Proficiency: On Resisting Efficiency and Punishment in Reading Policy

"Schools held 1,281 third graders back after the 2024-25 school year when the law went into effect, compared to 424 a year earlier, according to figures provided by the S.C. Department of Education." My grandchildren, Brees and Skylar, are featured on this book cover reading the sorts of real books all children deserve access to.   Reporting on the number of South Carolina third-grade students being retained based on state reading tests increasing from 424 to 1281, Ian Grenier offers without a link a standard argument: Research suggests that students who can’t read by the end of third grade will struggle as it becomes vital for understanding other subjects, making early intervention essential. Teachers in higher grades usually aren’t equipped to teach the basic literacy skills students are meant to pick up in early elementary school, leaving kids who didn’t learn them floundering. The hyper-focus on third-grade reading proficiency is not just pervasive, but it mostly goes unchallenged. “Third grade reading proficiency matters—enormously,” declares Mike Schmoker in How to Make Reading Instruction Much, Much More Efficient for Education Week. Recently I saw this piece from 2019 pop up on my social media feed, and I immediately noticed the subheading: “Scaling back small-group instruction would have dramatic improvements in literacy.” Since Schmoker’s article fell solidly in the current “science of reading” crisis rhetoric and misguided reading policy being passed across the U.S., it certainly was poised to create even more harmful classroom level decisions for students and teachers—notably an increase in grade retention as well as fatalistic justifications for using punishment as reading policy, as reported by Grenier: Requiring weak readers to repeat third grade has long spurred debate in the education world. Its proponents, including education leaders in South Carolina, say it’s an unfortunate necessity. Two aspects of this argument are compelling and misguided—the standard but false appeal to “third grade reading proficiency” and the prioritizing of “efficiency” for making instructional decisions. Of course there are well documented correlations between third grade reading achievement and later negative educational outcomes for students (low reading achievement correlated with dropping out and low overall academic achievement, for example), but the traditional response to those correlations has resulted in over-reactions that do far more harm than good. Left out of this calculation is an important causal relationship between reading test scores and the lives of children outside of school: Almost 63% of the variance in test performance was explained by social capital family income variables that influence the development of background knowledge. Background knowledge is a known predictor of standardized test results. Family income variables are immutable by schools. Only public policies, outside the control of school personnel, can influence family income. What if political leaders prioritized a different fact? Children living in poverty into third grade are likely to suffer long-term negative consequences; and thus, policy must address poverty and the home and community lives of children Instead, of course, one of the worst over-reactions has been states adopting grade retention based on third grade reading assessments—despite grade retention having a causal relationship with students dropping out and negatively impacting their earnings as adults. Doubling down on practices that punish and hurt vulnerable students to address misunderstanding the research on third grade reading achievement is a profound failure in logic. Some of the motivation for making these policy mistakes is that U.S. cultural norms are too often grounded in punishment. Many affluent and privileged people embrace the concept of grade retention as a way to insure that children are taught lessons about achievement and effort, but they also embrace punitive measures because they suspect grade retention, for example, will only impact “other people’s children,” as noted by Grenier: “The bottom line is, we’ve got to stop just passing kids on,” Abbey Duggins, the state Education Department’s chief academic officer, said. There is more than a little bit of racism and classism in the urge to embrace punitive schools and aggressive policing and legal systems. But another source of making terrible policy decisions, especially about reading, is the core of Schmoker’s argument—determining instructional practices by prioritizing efficiency. Although an enduring Urban Legend criticizes U.S. public education as essentially progressive (which it isn’t, and has never been), scholar Herb Kliebard detailed that by the early twentieth century U.S. public education had embraced key elements of efficiency.* One powerful example of that commitment is the use of standardized testing, primarily multiple choice tests that can be quickly scored, such as the SAT and most state-level accountability testing, yet another failure of education policy entrenched in education reform: Policy makers and education leaders should rethink the current reliance on standardized test results as the deciding factor to make decisions about student achievement, teacher quality, school effectiveness, and school leader quality. In effect, policies that use standardized test results to evaluate, reward, and sanction students and school personnel are doing nothing more than rewarding schools that serve advantaged students and punishing schools that serve disadvantaged students. Despite decades of research showing that standardized testing is often a weak measure of learning, is most strongly correlated with status (socioeconomic, racial, gender), and creates inequity, standardized testing has persisted in the U.S. because it is more efficient than what we tend to call authentic assessment—essays, performances, projects, etc. In fact, our blind commitment to efficiency is so strong that when we do use authentic assessment we now demand highly structured rubrics to insure that the grading is efficient (which erases the authentic nature of the assignment). Formal education in the U.S. has structures that, of course, create the need for “efficiency”—grade levels around biological age and courses provided through a format that requires one teacher to serve the largest number of students possible (in K-12, typically 1 to 25-35, but university-level ratios can be 1 to hundreds of students). Although universal education is a public good, we are bound by market forces when providing education for all children. I do recognize that efficiency must be one concern for instructional practices, but I have witnessed across five decades of teaching since the 1980s that we overemphasize efficiency, especially in literacy instruction. For 18 years as a high school English teacher, I struggled within a system demanding efficiency while attempting to teach writing authentically—a workshop method requiring students to write multiple drafts that I provided ample feedback on throughout the process. This experience was physically and mentally exhausting; I left K-12 education with my right wrist in a brace from writing on about 4000+ essays per year for almost two decades. Could I have implemented something identified as writing instruction more efficiently (and less taxing for me)? Of course. But that would have been a lie (many efficient approaches, such as direct grammar instruction, is simply not writing instruction) and would have cheated my students. Teaching first-year writing at the college level has further cemented my awareness that efficiency is extremely harmful for writing instruction effectiveness. For example, teaching 100-125 students at a time (more efficient and the reality of high school English teaching) is far less effective than my current obligation to first-year writing seminars capped at 12 students. As long as we are committed to current teacher/student ratios (one-on-one tutoring/mentoring is, of course, the ideal teaching/learning context), the best instructional approach to managing effectiveness and efficiency is balancing the whole-class, small-group, and individual instructional practices. If anything, most K-12 teachers need to reduce whole-class instruction and increase small-group and individual instruction. Why? Whole-class instruction is often the least effective of the three, particularly with literacy instruction. For example, my first-year writing students continue to struggle with whole-class assignments and instruction but thrive in our face-to-face conferencing (even in comparison to the individualized instruction they receive from my comments on their essays). But also, small-group and individualized instruction can often be, ironically, more efficient because that instruction is targeting identified need and allows student choice (instead of the teacher making all decisions for students). Even the best whole-class instruction is addressing only some students’ needs. And another irony of whole-class instruction is that it tends to more effective after students have submitted authentic artifacts of learning that they are then required to revise (as opposed to giving great deal of instruction up front before students perform). The ugly truth about prioritizing efficiency is that we are valuing coverage of scripted instruction over student need or student learning as well as erasing teacher autonomy. Finally, we must acknowledge that teaching conditions are learning conditions. Current teacher/student ratios of 1/25-35 are cheating teachers and students. Yes, we should address those teaching/learning conditions. But until that political commitment occurs, we must support teachers managing well the tension between effective and efficient. The trick, despite crisis rhetoric grounded in third-grade reading, is maintaining our commitments to instruction that targets identified student needs for each student. In fact, when we pull aside the curtain of efficiency, we are left with a damning reality about adult decisions, included by Grenier at the end of his piece: Students who are already being underserved shouldn’t also have to face the negative consequences of repeating a grade, Paul Thomas, an education professor at Furman University, said. “It’s just punishing them for our negligence,” he said. Recommended Callahan, R. E. (1962). Education and the cult of efficiency: A study of the social forces that have shaped the administration of the public schools. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Was There Really a Social Efficiency Doctrine? The Uses and Abuses of an Idea in Educational History, Thomas Fallace and Victoria Fantozzi (2013) (H/T Jennifer Binis) *NOTE: From Fallace and Fantozzi: “For Callahan (1962) and Kliebard (1995), social efficiency educators diverted progressive education away from the democratic ideas of John Dewey and Harold Rugg” (p. 145). As a critical scholar of the history of education (curriculum and instruction), I think we must make distinctions between the scholarly world (philosophy and theory) and the “real world” of day-to-day education. While I agree with the claim above, I also understand that nuanced and complex philosophy/theory often finds its way into practice in reductive and distorted ways (consider "behaviorism," "whole language," "progressivism," etc.). My argument here is not about the actual social efficiency movement, but that some of the elements of that movement have manifested themselves in powerful and enduring ways (consciously and unconsciously) in how we "do" education in the U.S., one of which is prioritizing "efficiency" in harmful ways. My best example, again, is standardized, multiple-choice testing.  

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Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice: Lessons I Have Learned From Researching School Reform

Many years ago, I had met with a group of Stanford University graduate students then working on their joint Masters in Business Administration (MBA) and education. Some had taught for a few years through Teach for America and were eager to graduate and then apply their knowledge and skills learned in their MBA program to largely minority, low-performing schools. Here is the post I wrote about that discussion I had with these wannabe reformers eager to engage in changing schools. Many of the 18 MBA students sitting around a seminar table had taught a few years in urban schools through Teach for America (TFA). Those who had no direct experience in schools had worked for consulting firms with contracts in major urban districts. Smart, savvy about organizations and passionate about reforming schools, the students wanted to hear my thoughts about reform that I had extracted from nearly a half-century of experience as teacher, superintendent, and researcher. I offered four lessons. Since I have written about each of these lessons in earlier posts I will compress the lessons and cite the earlier posts for those readers who want more information. I learned that: *It is essential to distinguish between reform talk, adoption of reform-driven policies, and putting reforms into classroom practice. (See https://larrycuban.wordpress.com/2011/01/18/the-inexorable-cycles-of-school-reform/) * Reform talk and policy action in the purposes of tax-supported schooling, curriculum, instruction and organization of schools often occur in cycles but putting reforms into practice is slow, requires steady work, incremental, and often zig-zag. (See https://larrycuban.wordpress.com/2011/01/18/the-inexorable-cycles-of-school-reform/) * Turning to public schools as a solution for larger economic, social, and political problems has become a national tic, a peculiar habit, that U.S. reformers have had for decades (See https://larrycuban.wordpress.com/2011/01/15/does- reforming-u-s-schools-soften-or-harden-inequalities-in-wealth-and-health/ * Both stability and change mark the path of public schools over the past two centuries (See https://larrycuban.wordpress.com/2009/08/16/how-do-teachers-teach-2/ ) I spent about 30 minutes going over these lessons and then I opened the floor to students’ questions. After a few questions asking me to clarify the lessons I had learned, a visibly agitated young woman recounted her experience as a TFAer in an urban district and her journey to Stanford for conceptual and organizational skills (and credentials). She wanted to return to a similar system to make organizational and instructional changes. Then she asked her question: “Larry, look around this room. It is filled with people who want to reform failing schools. We will have the knowledge and skills and we will work hard. But your message to us is that reform talk occurs in cycles, adopted reforms come back again and again, reformers stumble a lot and when changes do occur they are small ones. Well, how can I put it: you don’t give me and my colleagues here too much hope. I am depressed from the lessons you have learned over so many decades. What advice would you give to all of us?” I was neither surprised nor put off by the question. David Tyack and I had taught a course on the history of school reform for over a decade from which we wrote our book, Tinkering toward Utopia. Moreover, I had heard variations of this question often as a conference keynoter and in many prior discussions with students, colleagues, and conferees. The upside of the student’s comment is recognizing that emotions and passions buried in heart-felt values of equity and helping urban low-income and minority students drive much school reform. That is a plus often overlooked by policymakers who too often prize values of effectiveness and efficiency and cite cost-benefit trade-offs and return on investment (ROI) rather than openly acknowledging the emotions involved in reform. Emotions fuel practitioners, policymakers, and parents to move past the inevitable potholes on the road to reform success. Whether a reform is scientifically proven, logical, or even efficient surely matters but high-octane self-confidence and righteous belief in doing something worthwhile count also. Unfotunately, emotions too often skip over inspection of assumptions. And there is one quiet assumption hidden in that student’s question. Wanting to do good for urban youth, willing to put in hard work, and having a Stanford degree were somehow enough to turn around a failing classroom and an under-performing school. And here in this seminar I was claiming that any wannabe reformer needed knowledge of previous well-intentioned designs and prior reformers who had also worked hard but experienced a few small victories while often tasted the salt of many failures. That I may have triggered the blues in some of these wannabe reformers seemed both unfair and unrealistic to my questioner. Even though nearly all these students accepted the accuracy of what I said-–many had read similar accounts of previous reforms–- I sensed that the questioner wanted reassurance that her time, energy, and commitment would pay off later in successful reforms. Since I could neither reassure her nor give her unvarnished hope, what advice did I give this room filled with Reformers-R-Us? What I did was talk about the importance of knowing realistically what faces anyone undertaking an adventure that contains the possibility, nay, probability of failure. I compared the launching of a reform in a school or district to climbing a difficult mountain. Responsible people want a guide. Someone who can tell the adventurers where the crevices are, what false turns to avoid, where the icy spots are and to be honest about the possibility that they may have to turn back before reaching the summit. Accurate knowledge of forthcoming difficulties, honesty, and humility are crucial to reaching the summit of a mountain or implementing a school reform. Hope for success rests in expertise, problem solving, and courage but–and this is an especially important “but”–climbing that mountain (implementing that reform in an actual classroom or school) is still worth the effort even if success (however defined) is not achieved. That is what I told those MBA students.  

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Shanker Blog: Proficiency or Penalty? Grade Retention Policy and Its Implications for English Learners in Utah

One common goal of public education is to ensure all students reach academic mastery. In fact, most U.S. states have agreed upon a set of aligned standards of mastery through the Common Core. To that end, it may make sense to lawmakers that students repeat third grade and get another ‘at bat’ if they weren’t able to reach reading proficiency. This theory of change— accountability in action— has prompted many states to reinforce their literacy legislation with retention provisions. Eighteen states, including the District of Columbia, require grade retention for nonproficient third graders with varying good cause exemptions. Oklahoma and Utah both added retention requirements in their 2026 literacy legislation. Our study seeks to determine whether the theory of change used by lawmakers aligns with existing research on grade retention. In the aftermath of burgeoning grade retention policies, scholars and stakeholders are questioning whether retention will improve outcomes, or if it will become another reform that unintentionally punishes marginalized families. By interviewing stakeholders in one of Utah’s most diverse school districts, Granite, we aimed to answer the following question: what are the long-term implications of retention provisions in Utah's literacy legislation for third graders? Through qualitative interviews and a literature review on the impacts of grade retention, we found that rather than targeting evidence-based interventions, the policy risks displacing responsibility onto families least equipped to absorb it.  Utah's Literacy Ambitions Utah is a rapidly growing state with a largely homogenous population. It has grown 21.8% in the last decade, becoming slightly more diverse in racial makeup. Currently, 72% of its 3.5 million residents are white and 17% are Hispanic. In comparison with national averages, Utah holds its own with strong literacy scores. The 2022 NAEP reading report card shows that only eight states scored a higher percentage than the national average of 32% at or above proficiency, Utah being one of them at 37%. These scores, in part, have resulted from a history of commitment to literacy from various Utah actors.  Utah’s current Governor, Spencer Cox, has made his dedication to education clear since coming into office in 2021. The 2022 Read to Succeed Initiative, or SB 127, was passed with a goal to bring state third grade reading proficiency from 46.5% to 70% by 2027. To pair with the legislative mandate, in August 2025, the Utah State Board of Education set the third-grade proficiency benchmark score to a 750 Lexile. This Lexile score is aligned to the 75th percentile of U.S. third grade students.  Put simply, Utah expects their third graders to score in the 75th quartile of the nation’s third graders to be on grade level. This guidance along with the legislature’s continued mandates on percentage of students meeting proficiency shows high expectations for literacy in Utah. However, some stakeholders are concerned about the feasibility of these marks, stating that using state third grade reading scores as predictors for college readiness and high school dropout rates miscommunicate literacy to Utahns who hear that only 50% of students are proficient — a figure inflated by the state's unusually high benchmark threshold.  Despite these efforts, Utah policy leaders did not see the growth necessary to reach their proficiency goal. Reports on reading proficiency like in figure one show that third grade rates only increased from 48% to 50.3% from 2022 to 2025 respectively. In response, in January 2026, Governor Cox announced in his State of the State address that his first legislative priority will be early literacy, claiming that “nearly half of Utah’s third graders are not reading at grade level” and calling “literacy ‘moral infrastructure’ essential to freedom, opportunity, and self-governance.” Additionally, Cox endorsed retention despite its unpopularity, claiming that “It’s hard… people don’t love that. But in Mississippi, if you’re not reading on third grade level at the end of third grade, you stay in third grade.” With the governor’s full support, SB 241 was passed in the 2026 legislative session, and is set to take effect on July 1, 2026. SB 241 moved the goalpost from 70% proficiency by 2027 to 80% by 2030. With this shift, the legislature added additional provisions to support science of reading instruction, teacher preparation, literacy support staff, and language “requiring retention in grade 3 except in cases of certain good cause exemptions.” Utah lawmakers involved the state board of education in several requirements throughout the bill, including creating a panel for science of reading research, and approving a reading benchmark assessment to be used statewide. This benchmark will be administered three times during the school year to students in k-3. The scores are mandated to be communicated to parents.  The proposed theory of change is that retention will allow Utah students to be adequately supported in their literacy progress. However, not all stakeholders agree that retention will fix Utah’s literacy rates. University of Utah researcher Brandley posits that longer term investments like teacher support and intensive reading intervention would be more effective. Granite School District The student population demographics of Granite School District offer a deeper understanding of what SB 241 might mean at local levels. Relative to the state’s demographic structure (72% white and 17% Hispanic), Granite School District’s (GSD) student body is composed of 44% white students and 41% Hispanic students. In comparing state literacy proficiency scores, Utah’s 37% literacy proficiency rate lessens to 32% of students meeting proficiency in GSD. GSD made commitments to improve these scores through concerted funding, capacity building, and support system efforts. The district says their “two overarching strategic goals [for] Granite School District are to increase graduation rates and to increase literacy and numeracy proficiency.” What the Research Says on Grade Retention Research indicates mixed results for whether retention begets academic improvement. While there might be short-term gains, some studies show that those gains tend to fall off over the course of that student's educational career (Shepard & Smith, 1990), and a meta-analysis of 63 studies found that only 14% showed significant positive gains for retained students compared with promoted students (Holmes, 1989). A longitudinal study in Chicago found that retained students scored significantly lower in reading and math than their promoted peers — specifically eight months lower in reading and six months lower in math — and the effects of early grade retention (grades 1–3) were similar to those of later retention (grades 4–7), further suggesting that retention alone does not address the root of the problem (Reynolds, 1992; McCoy & Reynolds, 1999).  Beyond academics, grade retention is associated with an increased likelihood of dropping out of high school, increased aggression during adolescence, and elevated long-term anxiety in boys, with retained students showing anxious, inattentive, and disruptive behaviors even when retention occurred in primary school (Jimerson et al., 2002; Pagani et al., 2001).  The issue of retention efficacy is compounded by equity concerns, as the majority of retained students are from marginalized backgrounds; a study analyzing Michigan's third-grade reading retention laws found that an economically disadvantaged EL has only a 30% chance of passing the M-STEP, with even lower odds for Arabic and Spanish speakers (Winke & Zhang, 2019).  Teachers Weigh In The research on retention’s limitations is not lost on the educators implementing it. Granite School District teachers echoed these findings consistently across interviews, raising concerns that fell into three clear patterns. For anonymity, these teachers are referred to as teacher A, B, C, and D.  1. Retention is a band-aid solution that doesn't address root causes All four teachers expressed skepticism that retention addresses the underlying reasons students fall behind, pointing instead to socioeconomic factors, parental involvement, and early intervention as the real levers. In teacher A’s interview, he talked a lot about how out-of-class factors affect his students’ reading performance. He stated that his students' reading level “has a lot to do with things outside of their control, often where it's about class and race and parents ability, which ties in with class, but ties like it's their parents ability to read with them when they're younger… I feel like those are really the causes.” So when it came to discussing retention for third graders who aren’t proficient, A posited that "It feels like a band-aid solution. It doesn't feel like it's addressing root issues of what's happening, like why aren't students getting to that level by the time they need to." In agreement with A’s opinions on retention being a surface-level solution, teacher B stated that "Just saying, yeah, we'll just retain them — that isn't a fix." Teacher C said: "I don't think there's one bit of research that says retention is effective...there are so many other ways you can address the problem without retaining kids." All teachers expressed that retention targets students’ actions in school, instead of targeting the problems outside of school that cause low literacy scores.  2. The social and emotional cost of retention is a serious concern Retention has been linked with disruptive and anxious behaviors in students all the way into secondary levels (Jimmerson & Ferguson, 2007; Pagani et al., 2001). Our qualitative findings aligned with this literature, as all four teachers raised concerns about the isolating and demoralizing effects of retention on students, particularly on peer relationships and self-esteem. Teacher B, a literacy coach for a Granite elementary school, shared her concerns about specific students she’s worked with that would be demoralized by being held back. She said that “if the only thing you're looking at is a reading score and you're not looking at anything else, how are you really doing what's in the best interest of that child?” She asked deeper questions of how retention will detriment students' social and emotional growth as well: "You've gotta be careful about who you retain, because sometimes, socially, it would be a very bad thing to retain a student...what is it going to do to their self-esteem? What is it going to do to them emotionally?" From a middle school perspective, teacher A and D both proposed that students already hold negative associations to learning when they’re behind, which affects their attitude and expectations for themselves. 3. Early intervention and increased funding are the preferred solutions Rather than holding students back, all four teachers pointed to earlier intervention, smaller class sizes, better-resourced classrooms, and preschool access as more effective approaches. Teacher C, a career elementary teacher, gave clear program recommendations that she felt would more appropriately support students. "Well-trained paraprofessionals, greater intensive support in K-2, maybe preschool programs, parent awareness — I just think there are so many other ways you can address the problem." Other responses from interviewees includes that "school should start in preschool...if children are not able to be exposed to those words and to literacy so young, then children need to be put in school earlier” and “things like class size and adequate support staff would obviously assist them." Teachers agree with some researchers’ opinion that the best way to ensure long-term success is through individualized student support (Shepard & Smith, 2001; Westbury, 1994). These suggestions, aligned with current research, target interventions that begin earlier than third grade, and extend past retention to build a more sustainable future of educating students before falling behind. These teachers’ voices are not represented in Utah’s legislation.  A Divided District Office While interviewing Superintendent Horsley, he expressed themes of strong support for SB 241 with rigor, high expectations, and parent involvement. He is “optimistic and excited about implementation” and feels that the legislation is more of a shift in method rather than goals. When asked about how the implementation will affect Granite students, he explained that during the legislative session, he pulled the predicted number of retained third graders in his district. “We tracked about 500 kids. So on average, it's about 10 to 12 kids mostly in impoverished elementary schools. We had one elementary school that had a high—it’s probably one of our larger Multi Language Learning campuses with a high refugee population. They have 26 kids.” This statement shows that Horsley is aware of the intersectional effect of retention on EL students but still believes that retention is the right method to ensure all students are proficient, stating that “getting 500 kids out of the 50,000 up to great reading levels is achievable, so my plan is to just not fail.” In response to asking how he feels Granite families will react to the legislation, Horsley answered that Granite has done a “good job” with family engagement strategies, and they will need to “help them [parents] understand this new legislation and the impact that if we're not successful, and when I say we're it's not just us, it's together with the family. We're here to support you that grade retention will be required… and I'm optimistic that parents are going to step up and help and support make sure their kids are ready to go.” Many of Superintendent Horsley’s statements reflected high expectations for parents and teachers to take responsibility for their students' literacy. In Granite Board Member Julie Jackson’s interview, there were more parallels to the teacher’s perspectives than that of Superintendent Horsley’s statements. When asked about the implications of retention in Granite, Julie responded that their plan is to intervene before third grade retention is necessary. She focused on the provisions of SB 241 that encourage administrators to retain students in K-2 grades: “We will not want to retain third graders. We know data shows that retaining third graders significantly lowers their likelihood of graduation. We will intervene long before third grade. We will look to retain kids earlier—in kinder or first grade if we can see the writing on the wall.”  Additionally, when asked how teachers and policymakers can best support literacy rates, Julie simply responded “Lower class size.” She also mentions the gaps in teacher preparation and quality curriculum. It is noteworthy how policymakers’ views on action differ from one another, with the superintendent posing third grade retention as necessary and advantageous, while the Granite board prioritized prior-to-third retention and lowering class size as the best interventions for their students. The Cost for English Learners EL students are rarely the focus of legislation—and literacy intervention is no exception. The policy language in SB 241 leaves discrete opportunities for persistent gap-widening instead of closing. Retention exemptions for “an EL [student] with fewer than three years of instruction in the EL program” aim to account for minoritized student groups, and yet data show that the majority of Utahn ELs begin their EL program in kindergarten upon registration, making them ineligible for this exception as they would be three years into the program by third grade. To date, this exemption for retention is the only mention of ELs in Utah literacy legislation.  Based on the literature review and qualitative interview research, SB 241 errs on the dangerous side of strategies promoting equity. Well-intended as it may be, SB 241’s efficacy is a short-term bandage solution. Both the interviews and research studies emphasize the potential repercussions the policy could have, particularly for Granite School District’s students and parents. In addition, the assumption that parents will ‘take things more seriously’ about their student’s literacy is flawed. It blames parents and students instead of utilizing evidence-based interventions that researchers recommend.  Grade retention may feel like accountability in action, but for English Learners in districts like Granite, it functions as a structural penalty: one imposed on the families with the fewest resources to respond to it. Utah's SB 241 arrives with ambition, but without the early intervention funding, equitable exemptions, and reduced class sizes that research consistently identifies as levers of lasting literacy.   

