NEPC - Blog Post of the Day

The Education Wars: How Did This Happen???

elaine — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 16:24:20 +0000

The Education Wars: How Did This Happen???

Stories about parents rebelling against big tech are everywhere right now. They’re sick of the screens, the hoovering up of their children’s data, and they view AI and its rapid incursion into schools as a menace, not a ‘co-pilot’ for their kids’ education. This is a positive development, in my humble opinion, especially since the backlash against the tech takeover of schools crosses partisan lines. Meanwhile, pundits and hot takers are weighing in, declaring the era of edtech, not just a failure, but the cause of our failing schools.

Which raises a not insignificant question. Now that everyone who is anyone agrees that handing schools over to Silicon Valley was big and costly mistake, how did the nation’s teachers and students end up on the receiving end of this experiment in the first place? And here is where our story grows murky, dear reader. In fact, if you’re old enough to remember the absolute mania around ‘personalized learning’ that took hold during the Obama era, count yourself as fortunate. Because lots of the same influential, not to mention handsomely compensated, folks who were churning out ‘reports’ about our factory-era schools 15 minutes ago, suddenly seemed cursed by failing memories.

The not-so-wayback-machine

If you need a refresher to summon forth the 2010-era ed tech frenzy, proceed directly to Audrey Watters’ unforgettable write-up: “The 100 Worst Ed-Tech Debacles of the Decade.” Watters’ has moved on to a new newsletter and AI refusal, but her once lonely voice as the ‘Cassandra’ of education technology remains as essential as ever. Her tally of “ed-tech failures and fuck-ups and flawed ideas” is studded with now tarnished silver bullets that promised to transform our factory-era schools into futuristic tech centers, making a pretty penny in the process: AltSchool, inBloom, Rocketship, Amplify, DreamBox, Summit… The names have changed or been forgotten but the throughline—a fundamental misunderstanding of schools and teaching combined with the promise of hefty returns—remains constant.

My own introduction to the ed tech hustle came back in 2015. Jeb Bush’s group, the Foundation for Excellence in Education, or FEE, to use its comically apt acronym, came to Boston for its annual convening, to which I said, ‘sign me up!’ Always an early adapter (see, for example, school vouchers in Florida), FEE was also unabashedly pro technology, as I wrote in a story for the Baffler.

It’s one of FEE’s articles of faith that the solutions to our great educational dilemmas are a mere click away—if, that is, the schools and the self-interested dullards who run them would just accept the limitless possibilities of technology. Of course, these gadgets don’t come cheap. And this means that, like virtually all the other innovations touted by our postideological savants of education reform, the vision of a tech-empowered American student body calls for driving down our spending on teaching (labor costs account for the lion’s share of the $600 billion spent on public education in the United States each year) and pumping up our spending on gizmos.

In virtually every session I attended, someone would relate a story about a device that was working education miracles, followed by a familiar lament: if only the teachers, or their unions, or the education ‘blob’ would get out of the way.

False profits

In a recent piece for Fortune, reporter Sasha Rogelberg offers an interesting origin story for the tech takeover of public education. And you don’t need to read past the title to get where she’s going. ‘American schools weren’t broken until Silicon Valley used a lie to convince them they were—now reading and math scores are plummeting.’ I’d make the header even clunkier and add ‘the education reform industry’ to the mix. While the push to get tech into classrooms predates Obama-era education reform (check out Watters’ fantastic history of personalized learning, Teaching Machines, for the extended play version), it was the reformers’ zeal, when married to Silicon Valley’s profit optimization, that would prove so irresistible.

In the last hundred years, the base of the United States economy has shifted from industry to knowledge—but the average American classroom operates in much the same way it always has: one teacher, up to thirty same-age students, four walls. This report from StudentsFirst argues that this one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t cut it in the modern world, in which mastery of higher-order knowledge and skills ought to matter more than time spent in front of a teacher—and that what we need is competency-based education. This approach, also known as the “personalized model,” is characterized by advancing students through school based on what they know and can do, using assessments to give them timely, differentiated support, made easier by the introduction of learning technology.

StudentsFirst, the hard-charging school reform org started by Michelle Rhee, has since been eaten by 50CAN, which now advocates for school vouchers, but the fare they offered up was standard. Indeed, here’s a fun activity for you. Revisit any prominent reform group, individual, or cause of that era and you will find the same argument about our factory-model schools, followed, inevitably, by the inevitable pitch for a tech-centric solution.

Race to the Top, Obama’s signature education reform initiative, didn’t just bribe cash-strapped states into overhauling their teacher evaluation systems. It also ‘encouraged’ states to shift their standardized tests online. And Arne Duncan and Obama’s Department of Education actively courted the tech industry, encouraging them to think of schools as a space ripe for disruption. “Many of today’s young people will be working at jobs that don’t currently exist,” warned the XQ Institute, the reform org started by Steve Jobs’ widow, Laurene Powell Jobs. Today Powell Jobs presides over the Atlantic, where new panic pieces regarding young, tech-addled dumb dumbs appear seemingly every day.

Warning signs

My obsessive interest in the intersection of education and politics began back in 2012, when my adopted home state of Massachusetts came down with a serious—and well-funded—case of education reform fever. At a time when red states were crushing the collective bargaining rights of teachers (Wisconsin, anyone?), I was struck by how often reform-minded Democrats ended up repurposing the right’s anti-union, anti-teacher, anti-public-school rhetoric for their own righteous cause. Ed tech sat right smack in the center of this queasy juncture—beloved both by liberal reformers, ensorcelled by press releases promising higher test scores, and by conservatives who liked the idea of spending less on schools by replacing teachers with machines.

Recall, if you will, Rocketship charter schools, whose innovative blended learning model caused the test scores of its students—almost all poor and minority—to go up like a rocket. Richard Whitmire’s fawning 2013 book, On the Rocketship: How Top Charter Schools Are Pushing the Envelope, is a veritable time capsule of the era. Unlike the fusty Model-T schools of yore, Rocketship schools were tech forward. Students spent a chunk of each day in so-called Learning Labs, taking, retaking or practicing taking tests, a practice that had a measurable impact, especially since 50 percent of teachers’ pay was tied to test scores ascending. All that clicking also translated into dollar signs, wrote Whitmire. “A major cost-saving solution was for students to spend significant time working on laptops in large groups supervised by noncertified, lower-paid “instructional lab specialists.”

Rocketship has since fallen back to earth, in part because of stellar reporting like this from Anya Kamenetz, documenting the chain’s less savory practices. But it’s hard to overstate just how excited the reform world was about this stuff. Next time you hear an edu-pundit bemoaning the take over of kindergarten classrooms by big tech, remember that Rocketship got there first. “[K]indergarten teachers are spending less time making letter sounds,” co-founder Preston Smith told Kamenetz. Reformers couldn’t get enough…

Whodunit?

Investigative reporter Amy Littlefield has an intriguing-sounding new book out in which she uses the model of an Agatha Christie novel to suss out who killed abortion rights in the US. I imagine that taking a similar approach to the question of how big tech conquered public education would end up in Murder on the Orient Express territory. That’s the classic Christie whodunit in which everyone on the train ends up having ‘dunit.’ These days, there is a comical effort underway by reformers to distance themselves from the tech takeover—what train? I’ve never been on a train! But the idea that Silicon Valley had the cure for all that ailed the nation’s public schools was absolutely central to Obama-era education reform.

I’d locate the zenith of the reformer/tech love affair in 2017 when New Schools Venture Fund, a reform org that funds all of the other orgs, laid down a challenge, or rather, a big bet. At its annual summit, backed by a who’s who of fond of tech funders—Gates, Zuckerberg, Walton—NSVF called for big philanthropy to bet big on tech-based personalized learning. “The world has changed dramatically … and our schools have struggled to keep up,” then CEO Stacey Childress warned the crowd. But not all the news was bad. Going all in on education innovation would also pay off handsomely, claimed NSVF, producing an estimated 200 to 500 percent return on investment. And lest parents, teachers and students failed to adequately appreciate the various reimaginings they were in for, NSVF had an answer for that too: a $200 million ad campaign to “foster understanding and demand.”

As I was preparing to type a sentence about how poorly NSVF’s “Big Bet on the Future of American Education” has aged, a press release popped up in my inbox, announcing that Netflix founder Reed Hastings has joined forces with Democrats for Education Reform. “Just as Netflix replaced a one-size-fits-all broadcast model with something more personal and responsive, Hastings believes public education can make the same leap.”

AI is a once-in-a-thousand-year shift, and what happens in K-12 is at the center of it. The schools that figure out how to combine individualized software with teachers focused on social-emotional development are going to unlock something we’ve never seen before.

Of course, transforming “a school system in desperate need of reinvention” the way that Hastings reinvented home entertainment will require “governance innovation and political will.” No doubt an ad campaign is in the works too. And yet convincing education ‘consumers’ that school = individualized software is going to be a tough sell, especially as the Great Big Tech Backlash accelerates.