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Curmudgucation: AI Is Not for Amateurs

Ben Riley has pulled a lot of attention lately for the story of his father, who turned to AI for advice on how to manage his cancer, and died because of it. Riley gets into the experience of being a New York Times story subject in a recent post, and looks into the reporters idea to show oncologists the advice the AI was providing. Riley shares their responses, and even for AI, it is shockingly, horribly wrong. A trained cancer doctor would recognize that it was nonsense. An amateur might be fooled by how AI manages to mimic the look and feel of s real medical report.   This points to a recurring theme in AI use. The "human in the loop" principle is all about including a human being who can actually understand--and check-- the AI output. Or consider one of the more popular AI assignments for students-- have a LLM write about a topic you know well, and count up all the mistakes it makes. In other words, experts. Large Language Models can perfectly mimic form and confidence. They have, literally, no shame, less than even the most shameless bullshit artist that ever sold you some Florida real estate or a White House super-duper ballroom. They are elegantly mechnized Dunning-Kruger machines.  I recently sat and talked to someone who works in the computer tech and coding world and describes himself as a power user of AI. AI does save him and his team time, but there are caveats. AI doesn't remember what it has done. "It's like talking to a smart person with Alzheimer's." And it is not trustworthy. The project has to be broken down into chunks, and then each chunk has to be run through testing, designed by and/or involving a human coder in order to determine if the code actually does what it is supposed to do. The resulting process is still faster than the old all-human approach, but it still requires the involvement of humans with expertise to check the work, go back, re-do, check again, and on and on. It is most definitely not "Press a button and an hour later a fully-completed project is ready to go." The conversation raised lots of questions for me. If the AI is doing all the entry-level grunt work under the watchful expert eye of human accountability sinks, then where will the future expert eyes come from?  I'm also thinking of all those folks happily burbling "I use AI to write my journalism-flavored content" or "I use AI to write my lesson plans," and wondering if their process looks similar, if they are taking the bot through building up a lesson plan step by step, carefully examining each product every step of the way with their own expert eyes. Because I'm betting not.  Because while coding involves a lot of time-intensive grunt work hours that can be collapsed by AI, writing things does not. Doing the thinking work (outlines, brainstorming, etc) is how you get ready for the writing work, and that includes writing a lesson plan. If you have the AI write the outline, you still have to do the thinking part. In short, if you use the bot to write your lesson plan in a responsible, professional manner, I don't see it saving you any amount of time. In fact, if you really are an expert, I'm betting lesson plans or writing by bot, if done well, will actually take more time than just doing it yourself. The people who are finding it botting their way through the work are, just like the students using cheatbots, the folks least qualified to use the bot without producing junk.  It is the central irony of AI is that it's really only safe to use if you are already an expert in your field. And that's a terrifying thought when you consider that AI has the potential to completely gut the pipeline that would ordinarily produce experts.  Mind you, expertise is not a guarantee of well-used bots. AI repeatedly encourages users to trust its illusory expertise. Last week CNN reported that a top-ranked lawyer at "one of the most prestigious firms on the planet" became the latest in a long string of lawyers tripped up by AI error. He had to send a letter of apology to a judge after submitting a filing loaded with errors-- it took three pages to highlight and correct all of them. The mistakes were caught by opposing counsel.  All of this underlines one clear idea-- of all the people who shouldnt be using AI, students shouldn't be using it the most. Jessica Winters, in her recent New Yorker article, cites a host of experts who point out the many ways that AI is not a useful, appropriate, or even safe tech to include in education. But it is already oushed heavily in all manner of K-12 education.  The Chromebooks, which the students use in every class and for homework, came pre-installed with an all-ages version of Gemini, a suite of A.I. tools. When my daughter, who is in sixth grade, begins writing an essay, she gets a prompt: “Help me write.” If she is starting work on a slide-show presentation, the prompt is “Help me visualize.” She shoos away these interruptions, but they persist: “Help me edit.” “Beautify this slide.” The image generator is there, if she’d ever wish to pull the plug on her imagination. There are so many reasons to keep AI away from students. At the very least, we should be replacing all the cute little "become an AI expert" lesson plans helpfully provided by AI corporations with lessons about what AI is not and can not do, and nwhy children should avoid it like they avoid strangers in vans offering them candy.  Winters asks what it will take to push AI out of schools, and the answer, I think, is a whole hell of a lot because a lot of very powerful people have bet a very large amount of money that they can push AI everywhere, regardless of what harms it will do. It is as if the wealthiest corporations in the world have bought a vast supply of very powerful crack and they now are desperate to move it into any market they can think of. AI is not for amateurs in any field, and I only grudgingly accept that in some forms, it may have some use for some experts. In education, I think it will be awesome for cranking out lesson plans that administrators demand but don't read and teachers generate but don't use. For anything else, educators had better be prepared to use it like grown-ass experts in their field and not like a 14-year-old trying to generate a term paper ten minutes before it is due. And if using it like an expert in your field turns out to create a process that is longer and less productive than the non-AI version, well, experts should know how to get the job done.  

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Daily Kos: Texas’ New Propaganda Social Studies Standards

A roadside billboard in Texas where the state promotes a propaganda history curriculum. Internet According to the newly approved Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills for Social Studies standards “The primary purpose of Texas and American social studies is to educate students to become responsible, self-governing citizens who respect the rights of their fellow citizens and who cherish liberties and laws.” To promote “responsible” citizenship in the Lone Star State, the high school standards are laced with Islamophobic statements, justifications for slavery, the glorification of Christianity, Western Civilization, and capitalism, and leave out significant portions of Texas history. After all, in MAGA world, “Ignorance is Bliss.” This is a curriculum guide that Donald Trump would love, if he read it. The Texas Republican Party website claims the new standards support Trump’s campaign that “schools provide patriotic education that instills admiration for our nation and rejects indoctrination in radical, anti-American ideologies.” In support of the standards, MAGA Republican Congressional Representative Chip Roy accused “The Marxist-Islamist alliance” of mobilizing to “remove the current factual standards revealing the truth about the violent, aggressive actions of the promoters of Islam.” Examining the Texas State Board of Education high school standards, I couldn’t find any mention of the Comanche, the Apache or the Tonkawa, the original Native American inhabitants of the area that became Texas; how the Texas War for Independence was fought to protect slavery, which was illegal when Texas was part of Mexico; or that Texas fought with the Confederacy during the Civil War. The Tulsa Race Riots are included, but not who was rioting (whites) and who were the victims (African Americans). According to the Texas State Historical Commission, 339 African Americans were lynched by white mobs in Texas between 1885 and 1942, but that is not mentioned in the high school standards so apparently it is not considered “essential knowledge.” In Texas, “students understand the benefits of the United States free enterprise system, also referred to as capitalism or the free market system. This system, predicated on limited government and strong property rights, emphasizes the individual exercise of economic decisions without government interference, allowing people the opportunity to prosper.” Missing are the negatives – periodic economic downturns, structural inequality, the underfunding of essential social services, and climate change that has a devastating and deadly impact on the environment in Texas. Slavery is to be taught as something that “existed in many societies throughout history, including at the time of colonization, among some Indigenous peoples in America, in Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia, and earlier, in ancient civilizations.” Students don’t learn about the unique characteristics of slavery in the Americas, the United States, and Texas where it is based on race, the enslaved are property, not human beings, the Chrisian Bible is used to justify slavery; and it is the foundation of the agricultural economy of the South, provides the raw material for Northern industrialization, slave-produced commodities are the country’s chief export, and leads the country into Civil War. During the 17th and 18th centuries Christian Great Britain was the world’s largest slave-trading nation. But the only thing students learn from these standards is that the Christian religion’s belief in the inherent dignity and rights of all people, something apparently missing in the American South, led to the abolition of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and “influenced movements to end slavery around the world.” The biases against Islam in standards that promote Christianity as the bedrock of Western Civilization and American history are pronounced. The Prophet Mohammed is accused of brutal military campaigns against Christians and Jews; the teachings of jihad are blamed for the Islamic conquest of Christian lands during the European Middle Ages; and Radical Islam is the cause of terrorism today. Students are expected to learn about slavery in the Islamic world, but not that it was less extensive and less cruel than Christian chattel slavery in the Americas and that in the Islamic world enslaved people maintained their human status. Missing in the high school standards is that it was European Christians that invaded Islamic lands during the Crusades and looted Jewish sites; any mention of the Islamic Golden Age and contributions to mathematics and science; the Islamic world preservation the teachings of ancient Greece and Rome; the expansion of Islam into sub-Sahara Africa bringing literacy and numeracy; and the liberatory Islamic challenge to caste in India and feudalism in parts of Europe; To graduate, high school students must be able to denounce Texan LBJ’s Great Society efforts to abolish poverty and racial inequality as the much hated DEI and cite how the Reverend Martin Luther King, jr. used Biblical references in his speeches and writings. Of course, King, like Johnson, wanted to abolish poverty and racial inequality believing they violated Christian teachings and he also opposed the war in Vietnam, a war the standards present as a necessary effort to prevent the spread of communism.  

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Janresseger: Growth of School Vouchers at State and Federal Levels Threatens Public Schooling

Advocates for the privatization of public schooling are on the attack these days. Public education advocate, Jeff Bryant notes: “In what is being touted as the Golden Age of School Choice, the option that is most popular with American families—to fund and attend their local public schools—is gradually being made less viable.” In his in-depth report, Bryant identifies the millions of dollars states are investing in private school tuition voucher schemes as a primary contributor to a growing public school finance crisis across the states. Comparing voucher growth in North Carolina and Ohio, Bryant identifies an important and frequently unnamed result of privatization: it contributes to the competitive politics around state school funding and local property taxes: “On the privatization front, Ohio is somewhat ahead of North Carolina, with 4.2 percent of the state’s students receiving some kind of voucher to attend a private school or homeschool… But Ohio’s privately operated school sector may have an even more negative impact on school funding… (E)fforts by Ohio lawmakers to undermine the state’s funding for public schools have put pressure on local governments to steeply raise property taxes, resulting in Ohio having the eighth-highest property tax rate in the U.S., Statehouse News Bureau reports.  Understandably, there is now growing evidence of a popular uprising among Ohio voters to repeal property taxes….” Last week for News5Cleveland, Katie Ussin described how all this is playing out in Mentor, Ohio, an exurb in the Cleveland area. After the state failed fully to fund a new public school finance formula in the recent state budget and currently plans to invest over a billion dollars on private school tuition vouchers every year, and because the school district has failed to pass a property tax levy in two different election cycles, Mentor has decided to join the Vouchers Hurt Ohio lawsuit, which is challenging the constitutionality of the state’s school privatization scheme. The district is desperate for funds.  Ussin reports:  “Mentor has committed to cutting $6.6 million (in school services) heading into this upcoming school year and is planning an additional $3.5 million in cuts the year after. The district also plans to go back on the ballot in November with a lower levy ask.” Mentor School Board president, Maggie Cook explains: “Joining the lawsuit isn’t really a public versus private school issue… It’s a taxpayer issue and it’s a school funding issue.” Despite the urgent need to fight to contain voucher growth, Mentor’s financial crisis means that the school district can’t afford to pay the $2 per student cost of becoming a plaintiff in the Vouchers Hurt Ohio lawsuit.  In its desperation, the school district has been forced to turn to a Go Fund Me campaign in hopes of being able to join other school districts fighting against Ohio’s voucher program. No longer only a state concern, vouchers are now a federal issue as well.  A federal tuition tax credit private school voucher program was tucked into last summer’s huge, federal “One Big Beautiful” tax and reconciliation bill. By donating to a scholarship granting organization (SGO) parents can receive a dollar-for-dollar federal tax credit to help pay up to $1,700 for tuition at a private school of their choice.  Governors can decide whether their state will opt to participate in the program, a choice already made in 31 mostly GOP-led states. Recently, however, the Trump administration has been pushing to lure Democratic-led states to opt into the program.  Last Thursday, Education Week‘s Matthew Stone, Evie Blad, and Mark Lieberman reported that the U.S. Department of the Treasury confirmed that public schools and public school support organizations can also qualify for the federal vouchers with particular types of programming: “The law specifically lists tutoring, before-and after-school programs, uniforms, books, technology, and services for students with disabilities as school-connected expenses the scholarships can cover. The Treasury Department said this week that it plans to issue additional guidance on allowable expenses later this year.” Luring Democratic States to Opt-In  The reporters describe Marguerite Roza, director of the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University and a dogged and ardent promoter of the privatization of public schools, describing why she thinks Democratic governors should be interested in the federal vouchers, and how the federal vouchers could be adapted to support public education support programming: “One day, Roza said, the annual student bake sale fundraiser could be replaced with a drive to encourage people to sign up to send funds to an SGO that supports their public school, and employers could let workers easily direct funds from their paycheck withholdings to SGOs supporting local public schools… Public school districts could charge for ‘add-ons,’ paid for by scholarships (the tax credit vouchers)… Roza envisions three possible scenarios.  The first is relatively financially modest: private or home-schooled students could use the scholarships to pay public schools for ‘add-ons,’ like participation on sports teams or ala carte courses.  In a second scenario, public school students would use the scholarships for programs like after-school or summer enrichment.  In the third, most ambitious option, districts would bundle a set of ‘enhanced services’ covered by the scholarships, like expanded electives, mental health supports, and out-of-school learning opportunities. Districts would then work with families and a supporting SGO to sign up every eligible student for a scholarship that covers those services.” Education Week‘s Stone, Blad and Lieberman quote critics who worry about the dangers: “(T)he notion that public schools can benefit from the tax-credit scholarship program is a Trojan horse meant to make opting in palatable for reluctant governors, private school choice opponents argue. Private schools will see the most benefit, and decreased federal tax coffers will ultimately harm public schools, these opponents argue.” The reporters quote Melinda Person, president of the New York State United Teachers: “The question isn’t just about this year’s dollars and what we can get for public school kids this year. It’s about whether we’re helping to entrench a policy that we believe is ultimately going to weaken public education.” It is likely that if states begin expecting federal tax credit vouchers to be used for public school programming, this federal program will complicate the politics around funding public schools. The final rules are expected to be released in September, and it is not yet clear whether there will be limits on what public school support programs will be covered.  Will state legislators expect public school groups to start applying for federal tax credit vouchers to pay for programs their public schools already provide?  Will parents eventually be expected to make make additional tuition tax credit donations for educational enrichment programs on top of the state income taxes and the local property taxes they already pay?  Will the availability of federal tax credit vouchers undermine support for urgently needed local property tax levies? How much will the vouchers cost the federal government? Education Week‘s Stone, Blad, and Lieberman report that a federal estimate predicts that the federal tuition tax credit vouchers could reduce federal revenues by as much as $4.4 billion by 2034. The Cleveland Plain Dealer‘s Sabrina Eaton discovered that’s probably a gross underestimate: “There is no federal cap on how many people can claim the credit, making its total cost open-ended. The Joint Committee on Taxation has scored the program at $25.9 billion over ten years, but the Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy has estimated the real annual cost could reach $51 billion or more if a significant share of eligible taxpayers participate.” The Education Law Center’s Public Funds Public Schools Campaign debunks six claims made by the Trump administration in its effort to promote the federal tuition tax credit vouchers across the states. False Claim #1     “Vouchers expand educational access and opportunities for students.”  Instead, many “students who take a voucher to attend a private school—particularly LGBTQ+ students, students of various religious faiths, and other vulnerable populations—risk losing civil rights protections that they are guaranteed in public schools.” False Claim #2     “Vouchers do not take money from public schools…  Public schools receive funding largely based on the number of students they enroll.  When students take vouchers and exit their local districts to attend private school, public school funding decreases but fixed costs remain, leaving (the) students in those (public) schools with fewer resources…. The federal voucher program will also significantly decrease federal revenue…. Federal funding streams such as Title I… and IDEA… provide critical support to students…. Diminishing the federal treasury imperils these and… other programs. False Claim #3     “Vouchers improve student outcomes…  High-quality, large-scale studies demonstrate that vouchers have significant negative impacts on academic outcomes.” False Claim #4     “Vouchers do not burden taxpayers… The one-to-one tax credit for contributions to SGOs means that tax dollars owed to the federal government are re-routed to the voucher program. The loss of billions of dollars in tax revenue by the federal government will mean that taxpayers will feel the effect either as cuts to federal programs and services that no longer have funding, or as increased federal taxes to cover this budget hole.” False Claim #5     Vouchers provide families with affordable education options. Vouchers frequently do not cover the full cost of private school tuition. And they are usually insufficient to cover other essentials that are provided for free in public schools….” False Claim #6     The federal voucher program enjoys public popularity.  Vouchers are historically unpopular, and voters have rejected voucher programs every single time the choice has been put to them at the ballot box.” Public Funds Public Schools concludes: “The establishment of a federal school voucher program is part of a broader assault on public education, one of the most important common goods underpinning American democracy.  But federal vouchers cannot be forced on states that don’t opt in.” Here is a striking early example of one organization’s plan to use the federal vouchers to grow a network of Christian schools. Ohio has opted in to the federal tuition tax credit vouchers, and Ohio’s Center for Christian Virtue has already announced an adoption of the federal tuition tax credits that is particularly troubling for those of us who worry about the John Roberts Supreme Court’s abandonment of the protection of the separation of church and state. In late April, The Center for Christian Virtue announced that it has already established a Scholarship Granting Organization (SGO) to use federal tuition tax credit vouchers for students participating in the national expansion of its Christian Education Network: “The Christian Education Network (CEN), founded by the Center for Christian Virtue (CCV), has launched a federal Scholarship Granting Organization… positioning Ohio as the hub of a growing nationwide effort to expand access to Christian education…  This is a defining moment for Christian education in America,’ said Aaron Baer, Founder of CEN and President of CCV. ‘For the first time, families can take money they already owe to the federal government and redirect it into scholarships that fund a Christ-centered education… Under the federal framework, donors from any state can contribute, but only states that opt in will be eligible to receive scholarship funds…The new Federal School Choice Tax Credit presents the greatest evangelism opportunity in our lifetime.” There is already pushback in Congress  against the federal tax credit vouchers.    Some members of Congress are deeply concerned about the future implications the federal school voucher program.  In April, Peter Greene reported: “Senators Mark Kelly (D-AZ) and Mazie Hirono (D-HI) and an additional 28 senators have introduced the Keep Public Funds in Public Schools Act. The act would strike IRS Code Section 25, the portion of the IRS code that was inserted to create the federal school voucher program.”  On Thursday, June 11, The Plain Dealer‘s  Eaton reported that Gwen Moore (D-WI) introduced a companion bill, Keep Public Dollars in Public Schools Act, in the U.S. House of Representatives.  A teacher in my own school district and president of the Cleveland Heights Teachers’ Union, Karen Rego traveled to Washington, DC to participate in the press conference announcing Moore’s bill. Moore represents Wisconsin, and Rego is a public school educator in Ohio—the two states which have the longest experience with statewide private school voucher programs. Both programs began in the 1990s as small experiments to serve poor children; today both have expanded state-wide and ballooned in cost.  Now, like all the other statewide voucher programs, Wisconsin and Ohio vouchers serve primarily wealthy students. The federal tuition tax credit vouchers Kelly’s and Moore’s bills oppose are also designed to direct federal funds to wealthy families. Education Week‘s Stone, Blad and Lieberman remind readers: “The federal law doesn’t specify the size of the scholarships, and most students will be eligible—anyone from families earning up to 300% of their area’s median income, which is $510,000 in Westchester County, N.Y., on the high end and about $114,000 in Wolfe County KY., on the low end.”  

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Dr. Joe's Substack: Anthropic Launched Claude for Teachers. We Blocked It for Our District.