That’s my big bet.

elaine June 24, 2026

Source

The Education Wars

Curmudgucation: FL: Schools of Hope and Charter Property Grab

elaine — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 12:31:06 +0000

Curmudgucation: FL: Schools of Hope and Charter Property Grab

Florida is implementing a whole new way for charter schools to hoover up taxpayer dollars.

Schools of Hope started out in 2017 (the bill originally called them "Schools of Success" but someone must have decided against overpromising). The idea was the ultimate in targeting struggling public schools; the idea is that when you find a school that is struggling, you don't give them additional resources or support, but instead pay some charter school to come into the neighborhood.

The scheme was cooked up by then-House Speaker Richard Corcoran and then-Rep. Manny Diaz, two long-time opponents of public education in Florida. And they got some help-- according to Gary Fineout, an AP reporter who has covered many Florida crazy-pants education stories:

Rep. Michael Bileca, a Miami Republican and chairman of the House Education Committee, said legislators met with charter school operators and asked what it would take for them to set up schools in the neighborhoods now served by traditional public schools. He said one answer was that they needed help paying for new buildings to house the school.

Emphasis mine-- we'll come back to that. Cathy Boehme of the Florida Education Association pointed out the obvious:

You are saying funding matters. You're saying good strategies matter. And then you turn around and keep those strategies from schools that you could save from these turnaround options.

Yup. "We've found schools that need help," said the legislature. "Let's give that help to someone else!"

However, Schools of Hope did not take off. Florida was hoping to attract national charter chain action, but it turns out that national charter chains understand that in neighborhoods where public schools struggle, charter schools will also struggle (see also: sad story of Tennessee's Achievement School District). The League of Women Voters attributes the program's struggles to four factors:

Facility costs remained prohibitive even with 25% loan caps and state subsidies
Building schools from scratch takes years of planning, approval, and construction
Local opposition emerged in some communities skeptical of outside operators
Easier markets existed elsewhere for charter operators seeking expansion

The legislature, more interested in nursing the charter industry than the public school system, tried modifying the law. They expanded the range of public schools that could trigger Schools of Hope, both in terms of school achievement and location. They threw more money at the program.

It still wasn't enough.

So this year, the Florida State Board of Education just went ahead and changed the rules.

Remember that problem with getting new buildings up and running. Fixed! Colocation! Now districts must provide "underused, vacant, or surplus" facilities to SOH charters. No rent, no lease, no cost, and districts can't refuse. However, the district must provide building maintenance, custodial services, food service, and transportation. And as long as the facilities are "underused," the district has no say.

"Underused" is a big problem here. There's an administrative rule in the state code that defines "fully used" roughly as "no unused student seats," but that's not much help at all. Intermittent or irregular use? And there's a whole world of other programs that serve students in schools. As Education Matters in Manatee points out

[P]erhaps on an Excel spreadsheet (page 2 of 4 is shown below), a classroom housing six or seven students, one teacher, and several aides may appear to be “underutilized” - but it isn’t. It is in fact providing essential services to some of the most vulnerable citizens of our county.

Imagine you and some neighbors have a regular car pool to work. You share gas expenses, even pool money for a morning cup of coffee. Then one day another neighbor says, "I see you've got a spare seat in the car. I'm going to sit in it and you're going to drive me to work." The seat's not really empty, you reply-- most days we put the stuff we take to work there, and on Tuesdays we take Pat's mom to the doctor. "Don't care," says the neighbor. "You have to take me." Will you chip in for gas money? "No way," says the neighbor. "Also, you're going to buy me donuts and coffee every morning."

If this sounds like a sweet deal for charter operators, well, they agree. Dozens of charter operators have informed a public district that they want the district to fork over the space (WFTV9 pegs the number at 60, but that total appears to be a moving target-- Miami Times Online reports almost 700 "Give us your space" letters going out to school districts).

And now that the rules have changed--Schools of Hope no longer target just low-performing schools, but any school with mysterious "underused" space-- many of the schools that are being targeted are A and B rated schools, which is swell for charters, because that's the market they want to tap anyway. Schools of Hope were launched with all sorts of florid grandstanding ("No longer will we rob children of dignity and hope. Now every single child will be afforded an opportunity of a world class education.," said Corcoran in 2017). Now charter operators can skip right past those challenging schools and head for the more profitable neighborhoods. Once again, school choice is really school's choice.

Sure enough, here comes Eva Moskowitz and Success Academy to cash in on Schools of Hope. Success has perfected the art of creaming families that will fit in-- none of this "every single child will be afforded an opportunity" baloney for Eva. Backed by $50 million from Citadel CEO Ken Griffin, she's looking to set up shop in Miami-Dade, a move that would have been expensive before the state figured out how to give her facility space (and food service and transportation) for free. In return she gets to pick and choose the most agreeable students from a market that didn't include any low-performing schools under the original definition.

SOH present an assortment of problems on the ground--what, for instance, happens in a building where the public school staff and the charter school hours don't match up? Cafeteria time? Can schedules be worked out to manage students passing and mingling in the halls?

And what the heck happens if the public school enrollment grows and they need some of the space back? The law doesn't appear to have any clue (perhaps because Florida legislators are focused on gutting public schools, not building them.

A Success rep says this will be great for the public school because the co-located school will get increased state aid because of increased head count in the building. I wouldn't bet on it. Meanwhile, the charter gets to double dip-- the state hands over taxpayer dollars so that the charter can operate a school, but at the same time, the public school has to carry some of the costs of operating the charter school.

And somehow, the party of small government is once again stomping on local control. The members of the community have no say, no voice, in whether or not the charter becomes a squatter in their public school building, and no say in how the charter operates inside that taxpayer-owned building.

What do they get? Hard to say. The results of Schools of Hope are, so far, not particularly amazing and in many cases have been outstripped by public schools that work with the same demographics. SOH charters are not subject to the same sorts of penalties for low performance that public schools suffer. No School of Hope operators have lost their designation because of their low academic performance. But beyond that, much is mysterious because Florida does not collect information about students at SOH charters-- not which groups are represented nor which attendance zones they came from. You would think that a program supposedly aimed at rescuing poor high-risk students would collect data about whether or not those students were being rescued, but no.

If you're in Florida and want more information, I recommend the website schoolsofnope.org and the recent report from the League of Women Voters. If you aren't in Florida, watch for this manner of picking taxpayer pockets in your state.

elaine June 23, 2026

Source

Curmudgucation

Paul Thomas: Choosing "Changing the Odds" Over "Beating the Odds"

elaine — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 17:32:55 +0000

Paul Thomas: Choosing "Changing the Odds" Over "Beating the Odds"

"One of the excuses educators have long offered to explain America's poor reading performance is poverty." Emily Hanford, Hard Words (2018)

Even in an era where the line between college and professional sports has essentially been erased, the US is poised once again to enter March Madness, the NCAA basketball tournament.

One of the odd dynamics about Americans’ love of this tournament is the conflicting excitement about “my team” winning and possibly the most compelling part of March Madness—the upset.

The underdog who defies the odds and slays the basketball Giant (you know, if only Duke can please lose, I don’t care if my team doesn’t).

However, in reality the odds of the upset are much lower than what most of us envision or even remember about previous tournaments.

Many of us of a certain age believe every year will see the Cinderella outcome of the stunning NC State championship in 1983 because the media has burned into our minds the image of Jim Valvano at the moment he realized his team had in fact won:

Watch on YouTube here.

If we love anything in the US, it is those who overcome the odds.

In fact, despite overcoming the odds being by its nature rare, an outlier, we have come to use that expectation as the norm—even (or maybe especially) for people with the least social, political, or economic power.

Like children.

The fascination with beating the odds in education is widespread and usually is expressed in framing poverty as an “excuse” while also proving it is an excuse through anecdote—the “miracle.”

It’s the “See, there is no racism because Clarence Thomas is a Supreme Court Judge and Barack Obama was president!” approach.

If we circle back to the March Madness example, however, outliers do not prove a generalization; if fact, that something remains an outlier proves the opposite generalization, as shown in this 2024 analysis of the relationship between poverty and achievement:

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.

The “no excuses” mentality in education is pervasive and bi-partisan, including political sources (George W. Bush and Arne Duncan), edu-gurus (John Hattie), and media messaging (Emily Hanford).

The result has been that education analysis and reform have been primarily in-school-only based on the equally false argument that education is a “game changer” (although data prove school mostly reflect and not change society).

Currently, then, the reform gaze is exclusively focused on Mississippi as yet another compelling but misleading “miracle,” proof that if we follow the “science” students and teachers can beat the odds.

Focusing on beating the odds distracts us from a more ethical and effective goal—changing the odds.

Note something different about the 2024 NAEP grade 4 reading snapshots from MS and the Department of Defense (DoDEA) schools:

Mississippi

DoDEA

DoDEA has no students with economically disadvantaged status; and DoDEA Black students (221) significantly outperform MS Black students (206) as well as DoDEA students are the top performing students among all states in reading.