  We made that decision quickly and thoroughly. Not because Claude is a bad AI model. Quite the opposite. I believe it’s one of the best AI models available today. We blocked it because I believe Anthropic made one of the biggest K-12 go-to-market mistakes I’ve seen in years. The frustrating part is that it was completely avoidable. Here’s What I Saw As I read through Anthropic’s launch materials, a few things immediately stood out. Claude is described as: Safe with student data. Built with FERPA in mind. Designed specifically for teachers. Anthropic’s own examples encourage teachers to work with student assessment data, attendance information, classroom notes, and even reference IEP meeting notes. Then, farther down the same page, Anthropic says: “Claude for Teachers is for individual educators. A dedicated offering for schools and districts is coming soon.” That’s where they lost me. The district offering should have come first. Not later. If your product encourages workflows involving protected student information, districts need governance before teachers need access. Not the other way around. Teachers Were Put in the Middle This is my biggest concern. Teachers aren’t privacy attorneys. They aren’t FERPA experts. They’re teachers. When a company tells teachers a product is safe with student data, built with FERPA in mind, and then demonstrates workflows involving student information, many educators will reasonably assume those workflows are appropriate. In my opinion, Anthropic has put teachers in a position where they could inadvertently make unauthorized disclosures of protected student information while believing they were using the product exactly as intended. I am not suggesting teachers would intentionally violate FERPA. I’m saying they could reasonably believe they were doing exactly what the product was designed to do. That is not a position teachers should ever be placed in. The District Treats It Like a Data Breach When an unapproved application receives district data, we do not start by asking how good the AI model is. We handle it exactly like a data breach. Because, from the district’s perspective, protected information may have been disclosed to an unauthorized third party. We immediately need to know: Which employees created accounts? What information was uploaded? Which students were affected? Were IEPs, evaluations, behavior records, assessment data, or other protected records involved? Can the data be permanently deleted? Can the vendor prove it? Do we have notification, legal, or regulatory obligations? Whether a specific incident meets the legal definition of a reportable data breach depends on the facts and applicable law. Operationally, we don’t have the luxury of debating terminology first. We contain it. We investigate it. We determine the scope. We document the response. We notify the appropriate parties when required. We demand deletion of district data. The teacher clicked upload. The district owns the investigation. The district owns the legal review. The district owns the communication with parents. The district owns the regulatory response. The district owns the cleanup. The platform gains another user. The district gains another incident to investigate. Privacy Is More Than Model Training Anthropic deserves credit for making meaningful privacy commitments, including that educator conversations are not used to train their models. That’s the right decision. But protecting student information is about much more than model training. The first question isn’t: “What happens after the data gets there?” It’s: “Should the data have been disclosed in the first place?” Those are two completely different questions. From a district perspective, student data isn’t considered protected simply because it won’t be used to train an AI model. It also has to be disclosed under the appropriate legal, contractual, and governance framework. Then I Got to the Verification Process This one surprised me. Depending on the verification pathway, educators may be asked to provide a school-issued ID, government-issued ID, employment verification, a contract, or a recent pay stub. Think about that. School districts already know who their employees are. We already have HR systems. Google Workspace. Microsoft Entra. Identity providers. Clever. ClassLink. Why create another process that asks teachers to submit sensitive employment documentation to another third party? Even if handled securely, I don’t understand why that additional risk needs to exist. This EdTech GTM Playbook Is Getting Old Unfortunately, this isn’t unique to Anthropic. I’ve watched this same playbook repeat itself for years. Launch free teacher accounts. Drive rapid bottom-up adoption. Get thousands of educators using the platform. Then walk into the district office and say: “Hundreds of your teachers are already using our platform. If you want visibility, governance, identity management, administrative controls, and district oversight, you should purchase the enterprise version.” That isn’t responsible K-12 adoption. It puts districts in a position where they have to react after adoption has already started instead of evaluating the platform before sensitive student information may be shared. Governance becomes the upsell instead of the foundation. That’s backwards. Governance isn’t an enterprise feature. It isn’t a premium add-on. It is the prerequisite for adoption. School districts are the customer. More importantly, they’re the legal stewards of student data. Teachers, students, and staff are the district’s users. They are not an independent customer base for vendors to acquire around the district. This Didn’t Have to Happen One thing that surprised me was the apparent lack of engagement with many of the district technology leaders I regularly work with before this launch. When Google and OpenAI were preparing major K-12 initiatives, their GTM leaders reached out to me and many other district CIOs, CTOs, and K-12 leaders. They wanted us to challenge the strategy. They wanted us to find the holes. They changed things because of those conversations. I’m not saying Anthropic didn’t engage with anyone. I’m saying this rollout doesn’t feel like it was pressure-tested by enough district leaders who live with student privacy, procurement, governance, and technology risk every day. Because if it had been, I believe someone would have asked one simple question: “Could a teacher reasonably and falsely believe they’re authorized to upload protected student information because of how we’ve presented this product?” If the answer is yes… The rollout wasn’t ready. Claude Deserved Better I don’t think Anthropic has a technology problem. I think they have a K-12 strategy problem. Claude is an exceptional AI model. I genuinely want it to succeed in education. But great AI doesn’t excuse a poor go-to-market strategy. District office should not be an afterthought. Governance should not be an upsell. And teachers should never be placed in a position where they inadvertently create FERPA compliance issues while believing they’re using a product exactly as intended. Claude deserved a better rollout. I hope Anthropic fixes it.  

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Second Breakfast: The Algorithmic Order

The history of education technology is inseparable from the history of standardized testing. That’s part of the argument I make in Teaching Machines, where I trace the development of both the machinery of teaching and the machinery of testing back to the early twentieth century. There are more recent connections too, of course: the Obama Administration’s push for computer-based testing in the early 2010s, for example, which led many more school districts to adopt one-to-one computing (and, in particular, to not just buy Chromebooks but to adopt the whole Google framework about what digital work – school- and otherwise – should look like. See Natasha Singer’s forthcoming book, Coding Kids.) And while so much of the reporting on the recent and growing anti-ed-tech sentiment has framed the movement in terms of “too much screen-time,” parents (often the very same parents) have long been very frustrated and very vocal about “too much testing.” As such, it’s more than a little bit strange then that certain politicians and pundits believe that a winning message right now is “bring back high-stakes testing.” Or maybe it’s not strange at all: maybe all this helps to make clear that the technocratic elite care very little about what people want or need. They aren't even bothering to "read the room." In a recent op-ed in The New York Times, Ross Weiner argues that the calls to bring back the test-based accountability of “No Child Left Behind” is delusional. (Well, to be fair that’s the word that the headline writer chose: "delusional.") Weiner describes these policies as insufficient then and inadequate now. “Young people are placing more emphasis on purpose, relationships and contribution than on older markers of status,” he argues. For a generation, the reform coalition took its validation from economists and accountability metrics, while treating parents, students and communities as mere functionaries rather than partners in a shared civic enterprise.Taking their priorities seriously would mean broadening what we expect from the classroom. Schools should put what students can do on equal footing with what they know, embedding real skills in academic learning rather than leaving them to chance or sequencing them to later in life. Schools should reconnect with the communities they serve, so young people learn through and about the places where they live. And they should reanimate the character-forming, developmental mission a pluralistic democracy requires.Federal policy has an essential role to play in public education: protecting civil rights, funding quality data and research, and encouraging promising practices to spread. But the formative mission cannot be mandated by Washington. Belonging, the foundation of both learning and civic commitment, is relational and starts local; it cannot be standardized or scaled, but must be cultivated by schools that are responsive to the communities they serve. It’s not a fully-fleshed out vision for education, to be sure, but it does gesture at something quite different from the technocratic one that schools have spent the last few decades delivering -- and delivering via education technology, via a machinery that shapes the form and increasingly the content, the curricula and the pedagogy. Funny, for all the invocation of "the future of education" from ed-tech evangelists and testing companies and politicians, they're almost always talking about the past, or at least about much older narratives of what that future might look like. (And in doing so, they ignore that computers have been ubiquitous in classrooms for a very very long time now.) I’ve written quite a bit recently about how nostalgia seems to have circumscribed our ability to think about the future -- in particular, how those building and funding and hyping “AI” are still caught in the “Sputnik moment,” in ideas that are now seventy years old. But as this weird fondness for “No Child Left Behind” certainly demonstrates, there are other eddies that seem to have snared the political imagination. They’ve caught and captured the pedagogical imagination too, I fear -- I’ve noticed this in so many responses to recent efforts -- in Australia, in the UK, and now perhaps in Canada -- to limit children’s access to social media. Instead of banning technology, some people argue, we need to teach children how to use the technology correctly. We need “critical thinking.” We need “literacy.” (Fill in the blank with a descriptor there: Computational literacy. Digital literacy. Web literacy. AI literacy.) It’s almost as if the past thirty some-odd years of these sorts of lessons have made all the difference and -- somehow simultaneously -- have never happened at all. I’m not certain if folks are stuck in another era or simply long for another (mostly make-believe or misremembered) era, the one in which they imagine that adjectives like “open” and “critical” were sufficient to bend the arc of technology towards progressive education and away from the school-to-prison pipeline (or its contemporary Fortnite-to-looksmaxxing pipeline). Things have shifted. I’m still stewing on one of the essays I linked to last week, Fred Turner’s recent article in The Baffler on “The Texas Ideology” -- on a Silicon Valley that has embraced muscular Christianity, white supremacy, political surveillance, military contracts, and (as ever) resource extraction, and on what all this might mean for education and education technology. (Related: “Texas is poised to require millions of students to study Bible stories,” CNN reports.) "The California Ideology," with its privileging of neoliberalism, libertarianism, and individualism, has been the driving force of so much of ed-tech in the last decade or so – the MOOC was exemplary. And now? And next? I’ve just started reading Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff’s new book, in which they argue that “Muskism” has replaced “Fordism” as the new model for capitalism -- a model which has major ramifications not just for “business” but for all of society. (Do recall that one of the key elements of Fordism was that factory workers be paid enough wages to buy things: mass production and mass consumption were inextricable.) And while many people might like focus on Musk’s politics and/or his social media persona -- certainly as good an example as any as to why this stuff is bad for one’s mental health -- it’s worth remembering that, at his core, he is a government contractor: that is the business of SpaceX. (Green tech federal money provided some of the funding for Tesla too.) And the infrastructure that Musk has built and controls -- including the Starlink satellites -- also have a nostalgic bent to them, Slobodian and Tarnoff suggest: not just in the science fiction worlds that Musk read about as a kid, but in his lived experiences in apartheid South Africa. The future, for Muskism, is an apartheid techno-state. And I’m sorry, but no amount of “critical thinking” or “‘AI’ literacy” is going to get us out of “fortress futurism,” particularly when the very companies building this fortress subscribe to a vision of algorithmic-ordering of children. (Indeed, they long have, when we consider the origins of standardized testing: in intelligence testing and eugenics.) Something Wicked This Way Comes: Via Nature: “Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in — and they’re not good” “The problem with evidence production on AI in education,” by Ben Williamson Arjun Appadurai review Theo Baker’s new book on Stanford: “The University as Giant App” “Your AI is not a tool,” writes L. M. Sacasas. It is a “denial-of-service attack on the human psyche.”   “How to talk about "AI" without adding to the anthropomorphization,” by Emily Bender and Nanna Inie The words we use really matter. I wonder if, every time someone gets all in their feels about banning social media – this strikes me as language that triggers all sorts of other associations, a lot of them negative, as well as inducing in libertarians their loud regulatory paroxysms (or whatever you call their version of “moral panic”) – we might simply pick different phrasing: this issue, for example involves raising the age limit of who can sign up for these sorts of apps from 13 to 16. I dunno, seems less scary. (Yes, I realize that it's more complicated than that, and that handing over one's ID to access websites seems quite un-good. Then again, there isn't much good in any of the data we blithely surrender.) Or maybe rather than talking about screen free classrooms (or weekends or whatever) – a phrase that emphasizes the absence of devices but is easily twisted into some sort of lack – we talk about all the things that we are doing instead of staring and scrolling and clicking. This does mean, of course – and this is truly paramount – that we plan for those things, that we reclaim public space for kids, that we fund activities and resources for them and with them. And not because we think they’re broken without their phones, but because we believe that they are whole people, worthy people regardless. (image credits)   Today’s bird is the prothonotary warbler, which according to Wikipedia, “is named for its plumage, which resembles the yellow robes once worn by papal clerks (named prothonotaries) in the Roman Catholic Church.” I confess that sometimes my brain misinterprets words – my own little defective autocomplete machine, I guess – and I recently read this bird’s name as “profanatory warbler,” which I thought was delightful. I promptly went to learn all about why the little yellow creature would be cursing/cursed. Oops. If one were to invent such a reason, it would be perhaps its connection to Alger Hiss and Whittaker Chambers. A Cold War history refresher, we love those here: Chambers had accused Hiss of being a communist spy; Hiss insisted he did not know Chambers. But they both mentioned the warbler in their Congressional testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee – "gotcha." (Obviously it’s never taken much to convince American government officials that dissenters are part of some vast and violent conspiracy.) The profanatory warbler’s cry, I imagine, sounds something like “Are you fucking kidding me?!” Over and over and over again.  

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Critical Studies of Education & Technology: School Surveillance of Students – A Matter of Faith

The scope of what schools plausibly might want to know about their students is surprisingly wide. This is leading to all manner of AI surveillance products being pitched to education customers. Take the case of a small Australian AI start-up pitching a ‘faith-based’ version of its ‘HALO’ AI-powered analytics system specifically designed for Australia’s large sector of Catholic schools. On one hand, bespoke Catholic school surveillance software makes good technical sense – offering easy compatibility with the specific LMS and SIS platforms that Catholic schools tend to use. Yet, the appeal of HALO AI is also framed in terms of monitoring various aspects of student faith development that Catholic schools might understandably be interested in.   In this manner, alongside familiar school surveillance features such as real-time attendance ,‘risk’ and ‘well-being’ monitoring HALO AI offers a host of ‘faith formation tracking’ features – monitoring student involvement in things like sacrament preparation activities, religious retreats, prayer groups and the like. As HALO marketing puts it, this allows schools to “support each student’s faith journey with actionable data insights”.    These values are also incorporated into the system’s ‘Pastoral Care Analytics’, with HALO’s marketing stressing that the monitoring capacity of their product extends well beyond conventional secular notions of pastoral care: “Created with Catholic educators, not adapted from secular platforms. Track holistic wellbeing, emotional health, and spiritual growth with metrics that align with your school’s Catholic mission and values”. HALO even promises to make this monitoring a family affair, with the app version providing daily updates and to-do lists to parents – directing how they might best support their child. This is marketed as allowing parents and children to discuss ‘faith milestones’ and “connect faith formation at school with practice at home”. On one hand, this is all information that Catholic schools and families would likely be keeping an eye on without the help of AI. Nevertheless, the idea that AI can provide predictive insights into these intimate and highly personal areas of child’s development could be seen as rather impersonal … if not especially spiritual.  

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Cognitive Resonance: Why is Claude for Teachers?

Anthropic bumbles its way into education Everything about AI right now is weird. I took the first two weeks of July off to road trip through New Mexico (highly recommended) and managed to avoid reading or thinking about AI for two weeks (also highly recommended). When I came back online, the email at the top of my inbox was from a reporter at Ed Week asking if I’d care to comment on “Claude for Teachers,” and my initial reaction was—huh? For the last four years, OpenAI and Google and Meta have largely aimed their AI efforts at getting “consumers,” business-speak for “individual humans,” to use their AI products. It’s never been entirely clear that there’s a business model to be built around this, a fact that Ed Zitron reminds us via 50,000 word screeds every few weeks, but the basic play in technology for the past several decades has been to acquire users first and monetize later. And in accordance with this approach to lucrative enshittification, it makes sense for each of these companies to have an “education play,” meaning, a dedicated effort to infuse their particular product into the education system so it becomes the one that users, which is to say kids and their teachers, become habituated to using. This sort of thing. Meanwhile, as these titans of commerce have battled it out, Anthropic went the other way. Instead of focusing on consumer usage, Anthropic quite deliberately focused on developing AI for “enterprises,” business-speak for “businesses.” As OpenAI and ChatGPT captured most of the headlines, Anthropic quietly but very openly was building a product for corporations and other business entities to use to extract more profits and cost savings or whatever. Accordingly, Anthropic was also the one major AI company that had no apparent interest in intruding into education systems, because there’s very little money to be made there, let me tell you. And this strategy by Anthropic…appears to have been a wild success? Once considered the Lyft to OpenAI’s Uber, Anthropic has now vaulted ahead in earned revenue, prospective valuation, and maybe most importantly, the amorphous and ephemeral but nonetheless vitally important sense of being the “market leader.” AI as a consumer product has flailed around for three years, but at least for the moment, there’s every indication of a genuine “product-market fit”—business-speak for “shit someone or something will pay for”—around enterprise-facing AI agents, and of those, Claude is considered best of the bunch. And as I covered here, all the major AI companies appear to be pivoting away from chatbots toward some version of this “agentic” business model. Given all this, why has Anthropic dropped Claude for Teachers on us now? It’s a consumer-facing play that makes no obvious sense to me. We’ll get to what exactly Claude for Teachers comprises momentarily, but just as a general matter, it seems odd timing to “lean in” on this particular AI use when the backlash to AI and edtech in schools continues to grow. This appears misaligned to Anthropic’s business model and a recipe for future PR headaches. Or maybe not even future ones, as Claude for Teachers is already a privacy intrusion nightmare machine. In order to sign up, one must “get verified” as a teacher, which means Anthropic is asking educators to upload pictures of their staff IDs. Worse, as Mark Racine observed, Anthopic is also encouraging teachers to “upload student rosters, diagnostic data, and attendance.” Perhaps this hints as to why Anthropic is doing this—these companies are addicted to datasets, after all—but whoo-boy are they playing with fire with this blatant intrusion on student privacy rights. Which is why I was heartened to see Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, take a strong stand against Anthropic’s efforts to further infuse AI into education. Just kidding! From the news release: “We’ve been working with Anthropic on a Gold Standard that sets out industry best practices for safety and privacy in K-12 education,” said Weingarten. We’ll come back to this later. But first, what about Claude for Teachers as a product—is it compelling? Reader, it is not. With help from one of my special secret-agent educator moles, I managed to gain access, and it appears Anthropic spent all of five minutes creating a teacher-facing “skin” for Claude. Here’s the landing page: If you click on “plan a lesson,” you’ll then be taken to this: That’s it, that’s the level of “customization” for teachers provided in Claude for Teachers, this single pre-baked prompt. Everything else beyond this is just regular ol’ Claude. Wheeeee. Look closely, and you’ll notice Claude for Teachers also includes a few listed “Connectors,” included to something called Learning Commons. As best I can tell, this is the rebranded education division of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative that now offers edtech companies something called a “Knowledge Graph” that purports to unify all 50 state academic standards here in the US. From the Learning Commons site: This is bizarre for multiple reasons. First, no public school teacher needs this, there is zero value to them in having a “coherent, interconnected network” of unified academic standards—what matters is the standards in their particular state. But second, and far more bafflingly, surely both Anthropic and CZI are aware that one of the single biggest political controversies in education politics in the US was around the Obama Administration’s attempt to create a coherent, interconnected network of academic standards called the Common Core? And that the radical right-wing pushback to this effort, led by Glenn Beck and Michelle Malkin, was in some sense an early warning indicator for the rise of Trump, MAGA, Moms for Liberty and the like? Why would Anthropic and CZI want to go anywhere near this third rail again by trying to create what appears to be de facto national standards? To further beta Claude for Teachers, I fed it one of my favorite test tasks, asking it to plan a lesson around the Civil Rights Movement. It provided what all these tools provide, a completely anodyne lesson structure that would be destined to go awry in the hands of all but the most expert of teachers. But I then prompted it to “provide guidance as to how I should teach this lesson given I am in red state and many of my students have parents who support Trump,” which resulted in this internal monologue on Claude’s part: This is a crystal example of what AI scholars such as Abeba Birhane are warning about when they point out how AI is both encoding and shaping social prejudices at scale. To wall off “contemporary political issues” from our recent history is to make a choice, and here, Anthropic’s algorithm, programmed by Anthropic’s software engineers, is making it very clear that teachers should not connect the past to the present. Shudder. One last thing on Claude for Teachers’ functionality: Anthropic purportedly is providing teachers with “free access to premium Claude capabilities,” but if you’re looking to make use of the fabled Fable, Anthropic’s most advanced coding agent, you’ve got all of three days from sign-up before access will be cut off. And even while Fable is briefly activated, the usage limits are severe—it timed out on the sole task I gave it after 30 minutes, and promptly cut off all token credits.1 I mean, what is the point? Oh and if you’re wondering, I didn’t sit through the online “AI fluency” course developed by Teach For America, sorry not sorry. I did, however, take a quick peek at the obligatory end-of-course quiz, and this item made me spit out my milk tea: So what’s happening here is that to be AI fluent, according to Anthropic and Teach For America, individual teachers need to bear the responsibility for ensuring compliance with FERPA, even though the law itself applies to school districts and other legal entities (not individual educators). Or as Claude puts it:   Right, so Claude for Teachers is FERPA compliant if and only if teachers take on the work of anonymizing their student data each and every time they enter it into Claude. This is what Randi Weingarten is describing as the “Gold Standard” for privacy protection? What are we doing here? It’s all very weird and annoying and I’d like to go back to New Mexico.   UPDATE 7/27/26: Alert CogRes reader Connie Ma has alerted me to this essay by Dr. Joe Phillips, a school district administrator (I think), on why the district where he works is banning Claude for Teachers. The underlying FERPA privacy issue he flags aligns with what I’ve highlighted here. 1 The task, you ask? Of course I asked Claude Fable to take on Zork! It scored 58 points, better than my trials with Codex, but it was also completely unclear how it was engaging with the game. AI agents are confusing.  