Those top DoDEA scores reflect not just reading proficiency but also that those students have medical care along with food, housing, and parental work security.

In other words, being in the military addresses factors “outside the control of school personnel,” as Maroun and Tienken demonstrate.

The ugly truth is that the US proves time and again that we can do whatever we have the political will to do.

Billions for war is a disturbingly easy choice. But poverty? Gosh, nothing we can do. Sorry.

Yet, our children are bombarded with ideological slogans—no excuses, grit, and growth mindset—teaching them that their success or failure is entirely within their ability to control, even if they must beat the odds.

In-school-only education reform and “no excuses” mindsets have failed for decades, and the evidence is clear that we should choose “changing the odds” over “beating the odds.”

Regretfully, the odds are not in our favor for that to happen any time soon.

elaine June 22, 2026

Source

Paul Thomas

Janresseger: MAGA Promotes “Same Old” Dangerous School Vouchers With a New “Culture War” Frame

elaine — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 16:46:24 +0000

Janresseger: MAGA Promotes “Same Old” Dangerous School Vouchers With a New “Culture War” Frame

While every morning, 90 percent of U.S. children—our children, our grandchildren, and our neighbors’ children—go off to a public school which we expect will welcome them all, our legislators and Congress have been diverting more and more of our tax dollar to vouchers for unregulated private schools, which can exclude the children they don’t want as well as ignoring civil rights laws. Most of us don’t very often remember to appreciate the strength of universal public education, invented over the past two centuries in the United States to serve our democracy by bringing together all the children in every community to learn together in an institution that protects their rights and serves serve their particular needs. Of course, it has taken Brown v. Board of Education, the Civil Rights Movement and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act to put us on a path to make our public schools more inclusive, but our society has persisted.

Right now MAGA politicians at the federal level and far right legislatures across the states are voraciously promoting the alternative: retrenchment on civil rights protections for school children and the political promotion of private school vouchers paid for with tax dollars.

Who is responsible for the enormous voucher movement? In his book, The Privateers, Josh Cowen provides at least a partial list of ideological, so-called, think tanks. They and their affiliated billionaires are underwriting the campaign for school privatization, and they are now framing their campaign with a bigoted attack on civil rights and inclusion of all students: Alliance Defending Freedom, American Federation for Children, American Legislative Exchange Council, The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, The Council for National Policy, EdChoice, The Heritage Foundation, the Institute for Justice, and Moms for Liberty. (The Privateers, pp. vii-viii) That list leaves out state-by-state organizations like Ohio’s Buckeye Institute and Ohio’s Center for Christian Virtue. The State Policy Network coordinates a number these state-by-state agencies. When Cowen’s book was published in 2024, Linda McMahon was chairing the board of the America First Policy Institute; today Cowen would have to add that organization to his list, because that agency’s agenda is central to the Trump administration’s policies.

School privatization at public expense is a growing trend. For Education Week, Matthew Stone and Caitlynn Peetz Stephens estimate that 19 states now “have programs on the books that make virtually all their students eligible for state funding to use on private school tuition or home-school expenses.” And last summer a new, federal tuition tax credit program was created as part of the “One Big Beautiful Bill.” The Washington Post‘s Laura Meckler reports that governors continue to make decisions about whether their states will participate in the federal program: “Twenty-eight governors have said they will opt in, including all but one Republican (who remains undecided)… Two Democratic governors have said their states will participate, and four have said they won’t, but most have ducked the question, as pressure rises from all sides.”

Meckler explains how the program works: “These tax credits, including the new federal version, incentivize taxpayers to donate money to scholarship granting organizations, or SGOs, which then give money to students. Starting in 2027, donations up to $1,700 to SGOs will qualify for a dollar-for-dollar tax credit. That means that as long as donors owe at least $1,700 in federal taxes, they will see their tax bill reduced by the amount of their donation. In essence, taxpayers are directing money they owe in taxes to these SGOs rather than to the government. The Joint Committee on Taxation estimated that the program will cost the federal government $25.9 billion over 10 years.”

I hope you will take the time to read Kayla Patrick and Loredana Valtierra’s excellent report for the Century Foundation, A Backdoor School Voucher Scheme That Sidesteps Civil Rights and Undermines Public Oversight, which demonstrates the damage already inflicted on our children and their public schools by school privatization schemes across the states as well as the further damage the federal tuition tax credit scheme will likely impose. They begin: “(I)n practice, vouchers operate quite differently than advertised. It’s the private schools not families, who ultimately decide who enrolls, and they do so outside the accountability systems that govern public education and public dollars and ensure every student has equal opportunity to learn.”

Here are three of Patrick and Valtierra’s key observations about what the new federal tuition tax credit vouchers will mean.

In the first place, the federal tax credit scheme is constructed to help wealthy families: “(T)he tax credit is not targeted to families facing affordability pressures. It allows households earning up to 300 percent of area median income to qualify, a threshold that would make roughly 90 percent of U.S. households eligible.” Qualification to receive the benefit of the tax credit is tied to each region’s median income. “In high-income regions, families earning as much as $500,000 per year could receive publicly subsidized support for private education… (T)his program directs public dollars toward a limited use—private education subsidies for households that largely do not need the financial help….”

Second, the federal tax credit program, like almost all state-operated school voucher schemes lacks government oversight: “There are no academic performance standards, no transparency obligations, and no requirement to evaluate outcomes… Once a state opts in, its role is largely administrative and unfunded. States receive no resources to carry out oversight, cannot impose safeguards, and must submit eligible organizations to the U.S Treasury without authority to shape the program design or accountability.” The program was created to be administrated by the Department of the Treasury: “As a result, a major national education policy will be implemented through the tax code, with limited attention to accountability, equity, or educational impact.”

Third, the One Big Beautiful Bill does not include civil rights protection for participating students: “Public schools that receive federal funding are required to comply with federal civil rights laws, including Title VI and Title IX of the Civil Rights Act, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act… These laws require schools to take corrective action to prevent and respond to discrimination, provide accommodations and services to students, investigate complaints, and offer families meaningful avenues for recourse… By contrast, the One Big Beautiful Bill does not require scholarship-granting organizations or the private schools and programs they fund to comply with these federal civil rights protections.”

In today’s MAGA era, there is also something new about the way vouchers are being promoted. In The Privateers, Josh Cowen explains: “Trump’s election… recentered… the notion of ‘parents’ rights’ around its original conception of the right to avoid integrating students from different family backgrounds in one public school community… (H)is presidency refueled culture wars around issues of race and gender.” (The Privateers, p. 100) “This then, is the education freedom agenda in its entirety: increasing overt conflict on issues of race, gender, and sexuality with the express intent of devaluing public schools as a civic institution and reorienting the notion of education from a public good to a private enterprise.” (The Privateers, p. 131)

While vouchers were once promoted as a marketplace innovation, the Trump administration and groups like Moms for Liberty and the Heritage Foundation now frame the issue based on appealing to parents’ cultural biases. The new frame promotes private school vouchers as the way states and the federal government can help parents protect their children from “the dangerous other.” Parents are told they can move their children to private schools to insulate them from exposure to “woke” public schools and “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” The President, the Heritage Foundation, the America First Policy Institute and their allies never mention what has historically been understood as the primary role of public schooling: bringing children from across our society together to learn from each other and prepare for democratic citizenship.

Although MAGA has been radically reframing the promotion of vouchers from the point of view of the bigotry implicit in today’s culture wars, the danger of privatizing schools at public expense has not changed at all. Here are two traditional critiques of vouchers. The first analyzes the damage of vouchers academically according to the evidence without any reference to MAGA’s culture war framing. The second critiques vouchers as they were originally sold by appealing to marketplace framing. The two critiques use more old-fashioned frames to reach precisely the same conclusions explained of the new report from the Century Foundation.

In 2023, the editors of a Teachers College Press analysis of school privatization, The School Voucher Illusion: Exposing the Pretense of Equty, concluded: “As currently structured, voucher policies in the United States are unlikely to help the students they claim to support. Instead, these policies have often served as a facade for the far less popular reality of funding relatively advantaged (and largely White) families, many of whom already attended—or would attend—private schools without subsidies. Although vouchers are presented as helping parents choose schools, often the arrangements permit the private schools to do the choosing… Advocacy that began with a focus on equity must not become a justification for increasing inequity. Today’s voucher policies have, by design, created growing financial commitments of taxpayer money to serve a constituency of the relatively advantaged that is redefining their subsidies as rights—often in jurisdictions where neighborhood public schools do not have the resources they need.” (The School Voucher Illusion: Exposing the Pretense of Equity, p. 290)

And back in 2007, political philosopher, Benjamin Barber critiqued the same injustices, but from the point of view of a different frame: the danger of elevating the values of marketplace individualism over the common good:

“Privatization is a kind of reverse social contract: it dissolves the bonds that tie us together into free communities and democratic republics. It puts us back in the state of nature where we possess a natural right to get whatever we can on our own, but at the same time lose any real ability to secure that to which we have a right. Private choices rest on individual power… personal skills… and personal luck. Public choices rest on civic rights and common responsibilities, and presume equal rights for all. Public liberty is what the power of common endeavor establishes, and hence presupposes that we have constituted ourselves as public citizens by opting into the social contract. With privatization, we are seduced back into the state of nature by the lure of private liberty and particular interest; but what we experience in the end is an environment in which the strong dominate the weak… the very dilemma which the original social contract was intended to address.” (Consumed, pp. 143-144)

elaine June 18, 2026

Source

Janresseger

Shanker Blog: What Changed My Mind About How to Teach Reading

elaine — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 16:58:33 +0000

Shanker Blog: What Changed My Mind About How to Teach Reading

This guest essay features Claude Goldenberg, Professor Emeritus of Education at Stanford University, who shares how his thinking about teaching reading changed through close work with colleagues who held very different views, and how that experience points to a broader lesson about how teachers learn, how assumptions shift, and how practice can improve. It is adapted from a recent podcast episode of Literacy Across Languages. Learn more in his Substack 'We Must End the Reading Wars... Now."