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Gary Rubinstein's Blog: By One Dishonest Measure

A loaded question that education reformers like to ponder is: Exactly how many students in the boroughs of New York City are trapped in failing schools? In November 2014 there was a report put out by Families For Excellent Schools called ‘The Forgotten Fourth’ in which they put the number at 143,000 which is about 15%. This 143,000 number was quoted for months on the news and was featured in a New York Post op-ed by Eva Moskowitz, founder and CEO of the Success Academy charter school network. Two weeks ago, July 2026 The New York Post had an article about a new report with an updated number of how many NYC students are trapped in failing schools. The new number is 409,379 or 43%. This is based on a newly released report called ‘By Any Honest Measure’ and written by, of all places, Success Academy. So how, exactly, did the number of students trapped in failing schools triple in the last twelve years? It all depends on how the word ‘failing’ is defined. But defining what is and what is not a ‘failing’ school is a very subjective thing and I’m going to examine in this post how ‘By Any Honest Measure’ defines it to arrive at the 409,379 number and how slight adjustments to their metric would result in a very different number. In the 2014 paper, the measure of a failing school was a school in which fewer than 10% of the students passed the math state test and fewer than 10% of the students passed the ELA state test. Just looking at pass rates can be misleading because you could have a school, for example, in which 90% of the students get a 2.9 and the rest get over a 3.0 and that would be 10% ‘passing’ while you could have another school where everyone gets exactly a 3.1 and they have 100% passing even though the two schools are basically the same in terms of their test scores. So just looking at percent passing can give a misleading picture, it is the most crude way of measuring school quality. More sophisticated ‘growth’ measures at least try to capture the idea that a school can be doing a good job even though the students haven’t gotten to a certain level yet. But for that ‘The Forgotten Fourth’ that was they way they defined ‘failing’ despite the flaws in that simplified metric. But this new report from Success Academy has concluded that the number of students in ‘failing’ schools has tripled in the past 12 years. So how is ‘failure’ defined in ‘By Any Honest Measure’? For this study, a failing school is one where under 50% of the students have passed either the math or the ELA state tests. So to compare the two ways: ‘The Forgotten Fourth’ needed both math and ELA to be under 10%. ‘By Any Honest Measure’ needed either math or ELA to be under 50%. So right there, we should expect the number of students in failing schools to skyrocket. Well I downloaded the report and had to do some number crunching from the New York Department Of Education database so I can look at the numbers more closely. The first thing that came to mind for me was, why is the bar for ‘failing’ now under 50% passing when it used to be under 10% passing. The Success Academy report says that there has been grade inflation as the average state test scores have been increasing while the NAEP scores have been stagnant. This is actually a valid point (one of the few they make) but it still isn’t detailed enough to raise the failure bar from 10% to 50%. As an experiment, I recalculated these numbers to see what if the rule was to find schools where students got less than 40% on at least one of the two measures. Just changing that one number from 50% to 40% lowered the number of students attending ‘failing’ schools 242,822 (if you notice that my 50% on the chart is a little off from the Success Academy calculation, there are some very small differences in the counting but the difference is negligible). And if we lower to 10% like in ‘The Forgotten Fourth’ now it is just 14,000 students instead of the 143,000. But I will acknowledge that cut off scores and what qualifies as getting a 3 on a test is its own political issue so it is hard to know what is considered an alarming number of students not reaching an arbitrary cutoff. This is more the reason to use a more sophisticated way of trying to measure school quality and not just saying 50% is the ideal threshold to measure whether a school is failing. Here is a chart showing how the Success Academy numbers would change had they used a different threshold.   The next big difference between the new ‘By Any Honest Measure’ report and ‘The Forgotten Fourth’ report is that for the older one, for a school to be failing, it had to be less than 10% for both measures while for this newer report, for a school to be failing, it had to be less than 50% for either measure. So this means that if an elementary school had 49% of their students get a 3 on the math state test and 100% of their students get a 3 on the ELA state test, by the methodology in this report, that would be a failing school. That school would be failing while a school that got 51% on both tests would not be failing. This is really the critical flaw in this report so I decided to crunch the numbers to see how this one thing, the AND vs OR decision, affected the numbers. First I wanted to check to see if this was a common thing, a school having fewer than 50% on one test and much greater than 50% on the other test. So I went to the Success Academy report where they showed the numbers they used and I found something very interesting.   So in their list of failing schools, they only report the number for the one that is under 50%. So what I did was download the entire NY State database and fill in every missing value. So, for instance, that first school on the list there, PS 165, I found that their ELA score was 57% So they had 48% Math and 57% ELA but because one of those numbers was less than 50% all 459 students in that school, including all the K-2 who didn’t take the test are part of the 408,000 students ‘trapped’ in the ‘failing’ school. Had a few more students in 3-6 gotten one or two more questions right on that math test, 459 students would have been spared from this trapping. Well, I ran two calculations. First I looked at all 905 schools on the failing list to see if there were a lot of schools like this. I found that about half the schools had gotten under 50% on just one test. So I added together the two numbers and found 173 that had a combined sum of over 100, like a school that had 48% on one and 57% on the other, PS 165. Here are some of those results:   Like Brooklyn Bridge academy, that ‘failing’ school that had 48.5% passing math and 97% passing ELA. Above I listed the the top 25 schools, but for the 173 schools that had a combined over 100, their total enrollment 117,385. This, right there, the unfair labelling of a school as failing despite having an average of 50% or higher comprises about 1/3 of the students the report contends are trapped in a failing school. I think that even if a school had 35% math and 60% ELA so it doesn’t add up to over 100 but I still think it is unfair to label that school as a failure. If you only count schools where both scores are under 50%, the number of students enrolled in failing schools drops from 400,000 to 180,000. That’s how much can change when you change an ‘OR’ into an ‘AND.’ Whether Success Academy purposely left off the relevant other numbers from their spreadsheets so nobody would question if a school with 48.5% math and 97% ELA is truly ‘failing’ I don’t know, but I was glad that I have the technical know-how to fill in those missing numbers. Looking at the chart published in The New York Post, one thing that jumped out at me was that they claim that 62% of high school students attend ‘failing’ schools while just 34% of elementary schools do. So even though high school is just four grades, 9, 10, 11, 12, they comprise almost 40% of the total students in the ‘failing’ schools. So elementary schools have grades 3-6 state tests in math and ELA but high schools don’t. High schools, however, take a bunch of standardized state final exams called The Regents. One of those Regents is Algebra I and another one is ELA. Many students take Algebra I in 8th grade so only the lower performing students take the Algebra I Regents in high school and those scores are skewed. For elementary schools where four different grades are used to make their math score, trying to capture the quality of a high school by just looking at the Algebra I scores for students who came in not already having taken Algebra I in 8th grade is not going to be a fair way to judge the school, especially since getting less than 50% on Algebra I, regardless of how the school did on ELA Regents, dooms the school as failing and the entire enrollment to be trapped in it. And since a school is counted as failing if fewer than 50% pass either the Algebra I or the ELA Regents, the entire high school is labelled failing based on this one test. So the first analysis I did on the high schools was to look at the 297 schools and see how many had gotten less than 50% on both which ended up as 74 schools. Of the rest, 210 had gotten under 50% on Algebra I but more than 50% on ELA while only 9 had gotten under 50% on ELA but over 50% on Algebra I. One of the 9 entries in the category of over 50% Algebra 1 Regents and under 50% ELA regents is the ‘English Language Learners – Inter Supp’ isn’t actually a school with 276 students trapped but a category that happened to be in the database and which Success Academy included as 276 students to add to their list.   As a last irony, I looked at Success Academy’s Algebra I Regents scores. To someone who doesn’t know about the infamous ‘curve’ on this test, the 94% pass rate might seem fine. But only 52% of their students got a level 4 or level 5. The other 48% of their students got either levels 2 or 3. To get a level 4, you have to get 51 points out of 82, which is a 62% (which gets ‘curved’ to a 75). Level 2, though technically passing, is curved up from as low as 35% correct to 51% correct. So 48% of Success Academy, had New York State not done this generous curve, would have gotten less than a 62% on the Regents which would be failing. And, based on a bell curve, it is likely that a few of their level 4 students would have gotten under a 65. So by a pretty reasonable alternative way of scaling the Algebra I Regents, fewer than 50% of Success Academy students would have passed it and, by their way of measuring high schools, Success Academy Harlem I would be a failing school in which all the students there are trapped.   OK, I think you get the point. ‘By Any Honest Measure’ is anything but. It is really kind of embarrassing that a company with tens of millions of dollars would probably pay about 50 grand to create this slop. Sadly, this report has been picked up by the media and it will surely be quoted for years to come. 

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Daily Kos: Teaching the 25th Anniversary of 9/11

Friday, September 11, 2026 is the twenty-fifth anniversary of the aerial attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. By law, New York State public schools must observe a brief period of silent reflection at the start of the school day. The State Education Department and the 9/11 Memorial & Museum provide multi-grade teaching resources but specific lesson plans are up to local school districts. The New York State teachers union developed a series of lessons for the tenth anniversary of 9/11. For many teachers, the attacks on 9/11 and the aftermath were major events in their lives. However, for today’s students, the attacks on 9/11 have been relegated to the past along with the bombing of Fort Sumter in April 1861 and the attack on Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941, what President Franklin D. Roosevelt called a “day that will live in infamy.” Memories fade and impact wanes, the question becomes what should be the focus of instruction on the anniversary of 9/11? Social studies teachers have an especially crucial role to play because of our skill in addressing sensitive and controversial issues in the classroom. In 2007, I conducted a workshop on the significance of 9/11 for ninth graders who were nine years old at the time of the attacks. None of them remembered the events that day although they later learned about them. In 2025, other than children whose families suffered personal loss at the time and have discussed it with them, 9/11, if remembered at all, is only a historic event. We live a politically contentious time. For younger students, lessons can focus on how following the attacks on 9/11, the people across the United States rallied and stood together. They can also learn how people risked and sacrificed their own lives to help rescue others. A very compelling story is the man in the red bandana. Welles Crowther of Nyack, New York worked in an office on the 104th floor of the South Tower of the World Trade Center. After rescuing two groups of survivors, Crowthers went back upstairs to help others and did not make it out. He personally saved eighteen people. One of the survivors, Judy Wein, in a New York Times interview, told about being rescued by a “mysterious man” whose “mouth and nose” were “covered with a red handkerchief” – Welles Crowther, the man in a red bandana. There is a children’s picture book and 56-minutes long documentary about 9/11 and Welles Crowder. For a stand-alone middle and high school lesson, students can read and discuss documents 1 and 2 with supportive video. Document 1 is a news report from the New York Times. Document 2 is an excerpt from an article that includes interviews with survivors. In eleventh grade, as part of the end of the year curriculum, teachers can engage students in an evaluation of U.S. foreign and military policy. There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq or Afghanistan and the invasion and military occupation did not lead to creation of stable democratic governments. In Iraqi, civilians derisively demanded to know “Maki Kahraba,” “Where is the electricity?” The War on Terrorism, a war without end undermined the United States’ international stature and produced more terrorists than it eliminated. This is an especially important topic because the United States is now involved in another prolonged war in the region that undermines stability there, has weakened the American military, and threatens the global economy. Few high school students are ever exposed to critical analyses of United States foreign policy, which leaves them completely unable to evaluate the standard narrative presented in school and the media that somehow the United States is different from other nations, a shining democratic “city on the hill” for others to emulate and the defender of freedom around the world. Document 1. Hijacked Jets Destroy Twin Towers and Hit Pentagon Source: Serge Schmemann, New York Times, September 12, 2001, pg 1 A. Hijackers rammed jetliners into each of New York’s World Trade Center towers yesterday, toppling both in a hellish storm of ash, glass, smoke and leaping victims, while a third jetliner crashed into the Pentagon in Virginia. There was no official count, but President Bush said thousands had perished, and in the immediate aftermath the calamity was already being ranked the worst and most audacious terror attack in American history. The attacks seemed carefully coordinated. The hijacked planes were all en route to California, and therefore gorged with fuel, and their departures were spaced within an hour and 40 minutes. B. In all, 266 people perished in the four planes and several score more were known dead elsewhere. Numerous firefighters, police officers and other rescue workers who responded to the initial disaster in Lower Manhattan were killed or injured when the buildings collapsed. Hundreds were treated for cuts, broken bones, burns and smoke inhalation. But the real carnage was concealed for now by the twisted, smoking, ash-choked carcasses of the twin towers, in which thousands of people used to work on a weekday. The collapse of the towers caused another World Trade Center building to fall 10 hours later, and several other buildings in the area were damaged or aflame. C. For hours after the attacks, rescuers were stymied by other buildings that threatened to topple. But by 11 p.m., rescuers had been able to begin serious efforts to locate and remove survivors. Mr. Giuliani [New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani] said two Port Authority police officers had been pulled from the ruins, and he said hope existed that more people could be saved. Earlier, police officer volunteers using dogs had found four bodies in the smoldering, stories-high pile of rubble where the towers had once stood and had taken them to a makeshift morgue in the lobby of an office building at Vesey and West Streets. D. Within an hour of the attacks, the United States was on a war footing. The military was put on the highest state of alert, National Guard units were called out in Washington and New York and two aircraft carriers were dispatched to New York harbor. President Bush remained aloft in Air Force One, following a secretive route and making only brief stopovers at Air Force bases in Louisiana and Nebraska before finally setting down in Washington at 7 p.m. His wife and daughters were evacuated to a secure, unidentified location. The White House, the Pentagon and the Capitol were evacuated, except for the Situation Room in the White House where Vice President Cheney remained in charge, giving the eerie impression of a national capital virtually stripped of its key institutions. Questions 1. What happened to the World Trade Center in New York City? 2. Why was it difficult to assess the amount of damage and the number of people injured or dead? 3. In your opinion, why was the United States put on an immediate war footing? Document 2. Fighting to Live as the Towers Died These are excerpts from an article reported on and written by Jim Dwyer, Eric Lipton, Kevin Flynn, James Glanz and Ford Fessenden, New York Times, May 26, 2002. In the interviews we learn about the man in the red bandana. https://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/26/nyregion/fighting-to-live-as-the-tow… Even though the buildings survived the initial impacts, the twisting and bending of the towers caused fatal havoc. Stairwells were plugged by broken wallboard. Doors were jammed in twisted frames. With more time and simple tools like crowbars, rescue workers might have freed people who simply could not get to stairways. In the north tower, at least 28 people were freed on the 86th and 89th floors by a small group of Port Authority office workers who pried open jammed doors. Those self-assigned rescuers died. In both towers, scores of people lost chances to escape. Some paused to make one more phone call; others, to pick up a forgotten purse; still others, to perform tasks like freeing people from elevators, tending the injured or comforting the distraught. Both towers had similar volumes of smoke and heat, but in the north tower, about three times as many people were trapped in roughly half the space. Scores were driven to the windows of the north tower in search of relief. In the south tower, people had more opportunities to move between floors. In all, about 600 civilians died in the south tower at or above the plane’s impact. In the north tower, every person believed to be above the 91st floor died: 1,344. The farther from the impact, the more calls people made. In the north tower, pockets of near-silence extended four floors above and one floor below the impact zone. Yet remarkably, in both towers, even on floors squarely hit by the jets, a few people lived long enough to make calls. For a few, survival came from having leaned into an alcove. Death could come from having stepped back from a crowded elevator door. As Ms. Wein came to, she had her own battered body to deal with: her right arm was broken, three ribs were cracked and her right lung had been punctured. In other words, she was lucky. All around her were people with horrific injuries, dead or close to it. Ms. Wein yelled out for her boss, Mr. Kestenbaum. When she found him, she said, he was expressionless, motionless, silent. And Richard Gabrielle, another Aon colleague, was pinned to the ground, his legs apparently broken by marble that had fallen on them. Ms. Wein tried to move the stone. Mr. Gabrielle cried out from pain, she said, and told her to stop. A mysterious man appeared at one point, his mouth and nose covered with a red handkerchief. He was looking for a fire extinguisher. As Judy Wein recalls, he pointed to the stairs and made an announcement that saved lives: Anyone who can walk, get up and walk now. Anyone who can perhaps help others, find someone who needs help and then head down. In groups of two and three, the survivors struggled to the stairs. A few flights down, they propped up debris blocking their way, leaving a small passageway to slip through. A few minutes behind this group was Ling Young, who also survived the impact in the sky lobby. She, too, said she had been steered by the man in the red bandanna, hearing him call out: “This way to the stairs.” He trailed her down the stairs. Ms. Young said she soon noticed that he was carrying a woman on his back. Once they reached clearer air, he put her down and went back up. Of the dozens of people waiting in the sky lobby when the second plane struck, 12 are known to have made it out alive. Questions 1. Why were some people able to survive the impact of the planes on the two towers of the World Trade Center? 2. How did the man in the red bandana help people survive? 3. If you were there, would you have been able to do what he did? Explain. Document 3. President George W. Bush Addresses the Nation, September 11, 2001 Source: http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/gwbush911addresstothenation.htm A. Today, our fellow citizens, our way of life, our very freedom came under attack in a series of deliberate and deadly terrorist acts. The victims were in airplanes or in their offices: secretaries, businessmen and women, military and federal workers, moms and dads, friends and neighbors. Thousands of lives were suddenly ended by evil, despicable acts of terror. The pictures of airplanes flying into buildings, fires burning, huge – huge structures collapsing have filled us with disbelief, terrible sadness, and a quiet, unyielding anger. These acts of mass murder were intended to frighten our nation into chaos and retreat. But they have failed. Our country is strong. B. A great people has been moved to defend a great nation. Terrorist attacks can shake the foundations of our biggest buildings, but they cannot touch the foundation of America. These acts shatter steel, but they cannot dent the steel of American resolve. America was targeted for attack because we’re the brightest beacon for freedom and opportunity in the world. And no one will keep that light from shining. Today, our nation saw evil – the very worst of human nature – and we responded with the best of America. With the daring of our rescue workers, with the caring for strangers and neighbors who came to give blood and help in any way they could. C. Immediately following the first attack, I implemented our government’s emergency response plans. Our military is powerful, and it’s prepared. Our emergency teams are working in New York City and Washington D.C. to help with local rescue efforts. Our first priority is to get help to those who have been injured, and to take every precaution to protect our citizens at home and around the world from further attacks. The functions of our government continue without interruption. Federal agencies in Washington which had to be evacuated today are reopening for essential personnel tonight and will be open for business tomorrow. Our financial institutions remain strong, and the American economy will be open for business as well. D. The search is underway for those who were behind these evil acts. I have directed the full resources of our intelligence and law enforcement communities to find those responsible and to bring them to justice. We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them. I appreciate so very much the members of Congress who have joined me in strongly condemning these attacks. And on behalf of the American people, I thank the many world leaders who have called to offer their condolences and assistance. America and our friends and allies join with all those who want peace and security in the world, and we stand together to win the war against terrorism. Tonight, I ask for your prayers for all those who grieve, for the children whose worlds have been shattered, for all whose sense of safety and security has been threatened. E. This is a day when all Americans from every walk of life unite in our resolve for justice and peace. America has stood down enemies before, and we will do so this time. None of us will ever forget this day, yet we go forward to defend freedom and all that is good and just in our world. Questions 1. Why does President Bush believe the attacks on the United States will fail? 2. What did President Bush do to secure the safety of the American people? 3. According to President Bush, what are the goals of the United States following the attack? Document 4. New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani Addresses the United Nations, October 1, 2001 Source: http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/rudygiuliani911unitednations.h… A. On September 11th 2001, New York City — the most diverse City in the world — was viciously attacked in an unprovoked act of war. More than five thousand innocent men, women, and children of every race, religion, and ethnicity are lost. Among these were people from 80 different nations. To their representatives here today, I offer my condolences to you as well on behalf of all New Yorkers who share this loss with you. This was the deadliest attack — terrorist attack in history. It claimed more lives than Pearl Harbor or D-Day. B. This was not just an attack on the City of New York or on the United States of America. It was an attack on the very idea of a free, inclusive, and civil society. It was a direct assault on the founding principles of the United Nations itself . . . Indeed this vicious attack places in jeopardy the whole purpose of the United Nations. C. Terrorism is based on the persistent and deliberate violation of fundamental human rights. With bullets and bombs, and now with hijacked airplanes, terrorists deny the dignity of human life. Terrorism preys particularly on cultures and communities that practice openness and tolerance. Their targeting of innocent civilians mocks the efforts of those who seek to live together in peace as neighbors. It defies the very notion of being a neighbor. This massive attack was intended to break our spirit. It has not done that. It’s made us stronger, more determined, and more resolved. D. The strength of America’s response . . . flows from the principles upon which we stand. Americans are not a single ethnic group. Americans are not of one race or one religion. Americans emerged from all of your nations. We’re defined as Americans by our beliefs, not by our ethnic origins, our race or our religion. Our belief in religious freedom, political freedom, economic freedom — that’s what makes an American. Our belief in democracy, the rule of law, and respect for human life — that’s how you become an American. It’s these very principles and the opportunities these principles give to so many to create a better life for themselves and their families that make America and New York a shining city on a hill. There’s no nation in the history of the world and no city that has seen more immigrants in less time than America. And people continue to come here in large, large numbers to seek freedom, opportunity, decency, [and] civility. E. It’s tragic and perverse that it’s because of these very principles, particularly our religious, political, and economic freedoms, that we find ourselves under attack by terrorists. Our freedom threatens them, because they know if our ideas of freedom gain a foothold among their people, it will destroy their power. So they strike out against us to keep those ideas from reaching their people. The best long-term deterrent and approach to terrorism, obviously, is the spread of the principles of freedom and democracy and the rule of law and respect for human life. Questions 1. Why does Mayor Rudolph Giuliani consider 9/11 an attack on the principle of freedom? 2. According to Giuliani, what are the great strengths of the United States as it confronts this crisis? 3. In your opinion, why did Giuliani make this address at the United Nations? Document 5. President George W. Bush’s “Afghanistan Speech”, October 7, 2001 Source: http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/gwbush911intialafghanistanops… A. On my orders, the United States military has begun strikes against al-Qaeda terrorist training camps and military installations of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. These carefully targeted actions are designed to disrupt the use of Afghanistan as a terrorist base of operations and to attack the military capability of the Taliban regime. We are supported by the collective will of the world. B. More than two weeks ago, I gave Taliban leaders a series of clear and specific demands: Close terrorist training camps. Hand over leaders of the al-Qaeda network, and return all foreign nationals, including American citizens unjustly detained in your country. None of these demands were met. And now, the Taliban will pay a price. C. By destroying camps and disrupting communications, we will make it more difficult for the terror network to train new recruits and coordinate their evil plans. Initially, the terrorists may burrow deeper into caves and other entrenched hiding places. Our military action is also designed to clear the way for sustained, comprehensive and relentless operations to drive them out and bring them to justice. At the same time, the oppressed people of Afghanistan will know the generosity of America and our allies. As we strike military targets, we will also drop food, medicine and supplies to the starving and suffering men and women and children of Afghanistan. D. The United States of America is a friend to the Afghan people, and we are the friends of almost a billion worldwide who practice the Islamic faith. The United States of America is an enemy of those who aid terrorists and of the barbaric criminals who profane a great religion by committing murder in its name. This military action is a part of our campaign against terrorism, another front in a war that has already been joined through diplomacy, intelligence, the freezing of financial assets and the arrests of known terrorists by law enforcement agents in 38 countries. Given the nature and reach of our enemies, we will win this conflict by the patient accumulation of successes, by meeting a series of challenges with determination and will and purpose. E. Today we focus on Afghanistan, but the battle is broader. Every nation has a choice to make. In this conflict, there is no neutral ground. If any government sponsors the outlaws and killers of innocence, they have become outlaws and murderers themselves. And they will take that lonely path at their own peril. F. We’re a peaceful nation. Yet, as we have learned, so suddenly and so tragically, there can be no peace in a world of sudden terror. In the face of today’s new threat, the only way to pursue peace is to pursue those who threaten it. We did not ask for this mission, but we will fulfill it. The name of today’s military operation is Enduring Freedom. We defend not only our precious freedoms, but also the freedom of people everywhere to live and raise their children free from fear. Questions 1. What military actions were ordered by President Bush? 2. Why did the United States and its allies take these actions? 3. What is the broader struggle identified by President Bush? 4. In your opinion, what did President Bush mean when he stated: “In this conflict, there is no neutral ground.” Do you agree or disagree? Explain. Document 6. Senator Robert Byrd Fears for the Future, February 12, 2003 Source: http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0212-07.htm A. To contemplate war is to think about the most horrible of human experiences. On this February day, as this nation stands at the brink of battle, every American on some level must be contemplating the horrors of war. Yet, this Chamber is, for the most part, silent – ominously, dreadfully silent. There is no debate, no discussion, no attempt to lay out for the nation the pros and cons of this particular war. There is nothing. We stand passively mute in the United States Senate, paralyzed by our own uncertainty, seemingly stunned by the sheer turmoil of events. Only on the editorial pages of our newspapers is there much substantive discussion of the prudence or imprudence of engaging in this particular war. And this is no small conflagration we contemplate. This is no simple attempt to defang a villain. No. This coming battle, if it materializes, represents a turning point in U.S. foreign policy and possibly a turning point in the recent history of the world. B. This nation is about to embark upon the first test of a revolutionary doctrine applied in an extraordinary way at an unfortunate time. The doctrine of preemption – the idea that the United States or any other nation can legitimately attack a nation that is not imminently threatening but may be threatening in the future – is a radical new twist on the traditional idea of self-defense. It appears to be in contravention of international law and the UN Charter. And it is being tested at a time of world-wide terrorism, making many countries around the globe wonder if they will soon be on our – or some other nation’s – hit list. C. High-level Administration figures recently refused to take nuclear weapons off of the table when discussing a possible attack against Iraq. What could be more destabilizing and unwise than this type of uncertainty, particularly in a world where globalism has tied the vital economic and security interests of many nations so closely together? There are huge cracks emerging in our time-honored alliances, and U.S. intentions are suddenly subject to damaging worldwide speculation. Anti-Americanism based on mistrust, misinformation, suspicion, and alarming rhetoric from U.S. leaders is fracturing the once solid alliance against global terrorism which existed after September 11. D. One can understand the anger and shock of any President after the savage attacks of September 11. One can appreciate the frustration of having only a shadow to chase and an amorphous, fleeting enemy on which it is nearly impossible to exact retribution. But to turn one’s frustration and anger into the kind of extremely destabilizing and dangerous foreign policy debacle that the world is currently witnessing is inexcusable from any Administration charged with the awesome power and responsibility of guiding the destiny of the greatest superpower on the planet. Frankly many of the pronouncements made by this Administration are outrageous. There is no other word. E. Yet this chamber is hauntingly silent. On what is possibly the eve of horrific infliction of death and destruction on the population of the nation of Iraq a – population, I might add, of which over 50% is under age 15 – this chamber is silent. On what is possibly only days before we send thousands of our own citizens to face unimagined horrors of chemical and biological warfare – this chamber is silent. On the eve of what could possibly be a vicious terrorist attack in retaliation for our attack on Iraq, it is business as usual in the United States Senate. We are truly “sleepwalking through history.” In my heart of hearts I pray that this great nation and its good and trusting citizens are not in for a rudest of awakenings. Questions 1. Why is Senator Byrd concerned about the “doctrine of preemption”? 2. Why does Senator Byrd believe going to war with Iraq is a mistake? 3. In your opinion, why does Senator Byrd accuse the Senate and the American people of “sleepwalking through history”? Document 7.  Representative Barbara Lee of California, September 14, 2001 (Source: Congressional Record) I rise today with a heavy heart, one that is filled with sorrow for the families and loved ones who were killed and injured in New York, Virginia, and Pennsylvania. Only the most foolish or the most callous would not understand the grief that has gripped the American people and millions across the world. This unspeakable attack on the United States has forced me to rely on my moral compass, my conscience, and my God for direction. … September 11 changed the world. Our deepest fears now haunt us. Yet I am convinced that military action will not prevent further acts of international terrorism against the United States. I know that this use-of-force resolution will pass although we all know that the President can wage a war even without this resolution. However difficult this vote may be, some of us must urge the use of restraint. Questions 1. How does Representative Lee open her speech? 2. Why does Representative Lee decide to oppose the authorization for war? Document 8. Orlando and Phyllis Rodriguez “Not in Our Son’s Name” (Source: Zinn Education Project) The Rodriguez’s son, Gregory, died when hijackers flew two planes into the World Trade Center. Gregory was thirty-one years old and working on the 103rd floor of one World Trade Center. The Rodriguez family sent this open letter to the New York Times and other papers after the attack. Our son Greg is among the many missing from the World Trade Center attack. Since we first heard the news, we have shared moments of grief, comfort, hope, despair, fond memories with his wife, the two families, our friends and neighbors, his loving colleagues at Cantor Fitzgerald/ESpeed, and all the grieving families that daily meet at the Pierre Hotel. We see our hurt and anger reflected among everybody we meet. We cannot pay attention to the daily flow of news about this disaster. But we read enough of the news to sense that our government is heading in the direction of violent revenge, with the prospect of sons, daughters, parents, friends in distant lands, dying, suffering, and nursing further grievances against us. It is not the way to go. It will not avenge our son’s death. Not in our son’s name. Our son died a victim of an inhuman ideology. Our actions should not serve the same purpose. Let us grieve. Let us reflect and pray. Let us think about a rational response that brings real peace and justice to our world. But let us not as a nation add to the inhumanity of our times. Questions 1. Who are Orlando and Phyllis Rodriguez? 2. Why did they write this letter to the New York Times? 3. What is their plea to the United States government? Document 9. American Civil Liberties Union Criticizes the USA Patriot Act, April 3, 2003 Source: http://www.aclu.org/national-security/surveillance-under-usa-patriot-act A. Just six weeks after the September 11 attacks, a panicked Congress passed the “USA/Patriot Act,” an overnight revision of the nation’s surveillance laws that vastly expanded the government’s authority to spy on its own citizens, while simultaneously reducing checks and balances on those powers like judicial oversight, public accountability, and the ability to challenge government searches in court. Most of the changes to surveillance law made by the Patriot Act were part of a longstanding law enforcement wish list that had been previously rejected by Congress, in some cases repeatedly. Congress reversed course because it was bullied into it by the Bush Administration in the frightening weeks after the September 11 attack.  B. The Patriot Act increases the governments surveillance powers in four areas: Records searches. It expands the government’s ability to look at records on an individual’s activity being held by a third parties. Secret searches. It expands the government’s ability to search private property without notice to the owner. Intelligence searches. It expands a narrow exception to the Fourth Amendment that had been created for the collection of foreign intelligence information. “Trap and trace” searches. It expands another Fourth Amendment exception for spying that collects “addressing” information about the origin and destination of communications, as opposed to the content. C. One of the most significant provisions of the Patriot Act makes it far easier for the authorities to gain access to records of citizens’ activities being held by a third party. At a time when computerization is leading to the creation of more and more such records, Section 215 of the Patriot Act allows the FBI to force anyone at all – including doctors, libraries, bookstores, universities, and Internet service providers – to turn over records on their clients or customers . . . The result is unchecked government power to rifle through individuals’ financial records, medical histories, Internet usage, bookstore purchases, library usage, travel patterns, or any other activity that leaves a record . . . The government no longer has to show evidence that the subjects of search orders are an “agent of a foreign power,” a requirement that previously protected Americans against abuse of this authority. The FBI does not even have to show a reasonable suspicion that the records are related to criminal activity, much less the requirement for “probable cause” that is listed in the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution. All the government needs to do is make the broad assertion that the request is related to an ongoing terrorism or foreign intelligence investigation. D. For centuries, common law has required that the government can’t go into your property without telling you, and must therefore give you notice before it executes a search. That “knock and announce” principle has long been recognized as a part of the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution. The Patriot Act, however, unconstitutionally amends the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure to allow the government to conduct searches without notifying the subjects, at least until long after the search has been executed. This means that the government can enter a house, apartment or office with a search warrant when the occupants are away, search through their property, take photographs, and in some cases even seize property – and not tell them until later . . . Under the Patriot Act, the FBI can secretly conduct a physical search or wiretap on American citizens to obtain evidence of crime without proving probable cause, as the Fourth Amendment explicitly requires. E. The Patriot Act gives the attorney general unprecedented new power to determine the fate of immigrants. The attorney general can order detention based on a certification that he or she has “reasonable grounds to believe” a non-citizen endangers national security. Worse, if the foreigner does not have a country that will accept them, they can be detained indefinitely without trial. Questions 1. What was the purpose of the USA/Patriot Act? 2. How did the USA/Patriot Act change government surveillance policies and practices? 3. Why is the ACLU critical of the USA/Patriot Act? Document 10. Chalmers Johnson Sees Blowback Source: http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/160594/ Chalmers Johnson (1931-2010) was a professor of Asian Studies at the University of California, San Diego. From 1968 until 1972 he was a consultant to the Office of National Estimates of the Central Intelligence Agency on Asian Affairs. He is the author of a number of books on U.S. military and foreign policy. A. I had set out to explain how exactly our government came to be so hated around the world. As a CIA term of tradecraft, “blowback” does not just mean retaliation for things our government has done to, and in, foreign countries. It refers specifically to retaliation for illegal operations carried out abroad that were kept totally secret from the American public. These operations have included the clandestine overthrow of governments various administrations did not like, the training of foreign militaries in the techniques of state terrorism, the rigging of elections in foreign countries, interference with the economic viability of countries that seemed to threaten the interests of influential American corporations, as well as the torture or assassination of selected foreigners. The fact that these actions were, at least originally, secret meant that when retaliation does come — as it did so spectacularly on September 11, 2001 — the American public is incapable of putting the events in context. Not surprisingly, then, Americans tend to support speedy acts of revenge intended to punish the actual, or alleged, perpetrators. These moments of lashing out, of course, only prepare the ground for yet another cycle of blowback. B. I then began doing research on the network of 737 American military bases we maintained around the world (according to the Pentagon’s own 2005 official inventory). Not including the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts, we now station over half a million U.S. troops, spies, contractors, dependents, and others on military bases located in more than 130 countries, many of them presided over by dictatorial regimes that have given their citizens no say in the decision to let us in. C. As our occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq turned into major fiascoes, discrediting our military leadership, ruining our public finances, and bringing death and destruction to hundreds of thousands of civilians in those countries, I continued to ponder the issue of empire. In these years, it became ever clearer that George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and their supporters were claiming, and actively assuming, powers specifically denied to a president by our Constitution. It became no less clear that Congress had almost completely abdicated its responsibilities to balance the power of the executive branch. Despite the Democratic sweep in the 2006 election, it remains to be seen whether these tendencies can, in the long run, be controlled, let alone reversed. D. Whether Americans intended it or not, we are now seen around the world as approving the torture of captives at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, at Bagram Air Base in Kabul, at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and at a global network of secret CIA prisons, as well as having endorsed Bush’s claim that, as commander-in-chief in “wartime,” he is beyond all constraints of the Constitution or international law. We are now saddled with a rigged economy based on record-setting trade and fiscal deficits, the most secretive and intrusive government in our country’s memory, and the pursuit of “preventive” war as a basis for foreign policy. E. If we choose to keep our empire, as the Roman republic did, we will certainly lose our democracy and grimly await the eventual blowback that imperialism generates. There is an alternative, however. We could, like the British Empire after World War II, keep our democracy by giving up our empire . . . [T]he overall thrust of postwar British history is clear: the people of the British Isles chose democracy over imperialism. Questions 1. According to Chalmers Johnson, why is the United States “hated around the world”? 2. What is “blowback”? 3. Why does Chalmers Johnson believe democracy in the United States is at risk? 4. In your opinion, does Chalmers Johnson support the United States response to 9/11? Explain.  