When I went to college, I thought I'd go to law school or something like that. Education was not in my sights. But I found out in college there was a program you could take to get a teaching credential. My roommate told me, you know, before we go to law school, it might be good to get a teaching credential. It won't mess up your schedule. You don't have to take bulletin boards 101 or anything, and it will give you something to do for a year or two before going to law school. I said, okay, that sounds okay. As it turned out, over the remaining years I got more interested in education and less in law.

By the time I graduated from college, my parents were living in San Antonio. And I thought, well, I could go back there and teach because in addition to being interested in education, I spoke Spanish. So I thought that was sort of an additional skill I could bring to the proceedings.

I considered different places, but I always wanted to work with kids who just, you know, don't have the opportunities that I grew up with, and how many of the people in my socio-demographics grew up.

I wanted to teach history, my major in college, but I was offered a job as an eighth grade reading teacher in probably the poorest school district in Texas. Back then I thought, well, the more impossible the assignment, the more I wanted it. The students I’d teach were kids who, in eighth grade, were reading so poorly that the principal said, you can’t have your elective—you’re going to take remedial reading. And he assigned me, a first-year teacher, wet behind the ears and with very little preparation. And I struggled. I mean, it was hard. I had a lot of “ganas,” you know, a lot of wanting to help. But I realized I just didn’t know that much. I really didn’t have very good teacher preparation. Not to disparage anyone or any program, but I just wasn’t prepared. And so I decided to go back to graduate school and try to learn something—to understand why these kids were arriving in seventh and eighth grade so far behind academically.

I got my doctorate at UCLA and became immersed in education. I was very interested in bilingual education—the education of what we now call English Learners. That interest launched me into reading and reading research for English learners. I decided that I wanted my own classroom. I really was not interested in being an academic, so I didn't seek out an assistant professorship. My only postdoc goal was to teach first grade. I wanted my own classroom, and I was fortunate enough that when I finished my PhD, there was an opening at the school where I did my dissertation research. A first-grade teacher was leaving in the middle of the year, and the superintendent asked, Do you want that? And I said yes—that’s what I want.

So, for the following three and a half years, I taught, struggled, and tried to figure out how to teach reading. I was not very well prepared to teach first-grade reading, even with my freshly minted PhD. This was in the mid-80s during the height of whole language, later balanced literacy, when literature-based reading instruction was the rage.

And I was caught up in it. I thought, Yeah, this is very progressive—you don’t want kids barking at print, and all those other clichés. So I went in feet first, head first. Long story short, it didn’t quite work out the way I had expected. Kids made very slow progress.

But then my PhD turned out to be good for getting a postdoctoral fellowship that allowed me to do research half time and teach half time. I had to share a classroom with another teacher. This teacher was all about what we now call foundational literacy skills—phonics, letters, sounds, combining them, “las sílabas,” as we say in Spanish, “joining the syllables” after students learn to make them, usually by combining a consonant and a vowel.

I thought we were going to kill each other, because we were coming at reading from diametrically opposed directions. But we decided to make it work by dividing up the week. She taught the first half; I taught the second. I remember thinking, Okay, she’ll teach her syllables—ma, me, mi, mo, mu—and I’ll come in at the end of the week and do the important stuff, right? The language, the comprehension.

Well, lo and behold, when I came in at the end of the week—after a few weeks, then a few months—I realized these kids were getting the reading thing. They knew the letters, they knew the sounds, they could “juntar las sílabas.” They could read in a way that, when I had been teaching alone, was tortuous. It just wasn’t working. And now they were reading—and then I could actually do comprehension work with them. We could talk about vocabulary. We could talk about metacognitive skills. And automaticity and fluency. Combined with what she was doing at the beginning of the week, it was an extremely powerful combination.

Someone later told me, You know, that was an instantiation of Scarborough’s Reading Rope. My partner was doing the word-recognition side—decoding and so on. I was doing the language comprehension side—vocabulary, meaning. And it really was like the Reading Rope—before I had ever even heard of it. Actually, before it was even devised and published.

Almost by accident, I fell into it. In fact, what my partner did mirrored how my own mother had taught me to read. I had gone into my first-grade teaching thinking I had a new, better theory of teaching reading—especially Spanish reading. I assumed, since written Spanish is so orthographically regular, kids would surely figure out the ma-me-mi-mo-mu thing if given the right contextual scaffolding. There was no need for me to drill and practice letters, sounds, etc.

But I learned from this teacher, and from two kindergarten teachers who were also colleagues and participated in a study I had conducted (see here or here), that my theory of reading was really upside down, or at least sideways.

I then started digging into the literature, looking into it in a more detailed way that I never had in graduate school. No one ever challenged me. On the contrary, I was supported in my assumptions about meaning from the beginning, whole language and so forth.

I’m glad I went to PhD school. I learned important skills. But it was really in trying to teach first grade for nearly four years that I got a real education about teaching reading, the role of decoding and foundational skills, about comprehension, and about how those things must come and work together. That education was foundational and helped lay the foundation for just about everything I’ve done professionally and academically since.

We talk a lot about research. We do professional development. We talk about brain science, we do all these things—which I fully support. But they very rarely fundamentally change assumptions when those assumptions require rethinking.

That’s something I’ve been thinking about lately: How do you create experiences that encourage people to examine their beliefs—how those beliefs play out in practice and whether they might unintentionally interfere with shared goals?

Everyone I know wants kids to do well in reading and beyond. There’s no disagreement there. But we hold such fundamentally different ways of thinking about reading instruction. The question is how to challenge those differences when the best evidence available suggests some positions are either not supported by the evidence or at best are incomplete, as mine was? The idea is not to make people dig in further, but to invite reflection on the evidence and the conclusions to be drawn.

I don’t have a very good answer. What changed my thinking wasn’t an article, workshop, professional development, or a research presentation. It was what I saw with my own eyes that was inconsistent with my beliefs, the result of a series of events culminating in an unlikely partnership that, if I’d had my choice, would never have happened—and the students I had in my last two years of trying to teach first-grade reading would have paid the price.

That experience has continued to shape how I think about change in education and raises a larger question: How do we create partnerships and collaborations among teachers that contribute to continuous improvement in instruction and student outcomes? There is so much disagreement within our profession about fundamentals such as teaching reading. At the same time, there is so much evidence that could help us do better but is not widely known or is actively disregarded.

One way to address this tension is by reflecting on how professionals learn, revise their thinking, and improve practice over time. Scholars of occupations have a useful concept someone recently mentioned to me, “collective autonomy,” to describe one of the defining hallmarks of mature professions. Professionals have agency and control over what they do and how, but that autonomy does not reside with individual practitioners; rather, it is exercised collectively through shared standards, a well-regarded professional knowledge base that guides practice, and peer accountability. Professionals retain judgement over their work, but this judgement is bounded and refined by professional peers and professional associations, rather than by external control (e.g., policy mandates, accountability systems).

In a mature profession, there is no such thing as being the master of your own domain, or as some have urged teachers, “Close your door and just teach.” Professional autonomy cannot be isolating or divorced from a shared knowledge base; it is exercised with and through colleagues –- especially more experienced peers and mentors – around that body of knowledge. Creating the conditions for this to happen is a, or maybe the, central challenge we face as educators today.

elaine June 17, 2026

Source

Shanker Blog

Cognitive Resonance: An Illustrated Guide to Resisting “AI Is Inevitable” in Education

elaine — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 12:42:49 +0000

Cognitive Resonance: An Illustrated Guide to Resisting “AI Is Inevitable” in Education

1. Ask the AI-in-education enthusiast to clarify their premise.

(Slide created by Jane Rosenzweig, Director of Harvard College Writing Center)

2. Ask the AI-in-education enthusiast if they are familiar with recent research indicating that generative AI leads to widespread “cognitive surrender.”

Shot:

“Conceptually distinct from cognitive offloading, which involves strategically outsourcing a discrete task to an external tool (e.g., using a calculator), cognitive surrender represents a deeper abdication of critical evaluation, where the user relinquishes cognitive control and adopts the AI’s judgment as their own….

Across our studies, we observe that when System 3 [i.e., AI] was available, people readily engaged it and frequently adopted its answers. This shift reflects a reallocation of cognitive control rather than mere effort saving. System 3’s fluent, confident outputs are treated as epistemically authoritative, lowering the threshold for scrutiny and attenuating the metacognitive signals that would ordinarily route a response to deliberation. In the case of cognitive surrender, there is a shift in the locus of control, with an external system (System 3) occupying the default position.”

(Paper here https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6097646, with my emphasis)

Chaser:

(Paper https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.01106, BlueSky thread here)

3. If you feel the need to pile on with research, consider citing to this recent report from Stanford showing the complete lack of empirical research to support the use of AI in education.

“Research on how AI impacts K-12 students and educators is still extremely limited.

“As of October 2025 the AI Hub for Education Research Repository contained over 800 academic papers relevant to AI in K-12 education. Our review found that only a small subset (20 papers) produce strong causal evidence. Causal evidence provides the strongest basis for estimating how a tool impacts students and educators. The current causal research is still very limited: we did not identify any high-quality causal studies in K-12 settings in the U.S. for students and very few for teachers.

Students

Immediate gains with access: AI tools significantly improve student performance on math practice, programming projects, and writing tasks while students have active access to the technology.
Short-term boost, uncertain transfer: AI improves performance with access but when assessed independently without AI support, effects are mixed.
Easier doesn’t mean better: AI tools can alleviate students’ cognitive burden and foster positive experiences in learning, but can be at the expense of deeper thinking.
Pedagogical design matters: Tools designed with pedagogical guardrails (such as AI chatbots for tutoring that provide step-by-step reasoning instead of direct answers) show more promise than general purpose AI tools.

(source, my emphasis added re lack of causal evidence)

4. Ask the AI-in-education enthusiast if they are familiar with any of the recent efforts led by students pushing back hard on the intrusion of AI into their education.

a. In Pennsylvania

“Through its countless new programs and AI-centered events, Penn has positioned AI as an inescapable future that we all must accept in order to achieve success. There is no doubt that AI is part of the current occupational landscape, and we will certainly encounter it long after we graduate. Nevertheless, we attend this institution to develop hard skills, question the world around us, solve problems, produce new ideas, and the ability to think for ourselves. With the University forcing AI into our learning every chance it gets, do we end up gaining knowledge or cheat codes?

“The irony is that as Penn pours endless money and energy into AI advancement in its attempt to get ahead, the University is only quickening its own demise. AI cannot coexist with education — it can only degrade it. As technology advances and workers are replaced by machines, schools are some of the only places we have left to explore and wrestle with human thought. With our own university leading the charge, AI is now corrupting those few sacred spaces and leaving us with nowhere to engage in true scholarship.”

(Source, with my emphasis added)

b. In Colorado

“In an online survey conducted by Flynn Zook, a CU Denver student, nearly 300 respondents weighed in on the agreement. Fewer than 10 expressed clear support, while a small number said they were undecided. Many respondents raised concerns about environmental impact, intellectual property and the potential use of tuition dollars to fund the initiative.” (Story link)

c. In Ohio

(Source)

5. Politely point out that Sal Khan, perhaps the most prominent advocate for the capacity of AI to “revolutionize“ education, has recently changed his tune.

“‘For a lot of students, it was a non-event,’ Khan told me recently about his eponymous chatbot, Khanmigo. ‘They just didn’t use it much.’”

“Kristen Musall, a geometry teacher at Hobart High, gave Khanmigo a try when it first rolled out. Musall appreciated its encouraging, teacher-like tone, but she found that students didn’t really care for the bot….Musall no longer uses Khanmigo in her class. She says there’s been more enthusiasm for the product among administrators than teachers in her school.

“Kristen DiCerbo, the organization’s chief learning officer, said AI can only respond to students based on what they ask. And it turns out, she said, ‘Students aren’t great at asking questions well.’”

(From Chalkbeat’s Matt Barnum)

6. Direct the AI-in-education enthusiast to the PureGenius website to see if they get the joke.

(source; feel the future)

7. Ask the AI-in-education enthusiast if they are familiar with the broader pushback against the intrusion of education technology into schools led by educators and parents.

“McPherson Middle School, about an hour’s drive from Wichita, is at the forefront of a new tech backlash spreading in education: Chromebook remorse.

“Schools in North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland and Michigan that once bought devices for each student are now re-evaluating heavy classroom technology use.

“Now children’s groups and educators concerned about screen time are turning their attention to school-issued laptops and learning apps. Parents are flocking to support efforts, like Schools Beyond Screens and the Distraction-Free Schools Policy Project, to vet and limit school tech.

“Sarah Garcia, also 13, said spending less time online had prompted students to talk more. ‘Since we don’t have our Chromebooks in front of our face,” she said, “most people now interact with their, like, peers and stuff.’”

(source)

8. Gently remind the AI-in-education enthusiast that we have evidence in our own lifetime that highly addictive products marketed to children that cause serious harm are something we can address through policy and norms.

(source)

9. If the AI-in-education enthusiast has the audacity to cite f***ing AlphaSchool as counterexample and “proof of what’s possible,” liberally reference any or all the myriad reasons this is one of the most embarrassing possible arguments they could make.

“Former Alpha School employees told me that the company’s increasing reliance on generative AI in every aspect of its operation, as well as the constant monitoring and tracking of every student’s mouse movements, is making students anxious and does not always provide the quality of education Alpha School advertises to parents.

““All educational content is obsolete. Every textbook, every lesson plan, every test, all of it is obsolete because gen AI is going to be able to deliver a personalized lesson just for you,’ Joe Liemandt, Alpha School’s ‘principal’ and the founder of Trilogy, the company that owns many of the apps used by Alpha School, said in a podcast interview published last year.

“When a student requires help with additional questions, the chatbot fails to identify which specific question is being addressed,’ an internal Alpha School document outlining issues with AlphaRead says. ‘Accuracy of the content provided by the [AI] tutor is a concern. There are instances where it not only delivers incorrect answers but also provides convincing yet flawed justifications. Despite raising multiple queries about a particular answer, the chatbot erroneously confirmed an incorrect option as correct.”

(source)

From teacher Michael Pershan:

“Alpha is not trying to provide the best, most ambitious math or ELA education possible according to conventional understandings of that term. If they were, they’d keep studying ELA/math in the afternoon. Instead, their goal is to minimize the time spent on core academics while maximizing skills.

“This is unusual! This is not what most schools are trying to do!

“What’s most novel about Alpha School and Math Academy is their fundamental orientation towards K-12 schooling. The goal, quite expressly, is to minimize it and move on. Move on to what?”

(source)

From teacher Dylan Kane:

[Dylan explains how AlphaSchool measures its “success” by demonstrating how much faster students improve on the NWEA MAP, a mediocre-to-shitty assessment of student learning, compared to national average of students. In 2024-2025, using mediocre-to-shitty ed-tech product iXL, AlphaSchool students outgained the national average by 2.6x. Dylan reports on how students are doing this year using AI: on math, 2.5x, and on reading 2.8x]

“Again, let’s take these numbers at face value for a minute. Last year, the program was mostly iXL + a culture laser-focused on motivating students. There was little to no generative AI involved. This year, Alpha School has overhauled their academics, released their own platform, and incorporated generative AI throughout. They are finally doing what they say they are doing: AI-driven schooling. And the results are…more or less the same?

“This is completely fascinating to me. 100 million dollars, tons of hype on the internet, grand claims about the future of education. And the results haven’t budged from bribing kids to try hard on iXL?”

(source)

10. If all else fails, try appealing to the poetry of human existence. But don’t hold your breath.

(Source)

Our days are indeed precious on this earth. Today, the The New York Times published a long story about what happened to my father due to his reliance on AI for medical guidance. I am very grateful to reporter Teddy Rosenbluth for sharing his story with the world, and to all of you for your enduring support.

elaine June 16, 2026

Source

Cognitive Resonance

LSE Blogs: What We Get Wrong About Children and Social Media

elaine — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 16:57:40 +0000

LSE Blogs: What We Get Wrong About Children and Social Media

The case against children’s access to social media isn’t just about online harms, argues Goldsmith’s Dr Veli Hillman, but about the steady narrowing of what childhood is allowed to become.

Modern societies routinely restrict children’s access to activities where power, incentives and risks are radically unequal. Laws prevent them from driving, drinking alcohol, accessing pornography or competing in regulated sports below certain ages.

These restrictions are not about silencing children’s voices or denying their rights, but recognising that where consent cannot be meaningful, protection should take precedence. This is not because children lack agency, but because agency is never exercised in a vacuum. It is shaped by environments, incentives and constraints—and some environments are designed precisely to overwhelm it.