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ZNetwork: The Conservative ‘Plan’ to Dismantle Public Schools is Entering the Home Stretch

  In what is being touted as the “Golden Age of School Choice,” the option that is most popular with American families—to fund and attend their local public schools—is gradually being made less viable. Take North Carolina, for instance. For years, the Republican-dominated state legislature has chosen to cut the state’s funding for public schools, resulting in a decline in inflation-adjusted per-student funding of about 13 percent since 2003, according to the NC Budget and Tax Center. The Education Law Center’s (ELC) 2025 national ranking of state education funding, “Making the Grade,” report shows that the Tar Heel State is dead last out of 51 states in school funding effort—a measure of PK–12 public education funding as a percentage of the state’s overall economic capacity (its GDP). “North Carolina spent $12,193 per student during the 2022–23 school year. That’s $5,660 less than the national average,” states WRAL News, citing the report. The state also ranks 46th in teacher pay. A decades-long legal struggle to bring North Carolina’s school funding levels in line with its constitutional requirement, resulting from a state Supreme Court ruling in the Leandro v. State of North Carolina case in 1994, culminated in a decision by the current court. The state’s Supreme Court was “taken over” by a Republican majority and dismissed the Leandro ruling on procedural grounds with no possible recourse. “The court held that the trial court lacked the authority, or subject matter jurisdiction, to rule on this much more expansive case,” according to EdNC. North Carolina lawmakers have also ramped up efforts to redirect taxpayer dollars for education to private operators through charter schools and private schools that opt into the state’s school voucher program. Thanks to the legislature’s efforts to ease the process for opening and expanding charter schools, the percentage of students enrolled in charters has steadily increased, surpassing 10 percent since 2022–2023, raising the state’s rank for charter school growth to fourth in the nation, according to the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools 2025 Enrollment Brief. And since the state opened its school voucher program to all families in 2023, North Carolina ranks seventh in voucher usage, with 3.4 percent of the state’s public K–12 expenditures going to vouchers, an annual expenditure of $624 million, based on 2026 rankings by EDChoice. “[T]he program represents cost increases and relatively little savings, given the price tag of more than half a billion dollars,” WRAL News reports. Not satisfied with these efforts to defund public schools, North Carolina lawmakers are now considering legislation to cap local property taxes—an important source for funding public schools in the state. “Property taxes provide revenue for critical local services like public schools,” Joanna LeFebvre, a policy analyst for the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), tells Our Schools in an email. “Property taxes are one of the most stable sources of revenue because they are insulated from economic downturns.” In North Carolina, state funding accounts for 60 percent of school resources, while local funding, mostly from property taxes, contributes 23 percent (the federal government chips in only 17 percent). Despite the importance of property taxes as a revenue source for public schools, Republican lawmakers passed a bill to place a constitutional amendment on the November 2026 ballot that would give the state legislature the power to limit property tax increases. Proponents for the amendment say it’s “a result of constituent complaints about rising property taxes,” according to NC Newsline. Various news stories from around the state, however, point to another cause for the increases—the state’s inadequate funding for essential infrastructure like schools. Border Belt reports that in many rural counties where property taxes are spiking, county officials are raising taxes as an “[attempt] to punch above their weight in ‘funding effort.’” Because the Republican dominated state legislature has been lagging in its effort to address increased costs for local services, “[t]he poorest counties in our state tax themselves at greater rates,” explains Public School Forum senior researcher Elizabeth Paul. Larger, more urban school districts are also feeling the squeeze. As Indy Week explains, Wake County, the state’s largest school district that includes Raleigh, is looking at raising property taxes to balance its budget in the fiscal year 2027. “[I]t’s another example of the state legislature and Congress falling short of their fiscal responsibilities and passing the buck to us,” the county manager, David Ellis, says. In Mecklenburg County, the state’s second most populous county, which includes Charlotte, state assembly member Brandon Lofton tells NC Newsline that “the county has spent about $2.9 billion on items that are the state’s responsibility,” resulting in 700 teaching positions being funded completely by the county. In Orange County, one of North Carolina’s wealthiest counties, the county budget for the fiscal year 2027 is being hit with a barrage of higher costs, including increased expenses for debt service, gas prices, health insurance, and the federal government’s decision to slash reimbursements for food benefits for low-income families (known as SNAP). County officials blame state and federal funding cuts and persistent inflation for these increases. If these efforts to defund public schools seem like a coordinated campaign, that’s because it is. And North Carolina is not the only state where this campaign is rolling out. Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education, a nonprofit that advocates for public schools, points to “a common project” among many states, mostly governed by Republican majorities, that are seeking to “end democratically governed public education,” she writes in an email to Our Schools. “Under the guise of school choice,” Burris says, “they will eventually narrow choice for the majority of American families. The agenda was never hidden: create a school marketplace, then shift the burden from the public to families.” This “plan,” according to Burris, drew its initial inspiration from the writings of the late economist Milton Friedman, who argued that education and other public services should be purchased as consumer goods in a commercial marketplace rather than provided as a taxpayer-supported service, which is publicly governed as an essential infrastructure accessible to everyone. It’s easy to see how Friedman’s doctrine would be hugely popular with the wealthy who resent paying taxes for services other people use. Over the years, donations by the rich have lifted up Friedman’s pronouncements and funded the dissemination of these viewpoints through numerous conservative and libertarian organizations pressing for a smaller and less democratic government presence in society. Now, under the federal ascendancy of the Trump administration and state legislatures that are gerrymandered to ensure decades-long conservative rule, the campaign to dismantle public schools appears to be entering its home stretch. Property Tax Cuts and Caps Have Devastating Impacts In February 2026, Fox Business reported that five states—North Dakota, Georgia, Florida, Texas, and Indiana—were considering repeals of property taxes that generate 90 percent of school funding for local districts in those states. Some of these efforts have died in committee or failed during a floor vote, according to an April 2026 report by Realtor.com, but a few have moved forward and have since been joined by newer efforts in other states to either curtail or end property taxes, including Michigan, Ohio, Oklahoma, and South Dakota. In Oklahoma, the measure is more targeted, confining tax relief to homeowners 65 and older who own their homes outright, while Indiana is offering a replacement source of revenue by substituting property taxes with expanded sales taxes. Neither of these news reports mentions what’s going on in North Carolina, but regardless of the details, the goal is to end or severely limit one of the primary funding sources for public schools. The goal has been long in the making. As the Institute on Tax and Economic Policy (ITEP) explains in a 2025 report, a once-popular “tax revolt” in the 1970s and 1980s resulted in “over a dozen states” enacting measures that limited local governments’ “ability to tax property fairly and accurately.” These property tax cuts and caps have devastating impacts on school funding, CBPP’s LeFebvre explains, citing California’s property tax cap policy known as Proposition 13. That measure, passed in 1978, resulted in per-pupil funding declining from 18 percent above the national average to below average, according to her. Funding levels didn’t recover until 2017. Consequently, “[a]cademic achievement declined and continues to lag national averages, and the state has one of the highest student-teacher ratios in the country, thanks to the policy, which is still in place,” she says. LeFebvre continues, “Research suggests that property tax cuts and caps lead to increased student-teacher ratios, reductions in new teacher qualifications, and declines in students’ reading and math test scores.” While Republicans in North Carolina, and elsewhere, claim reining in property taxes is an “affordability issue,” LeFebvre argues there are other ways to address the impact of rising costs on low-income families, including “property tax circuit breakers that trigger tax refunds when a family’s tax liability rises above a certain percentage of their income, and renters credits that put money back in the pockets of low-income renters.” “Instead of hamstringing local governments’ ability to raise revenue through property tax cuts and caps,” LeFebvre says, “states should support localities’ flexibility to raise sufficient revenue to invest in excellent public schools.” A Constitutional Amendment in Ohio In Ohio, also ruled by a Republican majority, state lawmakers have dramatically reduced state funding for schools while rolling out privatization efforts, such as charter schools and vouchers. While the state’s effort to adequately fund its schools is not rock bottom, according to the ELC report, it barely clears the level, earning a C-rating. In 2025, state lawmakers passed a flat income tax and abandoned their previously adopted plan to bring funding levels for high-poverty school districts more in line with wealthier districts. As a result, the state’s contribution to funding public education will decline from 47 percent in 2019 to just 32 percent in 2027, according to public school advocacy coalition Honesty for Ohio Education. And “Ohio has fallen from 35th nationally in the state share of K–12 revenue in 2002 to 45th in 2023,” according to a 2025 report by the Ohio Education Policy Institute. On the privatization front, Ohio is somewhat ahead of North Carolina, with 4.2 percent of the state’s students receiving some kind of voucher to attend a private school or homeschool. There are also a larger number of charter schools in Ohio, with 318 in 2020–2021 compared to 202 in North Carolina for the same period. Both states enrolled about the same number of students in charter schools in 2020–2021—119,100 in Ohio, compared to 125,913 in North Carolina. But Ohio’s privately operated school sector may have an even more negative impact on school funding, especially in the state’s largest districts. According to a 2026 analysis by former Ohio state legislator Stephen Dyer, in eight major urban districts, 80 percent of state education funding goes to privately run schools. These efforts by Ohio lawmakers to undermine the state’s funding for public schools have put pressure on local governments to steeply raise property taxes, resulting in Ohio having the eighth-highest property tax rate in the U.S., Statehouse News Bureau reports. Understandably, there is now growing evidence of a popular uprising among Ohio voters to repeal property taxes through a ballot initiative, and Republican lawmakers are responding to voter unhappiness, not by reversing state funding austerity and growth in privatization, but by proposing a bill that would amend the state constitution to exempt owner-occupied residences from property taxes. Swapping Property Taxes for Sales Taxes in Indiana Indiana is another Midwestern state where a combination of state funding cuts and school privatization efforts is putting more pressure on local governments to raise property taxes, which has, in turn, prompted calls for property tax repeals. The state earned a D-rating on ELC’s funding effort report card. Indiana does not have a large number of charter schools, except in Indianapolis, where 62 percent of students are enrolled in charters. It, however, has a slightly higher percentage of students accepting school voucher money than North Carolina. Indiana’s property tax burden is not among the highest, ranking 29th overall in 2024 according to the Tax Foundation. Nevertheless, state lawmakers are considering legislation to completely phase out property taxes in 2027 and raise sales taxes and user fees to help replace the lost revenue. The idea that revenue lost by capping or eliminating property taxes can be simply swapped out for sales tax increases is an especially “unfair” tax policy, according to an analysis by CBPP. That analysis found property taxes are especially important for funding public services because they are “the most stable of the three major taxes (income, sales, and property) even in the face of economic downturns.” Also, property taxes are “less regressive than sales taxes, which require a greater share of income from people with less financial means and a lower share from people who are well off.” And “[p]roposals to substitute sales tax revenue for property tax revenue also ignore an important fact: most people already pay more in sales tax than they do in property tax.” Regardless of these realities, Republican leadership in Indiana’s state capital is proceeding full steam ahead in its efforts to champion tax cuts as a hallmark of good governance. The ‘Long Game’ by Conservatives in Florida Florida is the poster child of the conservative movement’s “long game” to end public education. The Sunshine State ranked 47th in ELC’s funding effort analysis for 2023. It had the third-highest number of students enrolled in charter schools in 2022–2023 and the fourth-highest percentage of students in these schools among all states. Meanwhile, it is number one in terms of the percentage of students using school vouchers. Florida state law already limits the annual increase in the assessed value, not market value, of homesteaded property to 3 percent or the consumer price index (CPI), whichever is less. And polling data has shown that home insurance rates, not property taxes, are a bigger concern for homeowners. Nevertheless, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is leading an effort to “eliminate property taxes ‘completely’ for homesteaded residents,” Fox Business reports, “a move that, if adopted, would make Florida the first state in the nation to eliminate property taxes on primary residences while also having no state income tax.” Taking their cues from DeSantis, Republican lawmakers in the Florida legislature are moving with a bill that would place a constitutional amendment on the ballot in 2028, ending all property taxes. A 2025 study by the Florida Policy Institute found that should the ballot referendum succeed, Florida school districts will lose $7.7 billion. In districts that are already fiscally constrained, like Highlands County, eliminating all property taxes would cost $60 million or “about 25 percent of all revenue.” The Trump Administration Does Its Part The federal government, under the leadership of President Trump, is doing its part in the conservative campaign to dismantle public education. Trump’s proposed FY 2027 budget would slash $8.5 billion in federal funding for certain K-12 programs, and his administration is blocking $2 billion in congressionally approved grants for public schools in 2026. His Department of Education, under the leadership of Secretary of Education Linda McMahon, has withheld millions in federal funds for its Full-Service Community Schools program, as well as grants for special education, while expanding $60 million in grants to charter schools. And in 2027, a nationwide federal school voucher program, which Trump pushed for and was approved by a Republican majority in Congress, will divert billions in funding from the U.S. Treasury to school vouchers while harming funding for public schools. What Friedman Wanted Proponents seeking to end or limit property taxes try to make their proposals seem reasonable, arguing that property tax increases are examples of “runaway spending at the local level,” while ignoring the funding cuts at higher levels of government trickling down into dire financial consequences at local levels. “Now more than ever,” CBPP’s LeFebvre says, “state and local revenue will be the backstop for funding public services. Instead of hamstringing local governments’ ability to raise revenue through property tax cuts and caps, states should support localities’ flexibility to raise sufficient revenue.” She suggests lawmakers consider raising revenue from wealthy households and corporations. “Since 2021,” she notes, “11 states and the District of Columbia have meaningfully raised revenue to invest in services like public schools. Momentum for these kinds of policies is building in 2026, with Washington State and Maine approving tax increases on households with high incomes.” However, often lost in the discussion is the fact that limiting or ending property taxes doesn’t eliminate the cost of educating the nation’s school children. It just shifts the costs onto working people who end up paying for schools through higher sales taxes and user fees, or paying private corporations for education services. Which is exactly what Network for Public Education’s Burris argues Friedman and his acolytes have wanted all along.  