This matters because opposition to recent proposals to ban children’s access to social media largely frames the issue as one of insufficient evidence of harm or infringement of children’s digital rights—to expression, participation and opportunity online. But this framing rests on a conceptual mistake. It treats social media platforms as neutral spaces in which children exercise rights, rather than as commercial systems designed to extract value from their attention, data and behaviour.

The predictable pushback is that children have ‘evolving capacities’ and agency. That may be true but beside the point. Agency is always exercised within environments that shape what becomes possible, desirable and imaginable. The mistake is to assume that the digital realm represents the full horizon of children’s possible futures. It doesn’t. What’s worse, when adults present the future as inevitably digital, participation comes to feel less like a choice than a necessity, while its absence—as a disadvantage.

Where participation is no longer a choice

A system that presents itself as unavoidable is already exercising power. Consider how participation now works in practice. School notices, homework and teacher-parent communication increasingly flow through platforms such as Google, Microsoft, or PowerSchool. Friendship groups, invitations and social coordination default to social media. Opting out means missing information, being absent from social life, or becoming administratively invisible. At that point, participation is no longer about choice—it becomes a condition.

This is what power looks like working in plain sight—in essence, it’s the lack of alternatives. The task of protection, then, is not to decide when children are ready to consent to data extraction, surveillance and algorithmic manipulation, but to ensure that their sense of what kinds of futures are possible is not prematurely narrowed by it. Put more simply, childhood should be organised around a plurality of activities and spaces, not concentrated within a handful of platforms designed to track, optimise and monetise children’s time and attention.

The narrowing of history

Much of the argument in favour of children’s participation in social media rests on an outdated picture of the internet. Social media spaces is not a continuation of the early internet of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Platform capture has fundamentally altered the terrain. What was once built around open, decentralised protocols has been replaced by enclosed systems whose organising logic is monetisation. Today, platforms control visibility, influence behaviour, and bind users to opaque and unequal terms. Children are subjected to contracts they cannot meaningfully understand, algorithmic ranking they cannot see, and data practices they cannot refuse.

To argue that children must be present on these platforms to participate in society is therefore to ignore these transformations of the internet, which in turn normalises something deeply troubling: the idea that children’s experiences, relationships and identities should be routinely monetised. Platforms don’t create friendships, creativity or social belonging. These already exist in schools, neighbourhoods, families, and clubs. What platforms do is capture, quantify and monetise them, yet adults increasingly accept this as fundamental.

When children say they will ‘miss out’ by not being on social media, that’s not an expression of freedom or the right to something but evidence of narrowing of options so completely that alternatives barely register. Then the sense that there is ‘nothing else to do’ can only reveal how thoroughly the environment of childhood has been impoverished.

The politics of digital inclusion

In spite of energetic advocacy for children’s digital rights and online agency, why has there been so little comparable mobilisation to reclaim physical space, time, and autonomy for children? Across advanced economies, policy attention, funding, and institutional effort increasingly converge on bringing more people online. In the United States, for example, federal programs and large-scale public-private initiatives channel substantial resources into digital inclusion, digital infrastructure and AI-oriented learning, treating digital participation as the primary pathway to social and economic opportunity.

This reflects a deeper asymmetry in how different futures are supported. Physical environments for children require long-term public investment and yield benefits that are not easily monetised. By contrast, digital-first childhoods align closely with existing market incentives. They scale easily, produce measurable outputs, and attract public and private investment. Over time, this alignment normalises the assumption that children’s futures are digital by default. In this sense, the emphasis on digital inclusion and online safety doesn’t challenge the prevailing order; it quietly reinforces it.

Once inevitability is accepted, the debate narrows from whether children should be drawn into platform environments to how early, how safely and how efficiently this should be done. Children, in turn, absorb the message adults send them—that the future is digital and opportunities are there, so that they should learn to adapt to it.

Anyone who has tried to pull a child away from these platforms understands how difficult disengagement has become. This has nothing to do with failure of discipline or parenting. Social media systems are engineered to maximise engagement and dependency because that is how they make profit.

The foreclosing of alternative futures

Here, an analogy with a confidence trick feels apt. As Mazzucato and Collington have argued, much of what is celebrated as innovation today involves value extraction, presented as value creation.

Social media platforms epitomise this logic, claiming credit for social goods they didn’t produce while positioning themselves as indispensable intermediaries—a dynamic long analysed by Shoshana Zuboff. Some scholars have argued that concerns about new technologies frequently fall into a cycle of technology panics, but these fail to engage with the deeper political and economic forces that shape digital platforms. It is precisely this structural logic that tends to disappear when debates about children and social media are reframed as cycles of moral panic.

To be precise, much of the research cited in defence of children’s social media use doesn’t position platforms as harmless, but argues that correlations between social media use and self-reported wellbeing are small or inconsistent. This is useful for puncturing any possible exaggerated claims about harm, but it also narrows the debate in a revealing way. When the central question becomes whether social media measurably damages mental health, everything else disappears from view: the business model, the extraction of value, the reshaping of childhoods, and the assumption that digital participation itself is inevitable.

Once these premises are accepted, the debate can only ever concern harm reduction and online optimisation. What’s camouflaged is the more fundamental question: should platform-based systems be organising childhoods at all?

Seen in this light, protecting children from social media is a recognition of power rather than a retreat from rights. It recognizes that the digital realm has been allowed to close in on childhood itself, thus narrowing the sense of what counts as opportunity, progress and a viable future.

Childhood doesn’t need to be platform-mediated to be rich, social, or full of possibilities. Treating the digital as inevitable can only impoverish the imagination of what children can be and do. The most serious harm is not exclusion from platforms, but the shrinking of what childhood is allowed to become.

This post gives the views of the author and not the position of the Media@LSE blog, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

elaine June 15, 2026

Source

The London School of Economics and Political Science

Nancy Bailey's Education Website: Robert Sweet’s Early Influence on the Science of Reading

elaine — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 18:13:09 +0000

Nancy Bailey's Education Website: Robert Sweet’s Early Influence on the Science of Reading

Today’s Science of Reading (SOR) was born of a right-wing conservative phonics focus. A Nation at Risk helped advance that messaging, and one of the messengers was Robert Sweet, Jr.

As the country mandates the Science of Reading (SOR) and invests heavily in unproven programs, marketing disputes flourish over which best align with so-called evidence. These programs control teachers’ instruction through one-size-fits-all directives, delivered with manuals or online. It’s easy to see where this is going. States could spend millions more on reading programs that don’t appear to improve learning as teachers are driven out with tech.

During the Reagan administration, A Nation at Risk raised unfounded negativity towards public schools and teachers (See Biddle and Berliner, The Manufactured Crisis). Reading, already controversial, became a vehicle for attacking teachers, their teacher colleges, and public schools, furthering a school privatization agenda that continues to this day. Schools weren’t doing badly, but those who wanted to privatize them worked to make them fail.

The obituary of Robert Sweet, Jr. is glowing. I don’t doubt that, like many SOR enthusiasts, he believed he was doing the right thing. He became instrumental in the phonics movement, working later with the Science of Reading and Reading First promoter Reid Lyon to create No Child Left Behind and Reading First. Yet he’s rarely mentioned today.

Sweet wasn’t a qualified reading teacher. He taught physics, coached, and sold textbooks. He arrived in DC as a member of the US House of Representatives staff during the Reagan administration. He supported Reagan initiatives such as tuition tax credits, low-income voucher programs, student self-help reforms, education savings accounts, and other conservative school initiatives.

He met Dr. Onalee McGraw, a PhD political scientist and a Heritage Foundation representative. McGraw, unrelated to the publishing company, was a Reagan appointee to the National Council on Educational Research (See Robert Sweet interview 4.17 below).

The Heritage Foundation is behind today’s Project 2025. Lindsey Burke, who wrote the education part, works with Education Secretary Linda McMahon. Neither are educators.

McGraw wrote “Family Choice in Education: The New Imperative,” arguing that public schools were in decline, academics had been replaced by social engineering, and humanistic curricula and subjective values had taken over. She believed education was inherently religious, not value-free. She promoted vouchers, minimum competency requirements, and moral education classes.

Sweet initially didn’t see reading as a problem. He and his children learned to read. But McGraw introduced him to Michael Brunner, who convinced Sweet otherwise.

Brunner wasn’t a reading teacher either. He had a degree in library science becoming the director of Title I in Idaho. He connected with the Reading Reform Foundation, created after Rudolph Flesch’s Why Johnny Can’t Read. Brunner wrote Vowelectomy. He believed in the work of well-known reading expert Jeanne Chall, but didn’t think vowel and mixed digraph instruction took place early enough, waiting until the end of first grade.

Both Sweet and Brunner repeatedly claim that students aren’t learning to read and teachers and especially their colleges are failing to teach phonics.

But Berliner and Biddle in The Manufactured Crisis pointed to media claims as being distorted and hostile, describing reporters failing to address cited study details, indicating that research really showed that poverty was the leading cause of reading difficulties (see p. 10-11).