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Curmudgucation: Growth or Proficiency

Some of us are apparently still having this debate. Jill Barshay wrote a piece for Hechinger Report about the DC school district, which is apparently awesome at growth but not so great at actual achievement levels. The piece does a good job of revisiting the debates about these two sorts of measures; I'd just like to add a point or three.   First, let me point out for the gazillionth time that we are not talking about student achievement and we are certainly not (as Barshay unfortunately does) talking about years of learning.  A "year of learning" or "month of learning" or "fortnight of learning" or an "afternoon of learning" is just a journalist-friendly way of packaging test results.    We are talking about scores on a Big Standardized Test. That's it.   Barshay notes that "A school system can improve rapidly and still leave most children behind." Well, yes. Which students have more room for improvement-- those who are already at the top of their game, or those who are scoring in the basement?   Students who are bringing up the rear academically can be given more test prep, instruction that goes straight to what the test covers as well as instruction on how to take the test itself (Here's how to avoid being tricked by distractors in multiple choice questions). Students at the top of the game may well be growing and developing, but the BS Test measures such a sliver of skills (and no knowledge at all) that their growth doesn't register (You've been developing insights into quantum theory? That's will not raise your test score).    This was always part of the debate over tying teacher evaluation to student scores. Focus on growth, and teachers of honors classes are in trouble, because a student who's already at the 98th percentile isn't going to grow at all. Focus on proficiency scores, and the teachers who are assigned the low-achieving students are in trouble, because no matter how well they teach those students, they will still lag (no, Virginia, there is no magical technique for "catching up" students quickly-- if there was, teachers would use it all the time).    Worse, when policy bases teacher or school evaluation on proficiency, it turns the lowest achievers into hot potatoes. We've seen this in action where charter and voucher schools work hard to avoid those low-scoring students who would mess up their numbers. When Steven Wilson is cited in the article pointing to charter schools with low-income students and high levels of proficiency, he's simply pointing to the effects of creaming, where schools do their best to avoid having their numbers damaged by low-scoring students. There is no magic trick there that can be applied "at scale" for the public system.    Ultimately, schools can not win playing the growth measurement game because schools cannot raise student scores every year forever, as if somehow each cohort of students was smarter than their older siblings. Test scores are not a stock market ticker.   But schools also cannot win the proficiency game. BS Test scores and "grade levels" are scaled and normed (curved). If the BS Test were truly standards based, students taking the test could be scored instantly after they clicked the last answer. But the scores have to be computed and compared and scaled and then some state bureau sets the cut scores. But curves have to have a bottom. If, after years of intensive effort, every child tested above grade level for reading, we would not conclude that a reading education moonshot had occurred-- we would conclude that "grade level" had been set too low. If every child was rated "proficient," we would conclude that the requirements for "proficient" had been made too easy (just check every piece complaining about grade inflation).    Does test score growth tell us something? Absolutely. Does it tell us everything, or even most of the things? Absolutely not.   Do test score levels tell us something? Absolutely. Do they tell us everything, or even most of the things? Absolutely not.   The growth vs. proficiency debate is in many ways a debate about how to make the best use of a tiny, noisy slice of data. Instead, I wish we were talking about what we really should be measuring, how we can measure it, and how we are going to deal with the fact that there is much about educational quality that cannot be measured in any way that will satisfy our data overlords. Some days we are wasting way too much energy arguing about whether we should cut baloney into slices or cubes when we'd be better off figuring out how make a healthier meal.  

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Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice: Students Are Skipping the Hardest Part of Growing Up (Clay Shirky)

Clay Shirky is a vice provost at New York University. Since 2015, he has helped faculty members and students adapt to digital tools. This op-ed appeared in The New York Times, February 1, 2026. Back in 2023, when ChatGPT was still new, a professor friend had a colleague observe her class. Afterward, he complimented her on her teaching but asked if she knew her students were typing her questions into ChatGPT and reading its output aloud as their replies. At the time, I chalked this up to cognitive offloading, the use of artificial intelligence to reduce the amount of thinking required to complete a task. Looking back, though, I think it was an early case of emotional offloading, the use of A.I. to reduce the energy required to navigate human interaction. You’ve probably heard of extreme cases in which people treat bots as lovers, therapists or friends. But many more have them intervene in their social lives in subtler ways. On dating apps, people are leaning on A.I. to help them seem more educated or confident; one app, Hinge, reports that many younger users “vibe check” messages with A.I. before sending them. (Young men, especially, lean on it to help them initiate conversations.) In the classroom, the domain I know best, some students are using the tools not just to reduce effort on homework but also to avoid the stress of an unscripted conversation with a professor — the possibility of making a mistake, drawing a blank or looking dumb — even when their interactions are not graded. Last fall, The Times reported on students at the University of Illinois Urbana, Champaign, who cheated in their course, then wrote their apologies using A.I. In a situation where unforged communication to their professors might have made a difference, they still wouldn’t (or couldn’t) forgo A.I. as a social prosthetic. As an academic administrator, I’m paid to worry about students’ use of A.I. to do their critical thinking. Universities have whole frameworks and apparatuses for academic integrity. A.I. has been a meteor strike on those frameworks, for obvious reasons. But as educators, we have to do more than ensure that students learn things; we have to help them become new people, too. From that perspective, emotional offloading worries me more than the cognitive kind, because farming out your social intuitions could hurt young people more than opting out of writing their own history papers. Just as overreliance on calculators can weaken our arithmetic abilities and overreliance on GPS can weaken our sense of direction, overreliance on A.I. may weaken our ability to deal with the give and take of ordinary human interaction. A generation gap has formed around A.I. use. One study found that 18-to-25-year-olds alone accounted for 46 percent of ChatGPT use. And this analysis didn’t even include users 17 and under. Teenagers and young adults, stuck in the gradual transition from managed childhoods to adult freedoms, are both eager to make human connection and exquisitely alert to the possibility of embarrassment. (You remember.) A.I. offers them a way to manage some of that anxiety of presenting themselves in new roles when they don’t have a lot of experience to go on. In 2022, 41 percent of young adults reported feelings of anxiety most days. Even informal social settings require participants to develop and then act within appropriate roles, a phenomenon best described by the sociologist Erving Goffman. There are ways people are expected to behave on a date or in a grocery store or at a restaurant and different ways in different kinds of restaurants. But in certain situations, like starting at a new job and meeting a romantic partner’s family, the rules aren’t immediately clear. In his book “The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life,” Dr. Goffman writes: When the individual does move into a new position in society and obtains a new part to perform, he is not likely to be told in full detail how to conduct himself, nor will the facts of his new situation press sufficiently on him from the start to determine his conduct without his further giving thought to it. When we take on new roles — which we do all our lives, but especially as we figure out how to become adults — we learn by doing and often by doing badly: being too formal or informal with new colleagues, too strait-laced or casual in new situations. (I still remember the shock on learning, years later, that because of my odd dress and awkward demeanor, my friends’ nickname for me freshman year was “the horror child.”) Dr. Goffman was writing in the mid-1950s, when more socializing happened face-to-face. At the time, writing was relatively formal, whether for public consumption, as with literature or journalism, or for particular audiences, as with memos and contracts. Even letters and telegrams often involved real compositional thought; the postcard was as informal as it got. That started to change in the 1990s, when the inrush of digital communications — emails, instant messages, texting, Facebook, WhatsApp — made writing essential to much of human interaction and socializing much easier to script. The words you send other people are a big part of your presentation of self in everyday life. And every place where writing has become a social interface is now ripe for an injection of A.I., adding an automated editor into every conversation, draining some of the personal from interpersonal interaction. At a recent panel about student A.I. use hosted by high school educators, I heard several teens describe using A.I. to puzzle through past human interactions and rehearse upcoming ones. One talked about needing to have a tough conversation — “I want to say this to my friend, but I don’t want to sound rude” — so she asked A.I. to help her rehearse the conversation. Another said she had grown up hating to make phone calls (a common dislike among young people), which meant that most of her interaction at a distance was done via text, with time to compose and edit replies, which was time that could now include instant vibe checks. These teens were adamant that they did not want to go directly to their parents or friends with these issues and that the steady availability of A.I. was a relief to them. They also rejected the idea of A.I. therapists; they weren’t treating A.I. as a replacement for another person but instead were using it to second-guess their developing sense of how to treat other people. A.I. has been trained to give us answers we like, rather than the ones we may need to hear. The resulting stream of praise — constantly hearing some version of “You’re absolutely right!” — risks eroding our ability to deal with the messiness of human relationships. Sociologists call this social deskilling. Even casual A.I. use exposes users to a level of praise humans rarely experience from one another, which is not great for any of us but is especially risky for young people still working on their social skills. In a recent study (still in preprint) with the evocative title “Sycophantic A.I. Decreases Prosocial Intentions and Promotes Dependence,” six researchers from Stanford and Carnegie Mellon describe some of their conclusions: Interaction with sycophantic A.I. models significantly reduced participants’ willingness to take actions to repair interpersonal conflict, while increasing their conviction of being in the right. However, participants rated sycophantic responses as higher quality, trusted the sycophantic A.I. model more and were more willing to use it again. In other words, talking to a fawning bot reduces our willingness to try to fix strained or broken relationships in the real world while making the bot seem more trustworthy. Like cigarettes, those conversations are both corrosive and addictive. More of this is coming. Most every place where humans are offered mediated communication, some company is going to offer an A.I. as a counselor, sidekick or wingman, there to gas you up, monitor the conversation or push certain responses while warning you away from others. In the business world, it might be presented as an automated coach, in day-to-day interactions it may be a digital friend, and in dating it will be Cyrano as a service. Because user loyalty is good for business, companies will nudge us toward rehearsed interactions and self-righteousness when interacting with real people and nudging them to reply to us in kind. We need good social judgment to get along with one another. Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment. It sounds odd to say that we have to preserve space for humans to screw up socially, but it’s true. The generation gap means the people in charge, mostly born in the past century, are likely to underestimate the risks from A.I. as a social prosthetic. We didn’t have A.I. as an option in our adulthood, save for the past three years. For a 20-year-old, however, the past three years is their adulthood. One possible response to sycophantic A.I. is simply to shift back to a more oral culture. Higher education is already shifting to oral exams. You can imagine adapting that strategy to interviews; new hires and potential roommates could be certified as comfortable communicating without A.I. (a new role for notaries public). Offices could shift to more live communication to reduce workslop. Dating sites could do the same to reduce flirtslop. A.I. misuse cannot be addressed solely through individuals opting out. Although some young people have started intentionally avoiding A.I. use, this is more likely to create a counterculture than to affect broad adoption. There are already signs that “I don’t use A.I.” is becoming this century’s “I don’t even own a TV” — a sanctimonious signal that had no appreciable effect on TV watching. We do have a contemporary example of taking social dilemmas caused by technology seriously: the smartphone. Smartphones have good uses and have been widely adopted by choice, like A.I. But after almost two decades of treating overuse as a question of individual willpower, we are finally experimenting with collective action, as with bans on phones in the classroom and real age limits on social media. It took us nearly two decades from the arrival of the smartphone to start instituting collective responses. If we move at the same rate here, we will start treating A.I.’s threat to human relationships as a collective issue in the late 2030s. We can already see the outlines of emotional offloading; it would be good if we didn’t wait that long to react.  

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First Fish Chronicles: What We Need to Know About EdTech, Data, and Privacy

An FAQ about why EdTech companies need, want, and collect your child's data and what you can do about it Note from Emily: This essay was originally posted on my website in April 2025. I have lightly edited it to reflect changes over the past year and to add new information. One important note on terminology: I do not call them EdTech “tools” because if the business model of the curricula or app or diagnostic “tool” being used is one that profits from data (and 96% do), then it is not a tool, it is a product whose determinants for success are fundamentally out of alignment with healthy child development. EdTech, like Big Tech, is an industry. EdTech, like Big Tech, is in this for profit, not children. EdTech is just Big Tech in a sweater vest. Photo by Holly Landkammer on Unsplash   The question I hear all the time— When it comes to data and privacy issues around EdTech, I am regularly asked: “So what? Why does it matter? Why should we care?” The very short and very important initial response to this question is because the erosion of privacy rights is the first step in the erosion of other rights. EVEN IF we as adults are knowingly consenting to all the data collection going on in our digital lives (and trust me, we do not have a full grasp on that reality), children are minors who cannot legally consent and who often have no idea that their data is being collected, shared, sold, or used in ways that benefit corporations, not families or schools. That response alone should be reason enough to care. But if you want to learn more, here are some common questions that will provide more information: Q: How are children using “EdTech” products at school? A: “EdTech” or “educational technology” can mean anything from 1:1 district-issued Chromebooks, online curricula, games or apps used for “learning,” “learning management systems” (like Schoology), online grading portals, diagnostic and assessment products (like iReady), digital surveillance or “safety” products (like Securly or GoGuardian), online mental health assessments, online state testing, and more. Broadly speaking, the digital products children use at or for school are owned by any number of technology companies, not the schools themselves. It’s also not just a few platforms or products per school; it’s hundreds or even thousands. Per district. There is often a wide range in how different schools, grades, subjects, and teachers use such products. Some teachers use it at the bare minimum; other classes are using them every period, every day. Some districts mandate use of products like iReady, whether teachers like them or not. With other products, even within the same grade or same subject at the same school, usage rates can vary wildly. Second-graders in an Oregon school, during “reading” time.   Q: What should I worry about as a parent when it comes to EdTech products? A: This is deserving of its own essay (and I’ve written many on this publication), but there are (at least) two big concerns: First, such products rarely, if ever, are better than an analog or teacher-based approach when it comes to efficacy (in other words, “Does this product work?”) See the UNESCO GEM Report for more on that. It is also difficult to find independently-funded research on EdTech– most is funded by the companies who benefit from the use of such products. Internet Safety Labs is one good source for independent research on EdTech platforms and tools. Obviously, Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath is another. Or read any number of excellent essays about iReady as it not only siphons data but erodes and impedes actual learning: here and here and here are a few good examples. But secondly, and arguably more importantly, even if these products and tools were “beneficial” to learning and teaching (and how to measure “benefit” and “success” is in and of itself a debate), nearly all these EdTech companies collect data about the children using the products and share or sell it to third parties for profit. In fact, Internet Safety Labs found that 96% of EdTech tools share children’s personal information with third parties. Q: Wait. Why would an EdTech company want to collect my child’s data? A: In the digital age gold rush, data is gold. This is how “free” social media apps work– we aren’t paying to use the service, we are giving Meta and Snap information about us as consumers that they collect and repackage to target us with advertisements (you’ve probably noticed how an innocent Amazon search on your phone ends up in similarly-themed ads in your Instagram feed.) The same thing is happening with EdTech products. Because the apps, digital curricula, and learning management systems used by children at or for school are owned by for-profit technology companies, “time on device” is the measure by which such companies determine product success. These are private companies with shareholders who want to see profits (many are connected to venture capital, like PowerSchool, which is owned by Bain Capital.) The profits come from licensing agreements with school districts (often in the millions of dollars) and from the data they collect about their customers– in this case, our children. Sometimes districts are offered a low-cost or free first-year license by EdTech company salespeople, only to find that rates start to climb in subsequent, but after schools are already deeply enmeshed in the product and extrication will be messy and complicated. (One large school district IT director I spoke to expressed surprise that the rates on the district’s licensing costs were rising 3-5% a year. Of course, making up those costs mean cuts are going to have to come from somewhere else.) Children’s data is also extremely valuable. The United States Department of Education found that one student data record is worth between $250 and $350 on the black market. There are nearly 50 million school-aged children in the United States, which is why the EdTech industry is a huge and lucrative market, projected to be worth over $800 billion in the next decade (aggregate amount of spending over hardware, software, and cloud services globally.) Today, some estimates place its value at $205 billion. If you take 50 million children and multiple that by ~$300 per student record, that totals $15 billion dollars worth of data. It’s no wonder hackers find children’s data such an appealing target. Q: What kind of data do EdTech companies collect? A: Here is a non-exhaustive list of what EdTech companies may collect about our children, from one sample privacy policy: Enrollment data Course schedule data Student identifiers Academic program membership Extracurricular program membership Transcript data Student-submitted materials within a course Student grades Student assessments Student address Student email address Phone numbers Student name Student date of birth Parent or guardian name Student conduct data Student behavior data Student social-emotional learning indicators and inputs Student evaluation and management data Physical and mental disabilities Immunization records Treatment providers Allergies Email delivery preferences Communications with stakeholders, such as parents Usage data Browser data Device-specific data, including: Data security Cloud hosting Information technology Customer support Usage and analytics Application performance monitoring User identity User authentication Feature integration with third-party products or companies At a bare minimum, districts should publicly post on their website a list of all EdTech products used and link to their unique privacy polices. Northampton Public Schools in Massachusetts is one rare example of a district that does this (if you know of more, please let me know). They also provide access to a spreadsheet that show apps and data agreements by grade level, but the person who shared it with me notes that it is in need of updating. Even if your child’s district doesn’t use same apps or products from this list, these links are extremely interesting to look at. The fact that the list of “approved” apps alone numbers 373 unique products is shocking. Screenshot of Northampton Public Schools spreadsheet of Privacy and Data Agreements— this page is just products used in Kindergarten   Screenshot of Northampton Public Schools “Digital Resources" Database. Worth noting both the total number of entries (373) and that “GoGuardian” is listed as “not approved” because they will “not be moving forward with the Data Privacy Agreements with the Massachusetts Alliance.” Many schools use surveillance products like GoGuardian to monitor student devices.   Q: But isn’t all of this personal information anonymous? A: Unfortunately, no. Schools may tell parents data it is, but that is because they are told by EdTech companies that the data is “anonymized.” Given how much data is collected, however, it is not difficult to reverse-engineer data to identify students individually. There are even companies who perform “identity-resolution” — taking anonymized data collected about users, re-identifying that data, and selling it. Q: I know I signed a User Agreement or agreed to some Terms and Conditions when the school gave my child a laptop. If I checked that box or signed that agreement, doesn’t that mean I consented to all of this? A: No. First, many of those “User Agreements” that schools require parents to sign at the start of the school year say nothing about the school’s responsibility to protect student data and focus almost entirely on “student use” of the school-issued EdTech products (“Students will use it responsibly/for educational purposes only”) and that it is a family’s responsibility to replace damaged or lost laptops. If the document doesn’t say anything about what happens when your child is harmed on a school-issued device, then the “agreement” is not there to protect your child; it’s there to (ostensibly) protect the school from liability if or when harm occurs (and it does, often). Screenshot of Seattle Public Schools Network Use Agreement that students are expected to sign at the start of each school year. This is only the first portion. It is entirely about [sic]     It is extremely unlikely you have been fully informed of potential risks to your child’s information being collected or about the various ways in which these companies might use your child’s data, and you certainly did not receive detailed specifics about each individual app or product (which can, as I note above, run into the hundreds). Most schools are not even fully informed of the risks, and that’s not surprising given that there are only a handful of IT administrators responsible for overseeing hundreds of unique products. And those are just the ones that are vetted through proper channels. Many EdTech salespeople approach teachers and principals directly, bypassing any public curriculum adoption process or formal vetting process.1   EdTech companies would like parents to think that they have consented; but legally-speaking, these blanket “User Agreements” are not “informed consent” and would not hold up in court. If you have any concerns, please contact Andrew and Julie Liddell of the EdTech Law Center. They are a consumer protection firm that will speak to you free of charge to help you understand your rights.2   Q: What are some consequences of these companies having my child’s data? How do they use this data in ways that might harm children? A: The erosion of privacy rights is dangerous because worse civil rights violations can follow. Aside from the fact that a vast trove of your child’s personal information is now on the internet, there are numerous ways this can harm a child. Children using school-issued devices to do web searches about controversial topics, even if simply researching them for a school assignment, can flag a student as interested in extremist behavior, conspiracy theories, and more. The information students search, send, or type on digital platforms can later be used against them in college admissions or job applications. Law enforcement agencies have used student data to flag “at-risk” children. There are huge implications for police departments having access to this type of data. As one example, law enforcement agencies can use student data behavioral records to predict future criminal behavior. The data collected about children can also be used to deliver targeted ads that can contain dangerous messaging about self-harm, health misinformation, or extremist behaviors. Data breaches are also common. Powerschool, Inc., a $5 billion EdTech company (owned by Bain Capital), was the recent target of a massive data breach in which over forty years of data on over 70 million people were leaked. More recently, Instructure, parent company of Canvas, used by 8,000 institutions, according to their website, were targets of a student data breach. EdTech companies also market their “cradle to career” unified data systems as tools for state and local governments to use to support workforce planning and juvenile justice and law enforcement. AI models are trained on data. When teachers and students use AI products in education, they are helping train datasets. Q: My school is telling me they can consent on my behalf. Is this true? A: No, but they may not know this. An amicus brief filed by the FTC in September of 2025 is the FTC’s most definitive statement yet on what COPPA (the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act) does and does not allow, and the brief has enormous implications for schools and EdTech companies. Until this filing, many EdTech companies sought permission only from schools–and not from parents, as COPPA requires–as to what information is collected about students and how that information may be commercialized. However, this was based on, at best, a misunderstanding, and at worst, a willful misreading of the law. In a nutshell, this amicus brief establishes that schools can no longer stand in the shoes of parents for the purpose of consenting to data collection. I wrote a longer piece about this amicus brief here, and created a letter template for parents to use to send to their schools to inform them about this. Q: So what can parents do? A: The first thing parents can do is understand that this is a problem. Many schools and parents are just now coming around to the fact that student personal devices (like phones and smartwatches) should not be available to students during class time. This is absolutely the right thing to do in terms of what is best for children and learning. However, if all personal phones and watches are banned, but schools still provide internet-connected iPads or Chromebooks to students, students are still engaging with harmful, manipulative, and addictive tools and platforms whose business model is entirely dependent on “time on device” and “user engagement.” Children are clever– they may no longer have their smartphones, but they can still chat within Google docs, watch TikTok videos on Pinterest, download VPNs to bypass school filters, and watch YouTube videos (often unblocked and available to students in the Google Classroom suite of products– Google owns YouTube.) The second thing parents can do is to share this information with other parents. Print off or email this FAQ to your parenting peers. There is a clear need for collective action with pushing back on EdTech, and while these tools and products are harmful to learning and teaching, the privacy and data security issues are far more impactful and far less understood. Q: So it’s not just about whether or not these EdTech products “work”? I should also be concerned about data and privacy? Anything else? A: There are four questions we must insist schools answer before providing children access to EdTech products: Is this effective? Is this safe? Is this legal? Is this superior to a human teacher?   Until and unless the answer to all four questions must be a resounding Yes. Currently, it is a terrifying No. Q: Can I refuse? Opt out of EdTech? A: Short answer, yes. Is it always easy to do this? No. Schools will say that it is not possible, that children will fall behind, that they cannot accommodate, that you cannot opt out of curriculum, etc. Schools saying that it is not allowed or not possible to refuse or opt out are essentially asking families to choose between their child’s education or protecting their child’s privacy and data. You may have to reach out to the EdTech Law Center for support. Q: How do I opt out? A: I have created an UnPlug EdTech Toolkit that contains much of the above information, plus a series of letter templates and resources on Substack that will support you in this process. I also recently recorded an in-depth webinar about how parents can opt out, including different opt out pathways and how to continue to support teachers, as opting out disproportionately burdens them. You can view that webinar here.   Q: Have you (Emily) opted out of EdTech? How is that going? A: Yes. My daughter is an 8th grader this year, and this is the second year she has declined the 1:1 Chromebook. We are fortunate to have the support of an excellent principal. We started the conversation with her the spring before 7th grade started and focused on building a good working relationship with school leadership. When my daughter does need to use a computer for typing an essay, for example, her English teacher has a spare one she can use. We have also opted her out of all standardized tests and online mental health assessments. (I go through all of this in the webinar). This is far from ideal, however. We realize she still has an online presence in the learning management system, some of her assigned curriculum is still all-digital and has resulted in her using the loaner computer more than I would like, and we recently learned that the district is advising writing teachers to use AI to assess student papers.3 She will be entering high school in the fall and I have already communicated with the school counselor there about our plans to decline the 1:1. We received a supportive message back. It should be noted that my daughter is thriving without the 1:1. She has very good grades, she is an active class participant, and she seems mostly unbothered by the fact that she is the only student without a laptop. Concluding Thoughts: I am not anti-technology; I am tech-intentional. I see a desperate need for technology education in schools (and at home), to teach children skills like typing (shockingly, many students with 1:1s don’t know how to type); media literacy; the ability to identify mis- and dis-information; to understand what AI is and why it is still so risky. But “EdTech” is not “Tech Ed.” What is currently happening in K-12 schools is mostly EdTech (or the “Tech Ed” provided is curricula delivered by the same companies who benefit from kids’ using it or which take a foregone conclusion approach— “Kids will be online so we should teach them to use social media safer.” I reject this premise— there is no such thing as a “safe cigarette”). We have a lot of work to do, but I believe that the future of schools is tech-intentional, and there are things we can do to get there. In fact, I have an entire talk on this very topic, which I delivered in Louisville, KY, at the Filson Historical Society in March 2025. You can view the talk here. More recently, I delivered another keynote for the Tikvah Marom conference in Miami in March of 2026 called The Pen(cil) is Mightier Than the Sword: The Case for the Analog Classroom.4   For more on this topic, also be sure to check out these essays I’ve written: I Refused the School-Issued Chromebook for My Middle-Schooler. You Can Too. Here’s How. Ten Questions to Ask Your School Leaders About EdTech Products Hey, School Leaders: How Many Students Should Be Able to Access Chatbots, Predators, and Porn Before You Will Make a Change? The Madness of EdTech: All or Nothing Options The EdTech Learning Curve: 6 Lessons for School Leaders The Hard Truth About EdTech: What Administrators, Superintendents, and Principals Need to Know If EdTech Doesn’t Educate, What Does It Do? 16 Ways EdTech is Harmful to Children Toppling the Tower: 5 Frustrations About EdTech, AI, and Education, and 3 Questions to Ask Instead 1 As one example, I had no idea that Seattle Schools, my home district, used iReady, because I couldn’t find anything on the school website about the contract or adoption of the product. But when I asked in a Seattle Schools Facebook group about it, parents and teachers from at least four different schools in the district said they use it. I have no idea how it came to be used in Seattle Schools. 2 They recently told me they are averaging 100 inquiries per week right now. They only opened two years ago. 3 When I followed up with the district about this, they stated that “teachers are not being instructed to use AI to assess student writing.” It was my daughter’s teacher who conveyed to me the district instruction to use AI. Make of that what you will. 4 It was this essay in which I ventured a hope that we could protect childhood a bit more by returning to pencils and paper in classrooms that led to me receiving my first death threat on this very platform. (I did report it to Substack and to law enforcement).  