Sweet became the director of the National Institute of Education and later the US Department of Education, bringing Brunner to DC to work on reading. They commissioned a report, Becoming a Nation of Readers. It’s informative, covering phonics importance, but also comprehension, meaning, and environmental influences. Sweet complained it was unfocused (8.45 video below).

He commissioned another report by Marilyn Jaeger Adams Beginning to Read: Thinking and learning about Print. The book, still popular today, stresses the importance of phonics and whole language. I could not find what Sweet thought about Jaeger’s book.

Both Bruner and Sweet favored Spaulding, a reading program spun from Orton-Gillingham (OG). Sweet criticizes Reading Recovery, praising Spaulding at the end of this interview. OG remains popular in the Science of Reading, despite common knowledge that it has lacked high-quality, peer-reviewed studies of its efficacy for 50 years!

Bruner and Sweet traveled the country observing teachers, without being reading experts. They blamed colleges for failing teachers on how to teach phonics. While teacher colleges can always improve, generalizing the same criticism towards all is dangerous. I knew of excellent teacher college programs at that time. Brunner created his own reading program, Phonics Made Plain.

He authored numerous articles on reading, including a Republican policy paper “Illiteracy: An Incurable Disease or Educational Malpractice?” Sweet’s paper was supported by the U.S. Department of Education and the Center for the Study of Reading at the University of Illinois. It called for the restoration of the instructional practice of intensive, systematic phonics in every primary school in America.

Next, under President H.W. Bush, Sweet became administrator for the Juvenile Justice Department. Brunner writes Retarding America: The Imprisonment of Potential highlighting that juvenile crime is due to current reading methods (i.e. little phonics), while ignoring other variables. A good thing is that they establish reading programs in some detention facilities.

Brunner criticizes the All Handicapped Children’s Act (PL 94-142) throughout the book listed above implying children simply lack phonics instruction.

Sweet learns of the National Institute of Health and Human Development and met Reid Lyon. He seemed then to form the idea that reading must be based on scientific principal and one assumes he’s talking about phonics (11.58 video below).

In 1993, Sweet became co-founder and president of the now defunct National Right to Read Foundation which focuses again on phonics (12:41 video below). He still implied that teachers didn’t know about phonics.

But, public schools were working to accommodate children with reading difficulties in schools using phonics in resource classes especially after the 1975 passage of PL94-142. And phonics may have been taught later.

Sweet eventually helps pass the Reading Excellence Act in 1998 under President Clinton, although he doesn’t care for Clinton’s America Reads program where college students read to students (14.18 video below).

Under President G.W. Bush he collaborates with Reid Lyon, an advisor to the president, crafts language for the No Child Left Behind Act. Sweet becomes the primary author of the Reading First initiative which saw “scientifically based research” noted more than 100 times. Reading First turned out controversial.

Lyon immensely disliked educational schools, stating in 2002, a year after 9/11, You know, if there was any piece of legislation that I could pass, it could be to blow up colleges of education. He supports today’s Science of Reading initiative.

Around this time Reid, according to the NYTs, advised his former boss, Dr. Duane Alexander, about candidates for the National Reading Panel (Schemo, 2007). No early childhood teachers who teach reading were included on the panel. It’s controversial findings are still promoted by SOR enthusiasts, including some whom were on the panel. [I mention the lack of early childhood teachers but one teacher/principal was selected for the panel. Joanne Yatvin wrote many reports about her concerns about the panel itself. Minority View]

Robert Sweet and those described here were given much clout over teachers and how they teach. Yet after all these years, focusing heavily on phonics, and adding billions in technology often for SOR online programs, teachers, and their teacher colleges are still blamed as failing.

References

Berliner, D. C., & Biddle, B. J. (1995). The manufactured crisis : myths, fraud, and the attack on America’s public schools. Addison-Wesley.

Gursky, D. (1981, August 1). After The Reign Of Dick And Jane. Education Week, Retrieved from https://www.edweek.org/education/after-the-reign-of-dick-and-jane/1991/…

Schemo, D. J. (2007, March 9). In War Over Teaching Reading, a U.S.-Local Clash. The New York Times, Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/09/education/09reading.html

This post is adapted from my panel presentation at the 2025 Network for Public Education meeting.

See video here.

elaine June 12, 2026

Source

Nancy Bailey's Education Website

Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice: As Schools Embrace A.I. Tools, Skeptics Raise Concerns (Natasha Singer) (Guest Post by Natasha Singer)

elaine — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 16:20:11 +0000

Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice: As Schools Embrace A.I. Tools, Skeptics Raise Concerns (Natasha Singer) (Guest Post by Natasha Singer)

A New York Times journalist, Natasha Singer covers technology access and use. This article appeared January 2, 2026.

In early November, Microsoft said it would supply artificial intelligence tools and training to more than 200,000 students and educators in the United Arab Emirates.

Days later, a financial services company in Kazakhstan announced an agreement with OpenAI to provide ChatGPT Edu, a service for schools and universities, for 165,000 educators in Kazakhstan.

Last month, xAI, Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company, announced an even bigger project with El Salvador: developing an A.I. tutoring system, using the company’s Grok chatbot, for more than a million students in thousands of schools there.

Fueled partly by American tech companies, governments around the globe are racing to deploy generative A.I. systems and training in schools and universities.

Some U.S. tech leaders say A.I. chatbots — which can generate humanlike emails, create class quizzes, analyze data and produce computer code — can be a boon for learning. The tools, they argue, can save teachers time, customize student learning and help prepare young people for an “A.I.-driven” economy.

But the rapid spread of the new A.I. products could also pose risks to young people’s development and well-being, some children’s and health groups warn.

A recent study from Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon University found that popular A.I. chatbots may diminish critical thinking. A.I. bots can produce authoritative-sounding errors and misinformation, and some teachers are grappling with widespread A.I.-assisted student cheating.

Silicon Valley for years has pushed tech tools like laptops and learning apps into classrooms, with promises of improving education access and revolutionizing learning.

Still, a global effort to expand school computer access — a program known as “One Laptop per Child” — did not improve students’ cognitive skills or academic outcomes, according to studies by professors and economists of hundreds of schools in Peru. Now, as some tech boosters make similar education access and fairness arguments for A.I., children’s agencies like UNICEF are urging caution and calling for more guidance for schools.

“With One Laptop per Child, the fallouts included wasted expenditure and poor learning outcomes,” Steven Vosloo, a digital policy specialist at UNICEF, wrote in a recent post. “Unguided use of A.I. systems may actively de-skill students and teachers.”

Education systems across the globe are increasingly working with tech companies on A.I. tools and training programs.

In the United States, where states and school districts typically decide what to teach, some prominent school systems recently introduced popular chatbots for teaching and learning. In Florida alone, Miami-Dade County Public Schools, the nation’s third-largest school system, rolled out Google’s Gemini chatbot for more than 100,000 high school students. And Broward County Public Schools, the nation’s sixth-biggest school district, introduced Microsoft’s Copilot chatbot for thousands of teachers and staff members.

Outside the United States, Microsoft in June announced a partnership with the Ministry of Education in Thailand to provide free online A.I. skills lessons for hundreds of thousands of students. Several months later, Microsoft said it would also provide A.I. training for 150,000 teachers in Thailand. OpenAI has pledged to make ChatGPT available to teachers in government schools across India.

The Baltic nation of Estonia is trying a different approach, with a broad new national A.I. education initiative called “A.I. Leap.”

The program was prompted partly by a recent poll showing that more than 90 percent of the nation’s high schoolers were already using popular chatbots like ChatGPT for schoolwork, leading to worries that some students were beginning to delegate school assignments to A.I.

Estonia then pressed U.S. tech giants to adapt their A.I. to local educational needs and priorities. Researchers at the University of Tartu worked with OpenAI to modify the company’s Estonian-language service for schools so it would respond to students’ queries with questions rather than produce direct answers.

Introduced this school year, the “A.I. Leap” program aims to teach educators and students about the uses, limits, biases and risks of A.I. tools. In its pilot phase, teachers in Estonia received training on OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini chatbots.

“It’s critical A.I. literacy,” said Ivo Visak, the chief executive of the A.I. Leap Foundation, an Estonian nonprofit that is helping to manage the national education program. “It’s having a very clear understanding that these tools can be useful — but at the same time these tools can do a lot of harm.”

Estonia also recently held a national training day for students in some high schools. Some of those students are now using the bots for tasks like generating questions to help them prepare for school tests, Mr. Visak said.

“If these companies would put their effort not only in pushing A.I. products, but also doing the products together with the educational systems of the world, then some of these products could be really useful,” Mr. Visak added.

This school year, Iceland started its own national A.I. pilot in schools. Now several hundred teachers across the country are experimenting with Google’s Gemini chatbot or Anthropic’s Claude for tasks like lesson planning, as they aim to find helpful uses and to pinpoint drawbacks.

Researchers at the University of Iceland will then study how educators used the chatbots.

Students won’t use the chatbots for now, partly out of concern that relying on classroom bots could diminish important elements of teaching and learning.