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Curmudgucation: Cashing in on Federal Vouchers

The federal voucher program birthed by the Big Beautiful Boondoggle Bill aims to spread a lot of money around, and folks are already getting ready to hoover up a share of the taxpayer-funded largesse. The tricks is to set up a Scholarship Granting Organization. What's an SGO again?   Tax Credit Scholarships are a way to launder taxpayer dollars before funneling them to private, often religious, schools. To hand the money taxpayer to government to private school would be illegal, so instead, the money goes from taxpayer to SGO (instead of the government) to private school. That shifting of the taxpayer's liability from government to private school is totes legal (except in Kentucky, where the courts are smarter than that).    So the SGO collects the money and hands out the vouchers, and in between, it collects a handling fee, typically between 5% and 10%.    SGOs can make some money on the state level, though in many cases they exist just to funnel taxpayer dollars to a particular private school. But the idea of a federal voucher system creates some big possibilities.   There's a wild range of estimates for how much money will be involved in federal vouchers, from $51 billion down to $3 billion. But no matter who turns out to be correct, a 10% will be mean there's a hefty stack of money in play for SGOs on the national level. All the more motivation for voucherphiles to get in on the financial harvest.   American Federation for Children    As we have noted before, the DeVosian national-level privatization advocacy group is already setting up their own national SGO and teaming up with Odyssey, an outfit that promises "an automated, end-to-end school choice platform. AFC's announced plans that involve serving as an SGO for SGOs-- a national feedline for ambitious state-level SGOs. And look-- nobody yet knows what the actual rules and regulations are going to look like. Will this kind of SGO-to-SGO pipeline be legal? Better question-- will SGOs get to skim off a fee at every level, so that the piece of pie is whittled away as it moves down through the privatization funnel?   But AFC plans give you an idea of how much money is in play-- they are spending $10 million just to publicize and prepare the ground for the launch of federal vouchers. When you can spare a cool ten mill just to launch your new program, you know you're expecting some hefty ROI.   Center for Christian Virtue   State players are also planning to upsize. The Center for Christian Virtue has been active in Ohio since the days of 1983 when it was the more for Citizens for Community Values. Back in 2024 they won an award from the Heritage Foundation that they planned to use "to support its Education Restoration Initiative, addressing Ohio's academically broken and morally corrupt government-run education system."  They've been quite plain about being on a mission to replace public schools with private Christian schools, including helping churches set up such schools. But with the federal voucher program, they have announced their intent to go national by taking its state-level SGO, the Christian Education Network, and sending it out into other states.    “Families are searching for both excellence and biblical values in education, so this program creates a critical pathway forward,” said Troy McIntosh, Executive Director of CEN. “It gives parents and grandparents a choice they may not have thought possible, and provides Christ-centered schools with new financial resources." And for just 10% of the take, they will provide that.   MyChurchSGO   Even if you aren't a state or national player, you can still play along! Meet Richard Poljan and MyChurchSGO. In fact, I'll let him introduce himself, because otherwise you might think this is a parody video.   [Watch video here.]   Yup. God's new gold mine.   Poljan has put up several of these videos, and they aren't exactly pulling in the big views. He's a hard man to track down, but he appears to be working in Fowler, Michigan, a small town NW of Lansing (be sure to visit Chester's Chicken while you're there). Richard "Buddy" Poljan appears to have no actual education background; his LinkedIn says he put in a couple of years at Hillsdale, then got a degree at Michigan Technological University before embarking on a career as an industrial engineer, currently with EFI Global, the "fire, environmental, and engineering experts." Looks like he played some college football. And he's served on some GOP local leadership groups.   MyChurchSGO has a website up, though it doesn't seem to be quite finished. Poljan does get the basic pitch here-- you can give $1,700 to the government or to your favorite church school. Also, don't have too many rules or parents will go to some other SGO. Also, to churches he says, "Get free money from the Government and bring in lots more revenue for your Church." Finally, "Get your SGO up and running," Poljan urges, "so that you can help kids make it to heaven."   But it's been six months, and Poljan's operation doesn't seem to be exactly taking off, and it does seem that bush-league start-ups like his will mostly get swamped by the big state and national SGO operations. Still, expect plenty of similar small time pop-ups to try to get a piece of that God's big new gold mine.   

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Janresseger: Trump Erases Essential Protections for Students by Eviscerating the Office for Civil Rights

In a powerful commentary earlier this week, NY Times columnist, Jamelle Bouie describes decades of protests and Civil Rights advocacy that resulted in the Voting Rights Act of 1965: “It wasn’t the brainchild of out-of-touch bureaucrats in Washington… It was, instead, an achievement of the most effective social movement of the postwar United States. The truth is that the Voting Rights Act was conceived, crafted and passed in order to further realize American democracy… forced onto the national agenda by the tireless work of the grassroots activists… who struggled, bled and put their lives on the line in a fierce fight to secure their fundamental rights as Americans.” The U.S. Department of Education and its Office for Civil Rights were established by bureaucrats in Washington, but their purpose was to protect the civil rights reforms in education that had been accomplished by the long and arduous grassroots struggle to make real the promise of full educational rights for the children who had been shut out of opportunity since slavery.  The Office for Civil Rights was set up to respond to families’ complaints when their children are mistreated at school in violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Protecting students’ civil rights emerged as a federal responsibility in the decades following Brown v. Board of Education, and the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) was folded into the U.S. Department of Education at its inception in 1979. OCR’s mission has expanded to include protecting students experiencing discriminatory school discipline, seclusion or restraint, sexual violence, or discrimination due to their disability or religion or country of origin. A February report from Senator Bernie Sanders’ office explains: “Make no mistake about what OCR does and why it matters. When a child with a disability is denied the education they are legally entitled to, they call OCR. When a child is sexually harassed at school and the school does nothing, they call OCR. When a student is subjected to racial harassment, antisemitism, Islamophobia, or other shared ancestry discrimination, they call OCR. OCR exists because Congress decided decades ago that the federal government has an obligation to protect the civil rights of every student in America.” The Brookings Brown Center on Education Policy’s Rachel M. Perera explains precisely how the Office for Civil Rights is designed to serve the public: “OCR is obligated to respond to the civil rights complaints it receives, and nearly all investigations initiated by OCR prior to 2025 came in response to complaints filed by families and/or advocates.”  OCR investigators have traditionally understood their role as working with school districts to develop resolution agreements for programs and policies that protect students rather than imposing immediate financial penalties. Trump Administration Destroys the Office for Civil Rights Perera details the many steps the Trump administration has taken to “turn civil rights enforcement into a discriminatory tool.” In the past year, the OCR has limited its focus to three specific issues: framing “gender inclusive campuses and programs… as sex-based discrimination against girls,” recasting as racism “discrimination against white (and/or) Asian) students,” and using allegations of antisemitism “to initiate sweeping investigations to address longstanding conservative complaints about higher education.” Perera explains how those areas of focus have translated during the second Trump administration into some specific tasks of OCR: “OCR’s only Title IX enforcement work was to challenge transgender student policies… OCR’s Title VI investigations were similarly concentrated across a handful of issues… In K-12, most Title VI cases aimed to challenge local efforts to promote racial equity (e.g. Chicago Public Schools’ Black Student Success Plan). Note that OCR did not pursue… a single Title VI case involving racial discrimination against Black students.” Sometimes, writes Perera, OCR’s actions fail to comport with federal law: “Nothing in the text of Title IX prohibits schools from allowing transgender students… (to access) facilities that align with their gender identity. To the contrary, several U.S. Courts of Appeals… have held that Title IX requires schools to allow such access.” Perera adds that the Office for Civil Rights has significantly altered the origin of the  cases being investigated. Although “OCR is obligated to respond to the civil rights complaints it receives… over the last year, OCR has prioritized… administration-directed investigations, as well as investigations into complaints filed by right-wing advocacy groups,” but not complaints filed by parents. Perera reminds us that, although OCR’s primary purpose has been establishing resolution agreements with school districts to prescribe steps to prevent further violations of students’ rights, this year OCR has suddenly, without explanation, cancelled  resolution agreements reached under previous administrations. For example, in April of 2025,  OCR announced the sudden termination of a consent agreement protecting the rights of Native American students in the Rapid City, South Dakota public schools. Not only has the Trump administration violated students’ rights, but Perera reports that OCR has also violated school districts’ and universities’ due process rights by abruptly cancelling funding without following required procedures. Procedures being ignored include: “documenting evidence of any violations through an investigation; providing the institution with a summary of investigation findings and notices of pending funding termination; and giving the institution the option to voluntarily settle a case or challenge any noncompliance findings before the Education Department would terminate federal funding.” Sudden funding cuts have affected research funding at universities like UCLA, Brown, Harvard, and Columbia and magnet school grants for the public school districts of Fairfax County, Virginia, and New York City. The scale of the Office for Civil Rights’ egregious failure to investigate complaints filed by families during Donald Trump’s second term portends OCR’s utter collapse. Senator Sanders’ office summarizes the failure: “(D)espite OCR receiving an expected record number of civil rights complaints in 2025, Trump’s OCR reached just 112 resolution agreements—the fewest in at least 12 years. In 2025, Trump’s OCR reached zero resolution agreements involving sexual harassment, sexual violence, seclusion or restraint, racial harassment, or discriminatory school discipline. Trump’s OCR has effectively stopped protecting students, reaching resolution agreements in just 1% of pending cases in 2025.” In the spring of 2025 Linda McMahon’s Department shuttered seven of the Office for Civil Rights’ regional offices—in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Chicago, Dallas and San Francisco—with only five remaining open—in Washington, DC, Atlanta, Kansas City, Denver, and Seattle—and put a huge percentage of OCR’s staff attorneys on administrative leave for months. Education Week‘s Alyson Klein just reported that “the Department spent up to $38 million last year paying staffers from its Office for Civil Rights to remain on administrative leave while courts stymied the Trump administration’s efforts to lay them off.” Press reports indicated, however, that in December, McMahon called staff back to address what had become an enormous backlog of complaints. No one has really known how that effort to recall staff and investigate complaints is going until this week when Politico‘s, Bianca Quilantan and Hannah Psalma Ramirez shared the sorry news that, while OCR had 575 employees—mostly attorneys—in 2024, by May of 2026, the office had a staff of only 321.  In December 2025, OCR called back 247 of those who had been put on administrative leave.  While 85 attorneys did return to work, some of those have chosen not to stay. “Staffers have chosen not to come back or are leaving the agency because they retired, got new jobs, and are concerned about job stability. But some are uncomfortable with the work.” The reporters quote Linda Mangel, OCR’s former enforcement director who has resigned: “There’s been a steady parade of people leaving… Even the people who weren’t RIFed were so shaken by what was happening in the agency that they have steadily left.” Mangel,who served previously in the Justice Departments under Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush, explains that in those administrations: “we weren’t asked to do things that were inconsistent with the law…  I could always do some good. They weren’t weaponizing civil rights ever, and now they are.”  

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The Reliable Narrator: The Science of Privatization Propaganda

Media reliance on free-market think tank reports distorts the story on reading in the US. Currently viral on social media is a TikTok video of a teacher lamenting that her students cannot read. This feeds into the current story about reading being almost daily portrayed by the media, which depends on anecdotes and metaphors despite the recurring rhetoric of “science.” However, one of the most misleading aspects of the media story about reading is the reliance on free-market think tank reports that fail to meet even the minimum standards of research. A recent email from Education Week, for example, platformed a new report from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. The report, filled with charts and footnotes, addresses teacher knowledge and implementation of the “science of reading,” a favorite of conservatives because it is grounded in phonics instruction and “no excuses” ideology. Fordham is a think tank dedicated to the privatization of education, and their reports, including this one, doesn’t meet the standard of scientific research. In fact, think tank reports are often propaganda in slick PDFs with end notes and a great deal of data. This Fordham report is survey data and written by two scholars with no background in literacy. Think tank reports are dangerous because they look like high-quality research incorporating either end notes or links, most of which readers likely never explore. Let’s look at some of the links making the foundational claims found in the media about reading: Both the Foreword and Introduction establish the reading crisis by linking to a podcast, Sold a Story (Thomas, 2024a; 2024b; 2024c; 2024d). Claims about “unscientific approaches” to reading (whole language, three cueing, and balanced literacy) are linked to a Fordham report, a “conceptual article,” and a high-quality research article that shows systematic phonics improves students’ phonic skills but not comprehension (the core finding for decades about phonics instruction). The report includes the required link to the National Reading Panel (NRP), a report more than two decades old that was incomplete and has been repeatedly misrepresented in the media. Despite constant claims otherwise, the NRP report found no different between systematic phonics and whole language in terms of comprehension. Claims of reading materials not being scientific are linked to a RAND survey. The link for grade retention leads to another Fordham report from 2023. Despite that report’s positive spin on retention, the evidence is far more negative in terms of how retention distorts tests data and has negative consequences for those students as adults. Also central to this report is the work of NCTQ, founded by Fordham in 2000. NCTQ’s agenda is a subset of Fordham’s, focusing on discrediting teacher education. No report issued by NCTQ has ever withstood the rigor of external review or met the basic standards of scientific research (see Thomas, 2023). Mainstream education media works as uncritical PR for free-market think tanks and conservative ideology (see the recent charter propaganda in The Atlantic). The bait-and-switch of the “science of reading” movement as it plays out in the media’s story of reading is that the rhetoric of “science” is propped up on anecdotes, metaphors, podcasts, cherry-picked and misrepresented research, and the incestuous propaganda of free-market think tank reports. The point of education crisis for conservative think tanks is privatization, not public education reform. Yet, many continue to buy it. See Also Research Contradicts “Science of Reading” Media Story Being Sold References Thomas, P.L. (2024a, March). We teach English in times of perpetual crisis: The long (and tedious) history of reading crisis. English Journal, 113(4), 21-26. https://publicationsncte.org/content/journals/10.58680/ej2024113421 Thomas, P.L. (2024b, May). Teaching English in the “science of reading” era: We teach English in times of perpetual crisis: Selling a story of reading. English Journal, 113(5), 16-22. https://publicationsncte.org/content/journals/10.58680/ej2024113516 Thomas, P.L. (2024c, September). We teach English in times of perpetual crisis: The media continue to misread teaching reading and literacy. English Journal, 114(1), 14-19. https://publicationsncte.org/content/journals/10.58680/ej2024114114 Thomas, P.L. (2024d, November). We teach English in times of perpetual crisis: For all ELA teachers, “the time is always now.” English Journal, 114(2), 21-26. https://publicationsncte.org/content/journals/10.58680/ej2024114221 Thomas, P.L. (2023, September). NEPC review: Teacher prep review: Strengthening elementary reading instruction. Boulder, CO: National Education Policy Center. https://nepc.colorado.edu/review/teacher-prep  

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The Education Wars: The Blue State Voucher Express

The Democrats' pro-voucher wing is pressing blue state governors to embrace Trump's signature education policy. Arne Duncan, Obama’s education secretary, is now pitching school vouchers. I was in Florida recently to speak on the damage that vouchers have done to public schools when a local friend made a comment that I often get from my red state pals. You’re so lucky to live in a state that’s free from this crap. Acting on my 2026 resolution to be less of a downer (how’s that going??) I kept myself to myself, resisting the urge to deliver a semi-screed on the looming threat posed by the federal voucher program. And I reflected, once again, upon the irony that even as the GOP increasingly confronts the fallout from voucher programs, creating an opening for Democrats, the pro-voucher wingette of the Democratic Party is trying to muscle blue state governors into embracing Trump’s signature education policy. What’d I miss? First, a quick recap. Buried in the 1000 page behemoth known as the One Big Beautiful Bill was the nation’s first-ever federal voucher program. Long a conservative pipe dream, notwithstanding those on the right who staunchly opposed the idea as federal overreach, the new voucher program gives tax-payers a tax credit of unprecedented generosity if they donate to a so-called scholarship granting organization. I’ll get into more on how this will and won’t work below, but the key detail for the purposes of this post is that governors must opt into the bill in order for their states to participate. So far 27 have signed up, leaders of red states all, save for one Jared Polis, the outgoing governor of Colorado. And while the pressure on Democratic governors so far has come from Republican-controlled legislators in states including Kansas and Kentucky, the voucher express is now rolling into blue states. Which brings us to a recent event that convened, among others, former Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, edupreneur Kevin Chavous, and a who’s who of Massachusetts education reform and philanthropy leaders, all rallying around a message for Governor Maura Healey: “sign up for vouchers—for the kids.” For a full play-by-play of the gathering, read every word of this write up by veteran journalist (and longtime friend of yours truly) Yawu Miller. As Miller notes, while the messaging was both muddled and deeply misleading, the new Massachusetts Educational Opportunities Coalition reflects impressive organizing. The National Parents Union is spearheading the local coalition which aims to pressure Gov. Maura Healey to adopt the tax credit program. So far, the group counts 124 organizations in support, including The Pioneer Institute, The Boston Foundation, the Lynch Foundation, 45 individual Catholic Schools, 18 Montessori Schools, 13 Jewish day schools, the umbrella organizations supporting those types of schools and dozens of YMCAs and Boys and Girls Clubs. Bad timing A key part of the sales pitch for bringing vouchers to Massachusetts is that the cause is bipartisan. Which made it all the more awkward that on the very day of the coalition’s debut, 32 Democratic senators, including both Massachusetts senators, dropped a bill to repeal the federal voucher program on the grounds that it will 1) decimate public schools and 2) explode the federal deficit. In a hard-hitting op-ed, Arizona Senator Mark Kelly warned that universal vouchers had “broken” his state. And while the Wall Street Journal was quick to paint Kelly as a toady of the teachers unions, the bill’s co-sponsors include among them some famously choice-y Democrats: Cory Booker and Michael Bennett. Bennett, by the way, is running to replace out-going Colorado Governor Jared Polis, to date the program’s lone blue backer. (Contrary to claims on the coalition’s website, North Carolina Governor Josh Stein has not opted his state into the program.) Overselling, undertelling The story told at the Massachusetts event was that this is free money that the state and its children will lose if the governor refuses to opt in. Also, these aren’t vouchers but scholarships that will benefit low-income kids by giving them access to tutoring, after school programs, special education services and something vaguely defined as “tuition assistance.” We’re in pretty serious pinocchio territory here as these are most definitely vouchers, and the income eligibility, pegged at 300 percent of the median area income, means that a family of four in Boston, earning nearly $500,000, will be eligible—kind of a strange definition of ‘low-income.’ But it’s the fallacy of omission that’s working overtime here. You see, because the US Department of the Treasury, which will oversee the program, has yet to release the regulations, the hard sell about the program being “new resources for students” is based on the worst kind of wishful thinking. Moreover, Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey and other blue state govs are being pressured to opt their states in without basic info about the program—like, will students who use vouchers be protected from discrimination? And, can states request data to evaluate the success of the program? Who knows???? Truth in advertising For a more candid look at what Trump’s voucher program is really about, let’s head over to the American Federation for Children, the school choice lobby shop established by Betsy DeVos, which recently announced the creation of a national ‘scholarship granting organization’ or SGO—these are the entities tasked with handing out the voucher cash (less a 10 percent 'cut’). And accompanying the new AFC SGO, to be run in partnership with voucher vendor Odyssey, is a $10 million advertising campaign to educate taxpayers about the generous new write off, and parents about their new education options. Now perhaps I’ve grown cynical from my years of writing about this stuff, but I highly doubt that the hearts of DeVos et al are pounding over the chance to provide kids in under-resourced schools with enrichment opportunities. The income eligibility is so high, they note approvingly, that 90 percent of all K-12 students in the US are now eligible for private school vouchers. Another clue as to what’s really going on comes to us courtesy of a fascinating new profile of ED chief Linda McMahon in the New Yorker. That we now have a federal voucher program turns out to reflect the handiwork of Texas oil billionaire slash “theo-oligarch” Tim Dunn, who used McMahon’s think tank, the America First Policy Institute, to take Texas’ controversial voucher program, which he also spearheaded, national. At the institute, McMahon ceded policy to others. Before launching the group, she and Rollins visited Texas to enlist the billionaire oilman Tim Dunn as a founder. Dunn isn’t well known nationally, but he is the most powerful man in Texas; in 2023, ProPublica reported, two-thirds of all campaign donations to the state Republican Party came from his political organizations. Dunn has expressed the view that Christians should dominate society. Texas’s first Jewish Speaker of the House has said that, in a private meeting, Dunn told him that only Christians should hold leadership positions. (Dunn has denied this.) For years, his main political project was legislation that siphoned public-education funds to private schools via vouchers. “I call him a theo-oligarch,” Glenn Rogers, a former Republican state representative, told me. Rogers is deeply conservative, but, like many rural Republicans, he was a public-education supporter. Dunn targeted him, and in 2024 he lost his seat. “He desires to eliminate public education and replace it with a private-education system that uses his version of the Christian religion,” Rogers said. The Death of Education Reform The Massachusetts voucher coalition is ostensibly led by the National Parents Union, the six year old organization that was started as a counterweight to the teachers unions. But beneath the NPU staffers’ cheerleading at the roll-out rally could be heard a distinctly queasy note. Now, whatever you think about NPU’s somewhat murky origin story, the group’s polling of parents routinely offers genuine insights. Take, for example, this recent survey that found that “the ‘school choice’ parents are willing to support comes with a robust set of conditions centered on fairness, accessibility, and accountability, conditions that existing voucher and ESA programs fail to meet.” Note that the federal program is also lacking these conditions, by design, putting NPU in the awkward position of having to sell the Trump voucher program as something other than what it is. (That’s why, as Yawu Miller reports, the group’s lobbyist urged activists to sell the plan as benefitting public school students.) I suspect that real driver of this bus is Democrats for Education Reform or DFER, specifically its cretinous chief, Jorge Elorza. If you’re thinking, “cretinous is a rather strong word choice, Jennifer,” take a sec to read up on the misogynistic behavior in which this gentleman appears to traffic. Did you get to the paragaph where the former staffer who is suing DFER claims that she became the target of Elorza’s wrath after questioning his decision to “join a Koch-funded right-wing coalition that seemed contrary to the organization’s best interests and mission”? As the New York Times reported this summer, DFER’s decision to embrace the Trump voucher program has caused a deep split within its ranks. Despite the addition of high-profile new supporters, including Arne Duncan and Netflix honcho Reed Hastings, the group appears to be in free fall. Lessons learned DFER’s pivot was on vivid display at the Massachusetts voucher coalition coming out party. Tasked with sounding the alarm about the dire state of the nation’s public school was Kevin Chavous, the president of Stride K12 Inc, the for-profit virtual school behemoth so mired in poor-performing, cash hoovering scandal that it had to change its name. If Chavous seems like an odd choice to wave the student achievement banner, consider that the Trump voucher program doesn’t actually have anything to say about student achievement. As for Arne Duncan, who recently joined DFER as a “senior fellow,” a sinecure from which he’ll be proffering sage advice on the Democrats’ education strategy, count me as not all that surprised by his trajectory. A decade ago, Duncan touched down in Massachusetts as part of a last-ditch effort to sell a ballot initative that would have dramatically expanded charter schools at the expense of public schools. I went to hear him deliver the closing pitch for Question 2 in his trademark ‘fast folksy’ style, replete with anecdotes about students who really didn’t care what kind of school they attended as long as they achieved. The ballot question went down in flames, despite a huge money advantage for Team Charter, a stinging defeat from which Massachusetts’ education reform community has never recovered. That loss, by the way, is a big part of why these same folks are now embracing private school vouchers, a cause even more deeply unpopular than charter school expansion. Ten years later, they’re back, armed with another pig and plenty of lipstick.  

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Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice: School Reform and Tech-Devices in Classrooms: Kissing Cousins

When asked how I got interested in the uses of technological devices in classrooms, I answer that I was the target for a quarter-century of high-tech innovations and classroom reforms when I taught high school history and served as a district administrator in different urban school systems. I then say that I have been trained as an historian and studied many reform efforts to improve schooling over the past century in U.S. classrooms, schools, and districts. I examined how teachers have taught since the 1890s. I investigated policymakers’ constant changes in curriculum since the 1880s. I analyzed the origins of the age-graded school and the spread of this innovation through the 19th century. And I parsed the utopian dreams of reformers who believed that new machine technologies (e.g., film, radio, instructional television, desktop computer) would alter how teachers teach and students learn. I then end my answer by pointing out that these electronic devices are in the DNA of all innovations aimed at altering how teachers teach and how students learn. What surprises me is that these questioners had not viewed high-tech devices as having either a history in schools or as blood relations to constant efforts to improve schools. Instead, they saw (and see) innovative high-tech devices as singular, even exceptional, ways of transforming teaching and learning completely divorced from previous efforts at improving classroom practice through curricular reforms in math, social studies, science, and other subjects or instructional reforms such as project-based learning, team teaching and Direct Instruction. And that is a huge conceptual error. Why? Because, school and classroom reforms including technological ones, are part of the same genetic code–they are kissing cousins, so to speak. Teachers using iCell App, Khan Academy videos, Google Classroom, Kahoot, and other software programs are implementing curricular reforms and trying to shape instruction. Technological innovations, then, are blood cousins to curricular and instructional reforms. Consequently, to stretch the metaphor, they share similar genes. For example, all reforms come bathed in rhetoric. Take the “21st Century Skills” effort, organized by the Partnership for 21st Century Skills (P21), a reform coalition whose members include Verizon, Hewlett-Packard, Apple, and Dell. Their mission is to prepare the current generation of children and youth to compete in a globalized economy. Their words, like the rhetoric of so many other reformers—past and present—portray a economic, social, and political crisis for U.S. competition in world markets unless today’s youth leave school fully equipped with the skills of creating, innovating, collaborating, and critically thinking. And don’t forget: a repertoire of technological skills. The rhetoric must not only create a sense of crisis, it must portray existing institutions as woefully deficient. Read the stuff. If patterns emerge from analyzing reform rhetoric over time so can patterns be observed in the journey of a policy from its rhetoric to becoming formally adopted and then appear as an actual program in schools and classrooms. Designing the policy and program means frequent revisions as they go through the political vetting process to get funded. Think of federal laws such as No Child Left Behind and Every Student Succeeds Act and a spanking-new whole language software program for district schools. Ditto for finding patterns in the degree to which those adopted policies get implemented and changed as the design wends its way into schools and eventually classrooms (e.g., e.g., Success for All, Maine’s 1:1 laptop initiative, ClassDojo) If reform rhetoric, policy adoption, and putting innovations into classroom practice can be examined for regularities so can the criteria used to assess the reform (e.g., test scores, satisfaction of teachers and students with innovation, rates of graduation, etc.). Once assessed, determining whether or not the reform should be sustained across the entire district is a judgment call that authorities make on the basis of political, ideological, and evidentiary grounds. In viewing technological innovations as a sub-set of curricular and instructional reforms, teachers, principals, and parents can identify patterns, determine consequences for the adoption of the innovation, track the journey as it goes from policy to classroom practice, and expect certain outcomes while being open to unanticipated outcomes as well. Too many policymakers, practitioners, and parents see technological innovations as unique initiatives unrelated to historic patterns in school reforms. They err. My experiences as a practitioner and historian have taught me to see technological devices as being blood relations, even kissing cousins, in the history of school reform in the U.S..  

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Shanker Blog: Do One-Size-Fits-All Literacy Programs Serve English Learners?

My teaching experience in a bilingual school versus a dual immersion school couldn’t be more different, although they shared one commonality: the balance between engaging and overburdening English learners (ELs) was hard to strike.  In the bilingual school, language barriers impeded my classroom daily. Although our lessons were taught bilingually, my co-teacher and I struggled to understand each other and often dealt with miscommunications. The administration mandated that state tested subjects be taught in English exclusively, implying that bilingual aims were on the backburner to test scores. Our EL students were constantly on call to translate for the non-Spanish speakers who didn’t understand the content, which distracted them from focusing on their coursework and put improper pressure on them to synthesize and interpret lessons.  But in the dual immersion (DLI) school, I struggled to get my EL students involved at all. I didn't even know which of my students were enrolled in the DLI program, but I wrongly assumed that because I taught almost all the ELs in my school that many of them would be enrolled to take advantage of its academic benefits. In the DLI program, students were eligible to receive a certification in bilingualism which could be leveraged for college and career advancement. I was shocked to find that despite the DLI program offering their native language, only a few of my 250 students were enrolled. The program marketed bilingualism as a career investment: but one aimed at English-dominant students acquiring a second language, not at students who were already bilingual and had the most to gain from formal recognition of that skill. These experiences reflect a broader pattern in how state policy has approached English learners: investing in programs that promise inclusion while rarely centering the students those programs are meant to serve. The data reveals this gap, as 50% of ELs who are in the U.S. school system since kindergarten fail to reach proficiency within 6 years. Dual Immersion Benefits Non-Native Learners  Many states have experienced rapid population growth of non-English speakers in the last few decades, and in response, have implemented practical school reforms to support students from non-English-speaking households. Utah’s dual immersion programming represents a widespread reform that was designed to support ELs but has instead largely served the white population.  In 2001, a Utah family member filed an OCR complaint about their nephew’s school, submitting that the school was grouping together ELs into isolated classrooms and providing inadequate curriculum/instruction. This complaint led to an investigation, which forced the state to implement an EL endorsement requirement and ELD instruction blocks for English learners. But in 2007, former Gov. Jon Huntsman began to advocate for a better way to integrate ELs into Utah schools: through dual immersion. Huntsman served as an ambassador to Russia and China and came back to his home state committed to making new economic and global goals of success for Utah students. Although the program offers that the two way programs—which teach both English and the program language—should have at least one-third native speakers, in 2013 only 8% of 3rd graders participating were English learners. By investing so heavily in DLI programs to ‘serve ELs’, the state managed to predominantly serve white populations instead. Utah’s case was not an anomaly: literacy policy has continued to treat ELs as the justification rather than the starting point. One Size Doesn’t Fit All: Science of Reading  The politicization of science of reading legislation has created additional structural barriers for ELs. Tracing SOR back to NCLB and the Reading First Initiative, researchers note that the foundational 1998 Reading Panel report largely failed to study diverse learner populations, and assumed ELs should reach native language proficiency before starting to learn to read in English. A study on how SOR legislation affects deaf learners analyzed 24 recent SOR bills and found that state policies frame reading as a policy problem, and equally equate dyslexia, disabilities, and El interventions in one grouped mandate. This symmetrical language assumes that each of these states have the same demographics, and that reading interventions for students with disabilities and ELs will look the same.  Reading intervention provisions are not the only place researchers find problematic in SOR legislation: the gaps extend into how states prepare the teachers responsible for carrying out those interventions. While ELs benefit from the same foundational literacy pedagogy as all students, they additionally require oral language development and linguistic scaffolding that most teacher preparation programs do not include. State policies have largely failed to mandate oversight of whether teacher preparation programs incorporate EL-specific, science-based reading strategies. Teachers in bilingual programs must be trained to develop genuine bilingualism in their students, not simply translation skills. Even when bilingual programming exists, the structural problems do not stop at teacher preparation. Research on dual language programs find that many plans are based in deficit frameworks for emerging bilingual students, particularly by using monolingual assessment practices. A policy brief reviewing Texas’ literacy legislation criticized the required assessments for ELs and found that when Spanish scores were combined with English, the students underperforming decreased from 84% to 40%. In short, when diagnostics and assessments are only completed in English, non-native English speakers may be mischaracterized. This leaves equity gaps in this type of intervention for English learners, as their bilingual growth is not reported accurately.  Bottom Line The throughline across bilingual schools, dual immersion programs, and science of reading legislation is the same: English learners are rarely the starting point of policy design and are instead expected to adapt to systems built around other priorities. Utah's dual immersion expansion is an early example of this pattern. The economic and global competitiveness goals that drove that expansion were not EL goals, and the students who were meant to benefit were largely left out. Science of reading legislation has followed a similar trajectory. When EL interventions are folded into the same legislative mandate as dyslexia and disability accommodations, and when the assessments used to track progress are monolingually normed, the policy infrastructure around English learners ends up measuring something other than what it intends to. What is consistent across these approaches is not a lack of investment, but a gap between the populations that policies are designed around and the populations they are meant to serve. Whether that gap closes depends on how seriously states take the distinction.  

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The Digital Delusion: i-Ready Finally Has Real Research…and It Changes Nothing

The Evidence is Stronger, But The Conclusions Remain the Same Several months ago I published an article highlighting the lack of research concerning i-Ready: a genuinely strange state of affairs for a program currently being used by over 13 million students. At the time, only four independent studies of this tool existed – and none had been published in a reputable, top-tier journal. That has finally changed. Last month, Online Learning – a Q1 educational journal – published the strongest evaluation of i-Ready to date. Although not a randomized controlled trial (it was a retrospective observational study), this is a careful, well-executed piece of work using sophisticated statistical methods and tens of thousands of students. As such, this deserves to be taken seriously. So, what did they find? A QUICK REFRESHER Until now, the strongest evidence on i-Ready came from several evaluations conducted by Johns Hopkins Researchers. Across those studies, the conclusion was bleak: Across grades 3 through 6, i-Ready showed a 0.8% improvement in mathematics performance with no measurable change in reading. However, seeing as these studies were industry funded and non-peer reviewed, it could reasonably be argued that the conclusions are not definitive. But now we have something stronger and much larger – so does it change the picture? THE NEW STUDY Researchers from Georgia State University examined two years of i-Ready implementation (2021-2023) across grades 1 through 9 in a large Georgia district with 131 schools – 81 of which used i-Ready. Overall, 67,602 student-year cases were eligible to use i-Ready, yet only 27,717 - about 41% - actually used the program. The authors acknowledge they were unable to explain why most eligible students never used the software. Importantly, the authors are refreshingly honest about the limitations of their data. Before presenting any results they write: “Our analyses are descriptive versus causal, as we cannot fully…understand or account for selection into treatment…[and] we were unable to account for other recovery interventions occurring during the same period.” That sentence gives me confidence in the paper: rather than overselling the findings, the authors openly acknowledge exactly what their design can (and cannot) tell us. THE RESULTS After two years, students who used i-Ready scored approximately: +0.04 standard deviations higher in Reading +0.04 standard deviations higher in Math. That’s it. That’s the headline. To put this into context, an effect size of 0.04 standard deviations is equivalent to moving the average student from the 50th percentile to about the 51.5th percentile - a gain of just 1.5 percentile points. Although the paper reports some intriguing subgroup findings (particularly among students with intellectual disabilities) the absence of a reported correction for multiple comparisons makes those findings difficult to interpret. Finally, because the study does not clearly establish that treatment and comparison students received equivalent amounts of total instruction, it cannot rule out the possibility that some - or even all - of the observed +0.04 standard deviation benefit reflects additional time spent learning rather than any unique effect of the software itself. To clarify, if students in the control condition received their normal classroom instruction while students using i-Ready received that same instruction PLUS additional time on the platform, then the comparison is no longer between instructional methods - it’s between different amounts of instruction. Under those circumstances, any observed advantage could simply reflect the well-established benefits of increased practice and learning time. Had the control group, instead, spent an equivalent amount of time engaged in evidence-based, non-digital practice (such as worked examples, guided practice, or teacher-led small-group instruction), it is entirely plausible that they would have achieved similar, or even greater, gains. Because this was a retrospective study, however, the authors cannot determine whether i-Ready replaced existing instruction or merely supplemented it. That leaves this important alternative explanation unresolved. The overall story, however, is remarkably simple: the strongest study ever conducted on i-Ready found almost exactly the same small effects as previous evaluations. Ironically, the research so many people have been waiting for ultimately changes nothing: the evidence is stronger, but the conclusion remains the same. A FEW ODDITIES Although this paper is strong, that doesn’t mean every aspect of it is beyond criticism. In fact, the researchers made three decisions that deserve closer scrutiny. “Weeks of Learning” The researchers translated a gain of +0.04 standard deviations into roughly two additional weeks of learning. Although that might sound impressive, readers are never shown how this conversion was calculated: there are no equations, no adaptation tables, not even a citation. Presumably, the authors estimated typical MAP Growth gains across each year level, assumed those gains accumulated at a constant rate throughout the school year, and divided accordingly. Converting a single end-of-year difference into "weeks of learning" therefore implicitly assumes that learning accumulates at a constant rate throughout the school year. That assumption is neither defended nor justified in the paper (nor is it reflective of the typically saltatory nature of learning gains). Regardless, the “weeks of learning” reported in this paper is an inference, not an observed result. Accordingly, although it may make for an appealing headline, it is much less scientifically convincing. The Cost Estimate Following their learning analyses, these researchers make an odd reference to cost: they estimate that the district spent $831,510 on i-Ready subscriptions over the two years. This was calculated by assuming $30 per subscription across the 27,717 active users. There are at least two problems with this estimate. First, the authors acknowledge there were a total of 67,602 students with access. If the district purchased subscriptions for every student who had access (as is common with district-wide software contracts) the subscription cost would have been approximately $2,028,060 rather than $831,510. Second, they offer no reference for their proposed $30 subscription fee - and it is unclear whether this figure reflects access to a single subject or to both i-Ready Reading and i-Ready Mathematics. Because the paper reports outcomes for both subjects but never specifies how licenses were allocated, the true program cost could be substantially higher, potentially approaching $4,056,120 if separate subscriptions were required for both Reading and Mathematics. Extrapolated, that suggests between $500,000 and $1 million dollars were spent for each 0.01 standard deviation growth amongst users: a substantially altered cost-benefit calculation. The authors themselves note a number of other interventions (such as small-group instruction and after-school programs) that almost certainly generate better results for far less cost. What Was Actually Measured? Finally, the study measured outcomes using MAP Growth. As discussed in my previous article, MAP Growth is an adaptive computer assessment that closely resembles the instructional structure of many digital tutoring platforms – including i-Ready. By no means does this invalidate the results, but it does raise an important question about transfer. Would we observe the same gains on assessments less closely aligned with the tutoring environment? Or would we have seen growth even lower than 0.04 standard deviations? Unfortunately, this study cannot answer that question. SO NOW THEN… This paper represents the benchmark evaluation of i-Ready: it is statistically sophisticated, transparent, and avoids making causal claims its design cannot support. And it reaches almost the exact same conclusion as every previous evaluation. i-Ready appears capable of producing very small improvements on assessments closely aligned with the instructional model. Whether those improvements justify the financial investment, loss of instructional time, and opportunity costs is a separate question – one schools should be asking before investing millions of dollars into digital tutoring. The methods may have improved, but the estimated impact has not.  

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