“If you are using less of your brain power or critical thinking — or whatever makes us more human — it is definitely not what we want,” said Thordis Sigurdardottir, the director of Iceland’s Directorate of Education and School Services.

Tinna Arnardottir and Frida Gylfadottir, two teachers participating in the pilot at a high school outside Reykjavik, say the A.I. tools have helped them create engaging lessons more quickly.

Ms. Arnardottir, a business and entrepreneurship teacher, recently used Claude to make a career exploration game to help her students figure out whether they were more suited to jobs in sales, marketing or management. Ms. Gylfadottir, who teaches English, said she had uploaded some vocabulary lists and then used the chatbot to help create exercises for her students.

“I have fill-in-the-blank word games, matching word games and speed challenge games,” Ms. Gylfadottir said. “So before they take the exam, I feel like they’re better prepared.”

Ms. Gylfadottir added that she was concerned about chatbots producing misinformation, so she vetted the A.I.-created games and lessons for accuracy before asking her students to try them. Ms. Gylfadottir and Ms. Arnardottir said they also worried that some students might already be growing dependent on — or overly trusting of — A.I. tools outside school.

That has made the Icelandic teachers all the more determined, they said, to help students learn to critically assess and use chatbots.

“They are trusting A.I. blindly,” Ms. Arnardottir said. “They are maybe losing motivation to do the hard work of learning, but we have to teach them how to learn with A.I.”

Teachers currently have few rigorous studies to guide generative A.I. use in schools. Researchers are just beginning to follow the long-term effects of A.I. chatbots on teenagers and schoolchildren.

“Lots of institutions are trying A.I.,” said Drew Bent, the education lead at Anthropic. “We’re at a point now where we need to make sure that these things are backed by outcomes and figure out what’s working and what’s not working.”

elaine June 11, 2026

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Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

The Education Wars: The Big Tech Backlash

elaine — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 17:48:00 +0000

The Education Wars: The Big Tech Backlash

Thoughts on what's driving a potent grassroots revolt

Reader: one of the few developments that gives me genuine hope these days is the fast-moving backlash against all things edtech. Uniting the oddest of bedfellows across partisan lines, and tapping into a broader frustration with what’s been called the “enshittification” of, well, everything, this emerging movement feels as potent as it does unpredictable. Let’s take a look, shall we?

The backlash is here—and it’s potent

First, let’s set the stage. “The Ed-Tech Backlash is Here,” as a recent EdWeek story put it. For a glimpse of what it looks like, let’s start in New York City where, just this week, parent opposition stymied the opening of what would have been the first AI-themed high school in a district that has been notably “bullish on the future of artificial intelligence in education and its potential benefits.” As for the parents? Not so much. As public education advocate extraordinaire Leonie Haimson observed: “The intense outrage among parents in New York City is as great as I’ve seen it on any education issue that I’ve been working on for 25 years.” And NYC isn’t the only place where parents are forcing tech rollbacks. As tech writer Natasha Singer reports, Team Backlash is notching impressive wins, including in LA, the first district to restrict student access to YouTube, eliminate digital devices entirely through first grade, and limit screen time for older kids.

Odd bedfellows

Quick! Which cause now unites Hugh Grant, Texas Senator Ted Cruz and Oprah Winfrey? If you answered “getting screens out of schools,” you’d be correct. But the unusual allies I’m more interested in aren’t media moguls, right-wing showboats or rom-com heartthrobs (Will Thacker!!) What’s so interesting about this fast-moving movement is that “pressure is coming from every direction,” as the Boston Globe’s Christopher Huffaker reported this week about Massachusetts.

[P]arents in Scituate, the teachers union in Melrose, cost-conscious administrators in Arlington. The Melrose teachers union, for example, is calling for device restrictions as part of contract negotiations that make paper the default option for testing and reading assignments. In Winchester, one School Committee member is calling for a recently formed technology committee to consider banning personal laptops in certain grades. And Northampton elementary school parents are worried about the use of YouTube videos in place of teacher-led story time.

This is about more than just screens

First, let’s pause here momentarily to acknowledge that “parents are worried about the use of YouTube videos in place of teacher-led story time” may be the most depressing education-related sentence you’ll read today… Now back to the main event. As is so often the case when we’re fighting over school in this country, there’s something larger at stake here. As my podcast co-host, education historian Jack Schneider observed in our recent episode about Silicon Valley’s vision for schools, people are also objecting to the way in which edtech turns schools into ‘black boxes’—privatized and proprietary.

When the size of that black box is getting bigger and bigger inside our schools, it suggests to us that that a larger and larger share of this thing that is technically ours is not ours any longer to inspect or understand or adapt or control. And I think that people are sensitive to the fact that when you look all around our society, what used to be ours is increasingly theirs.

This is also about standardized testing

Of course, the erosion of community influence over schools didn’t arrive with Chromebooks, which is exactly Jack’s point. Think about, say, the Common Core, which united similarly strange bedfellows against the Obama Administration’s attempt to redefine school through federal standards and tests. Which brings us to a lesser discussed aspect of the backlash vs. edtech: the near universal loathing of standardized tests. As the Globe concedes, “[f]or certain purposes, schools have few alternatives to screens. Most standardized tests, including the state’s MCAS exams beginning in Grade 3, are taken on computers.” Add in the test prep and the practice tests and for an awful lot of students, tests-on-screens are school. Indeed, much of the enthusiasm of education reformers for edtech was that it enabled students to be tested constantly. And while the ‘discourse’ among pundits, policy makers and hot takers is all about returning to the glory days of high-stakes testing, in the real world, politicians spar over who hates the tests more.

Billionaires and budget crunches

The grassroots revolt against tech in schools arrives at a particularly vulnerable time for public education. Voucher programs, including the new federal program, are on the march. Enrollment is dropping, thanks to a demographic cliff. And rising costs are putting a squeeze on school district budgets. With layoffs and school closures happening just about everywhere, expensive edtech programs and the companies and tech moguls who profit from them make an increasingly juicy target. “We’re seeing this decrease in school funding, statewide, and we’re seeing districts making cuts to staff,” Leslie Means, head of the teachers union in Melrose, Mass. told the Globe. “We’re continuing to see the ed-tech industrial complex get rich.” Not that long ago, Means would have come across as just another left-wing union leader who hates capitalism. No longer. Antipathy towards tech ceos is on the rise, and so is the appetite for taxing tech billionaires and their companies. This, by the way, is a big part of what gives the edtech backlash its potency. When teachers and parents say ‘enough,’ they’re not just reacting to excessive screen time or the arrival of Khanmigo, but to big tech domination more generally.

Don’t forget the data centers

I certainly haven’t, and neither should you, because the backlash to these electricity and water sucking literal black boxes is another grassroots revolt that is bringing together unlikely allies and upending politics. The question is will the opposition to data centers and the movement against edtech begin to overlap? My bold prediction is ‘absolutely,’ based on the fact that we already see signs of a convergence. In Virginia this week, public education advocates released a big report documenting the financial toll that tax credits for data centers have had on the state’s public schools. (Spoiler: the giveaway to data centers cost the state more than $1 billion, of which nearly $300 million would have gone to schools.) And in Texas, which will soon surpass Virginia as the largest data center market in the world, water rates are skyrocketing, even as water supplies dip dangerously low. Rising anger regarding what the Texas Observer describes as the “grim costs” of the data center boom feeds into already simmering public resentment over the willingness of GOP officials to sell off the state’s goods—including its schools—to the highest, most connected bidder.

A walled garden for me, grimy screens for thee

Atop my reading pile is the new book by Ben Tarnoff and Quinn Slobodian, Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed. The authors argue that Muskism represents a new form of capitalism in which the techno-elite occupy a sort of walled garden, while the rest of us scrum for scraps. As always, I’m interested in the implications for education. Musk himself attempted (and has so far failed) to launch a STEM school. But the best example of the walled-garden vision for schools may be the illegal school compound operated by Musk’s fellow tech titan and education disruptor Mark Zuckerberg.

Mark Zuckerberg has been denounced after a school he and his wife established for children from low-income families in East Palo Alto announced in April that it will be shutting down, leaving students and their parents confused and angry. But it turns out that a mile away, behind a high wall of hedges, the billionaire and his wife, Priscilla Chan, were running a private school out of a house at their Palo Alto compound for two of their daughters and a dozen other children. And they were doing it in violation of city code.

The anti-tech movement now sweeping schools is also a movement against Muskism, with its vision of “fortress futurism” in which the welfare state is stripped for parts and technology is employed to entrench social hierarchy. At least some of the activists who want to free kids from the tyranny of screens understand that public education stands in stark contrast to the walled garden—a hedge-rowed enclave for me, a grimy screen for thee… A new reason to fear and loathe Musk, his Silicon Valley fellows, and their Trumpian allies arrives seemingly everyday. The fast-moving backlash to edtech serves as a hopeful reminder that they haven’t won yet.

elaine June 10, 2026

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The Education Wars