NEPC - Blog Post of the Day

Janresseger: Trump’s Education Department Axes Grants for Full-Service Community Schools

elaine — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 16:21:46 +0000

Janresseger: Trump’s Education Department Axes Grants for Full-Service Community Schools

The late, great David Berliner was the Regents’ professor emeritus in the psychology of education at Arizona State University, a former president of the American Educational Research Association, and the former dean of the College of Education at Arizona State. In the first chapter of The Manufactured Crisis, a book he co-authored 30 years ago with another academic expert on education, Bruce Biddle, he derided what he saw as the misdirection of education reform ideas developed as a response to the 1983 A Nation at Risk report: “One of the worst effects of the Manufactured Crisis has been to divert attention away from the real problems faced by American education—problems that are serious and that are escalating in today’s world… (A)lthough many Americans do not realize it, family incomes and financial support for schools are much more poorly distributed in our country than in other industrialized nations. This means that in the United States, very privileged students attend some of the world’s best private and public schools, but it also means that large numbers of students who are truly disadvantaged attend public schools whose support is far below that permitted in other Western democracies.” (The Manufactured Crisis, pp. 4-5)

Then, in a 2017 analysis, Berliner listed some of the factors that underlie the test score achievement gap that No Child Left Behind was supposed to have addressed: “It’s neither this nation’s teachers nor its curriculum that impede the achievement of our children. The roots of America’s educational problems are in the numbers of Americans who live in poverty. America’s educational problems are predominantly in the numbers of kids and their families who are homeless; whose families have no access to Medicaid or other medical services. These are… families to whom low-birth-weight babies are frequently born, leading to many more children needing special education… Our educational problems have their roots in families where food insecurity or hunger is a regular occurrence, or where those with increased lead levels in their bloodstream get no treatments before arriving at a school’s doorsteps. Our problems also stem from the harsh incarceration laws that break up families instead of counseling them and trying to keep them together. And our problems relate to harsh immigration policies that keep millions of families frightened to seek out better lives for themselves and their children… Although demographics may not be destiny for an individual, it is the best predictor of a school’s outcomes—independent of that school’s teachers, administrators and curriculum.” (Emphasis in the original.)

We tend to think of these problems as though they reside exclusively in urban places where poverty is concentrated, but journalist Beth Macy just published Paper Girl to expose the very same issues in Urbana, Ohio, a small, MAGA town located in Jim Jordan’s Congressional district.

In a policy strategy left over from No Child Left Behind’s test-and-punish regime, lawmakers seem to believe that a teacher’s role is to produce test scores, that prescribed strategies like the Science of Reading and the Third Grade Guarantee will raise test scores, and that state takeovers of so-called failing schools will force teachers to work harder and smarter. But more thoughtful educators and policymakers have looked instead to reforms that surround vulnerable families with support. Full-Service Community Schools, designed to wrap medical and social services, and extracurricular enrichment programs right into the school building, have grown in their reach and are now valued by families and educators.

The Trump administration has begun canceling Full-Service Community Schools grants. In December, however, the Trump administration cancelled $168 million in federal grants from the Education Department’s Full-Service Community Schools program. Education Week‘s Mark Lieberman reports: “Those 19 grants—spread across 11 states and the District of Columbia—amounted to nearly $61 million in funds that were due to flow Jan. 1, and another $107 million that was due to flow by 2028. The loss of those funds could lead to layoffs for dozens of public school educators nationwide within weeks. In Idaho alone, 60 community schools coordinators across 47 rural school districts have salaries funded in part or in full with the now-excised grant funds.”

Why cut grants from a federal program that has continued to grow due to the documented effectiveness of Full-Service Community Schools? Lieberman explains: “Grant cancellations are part of Trump efforts to eradicate DEI. The Trump administration has argued in ‘notices of non-continuation’ to affected grantees that the programs in question may be promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives that top federal officials have characterized as divisive and harmful. Community schools advocates, though, describe their mission as a painstaking, constantly evolving, and research-backed effort to identify and meet the specific needs of students and their families—ranging from unemployment and food insecurity to difficulty accessing medical care and navigating bureaucracy.”

What is a Full-Service Community School? Community Schools are public schools which collaboratively incorporate additional professional social and medical services, and additions like after-school programs right in the public school building. While in Ohio, the state calls privately operated charter schools “community schools,” Full-Service Community Schools are not the same as charter schools.

New York City’s Children’s Aid Society has a history of 25 years of experience operating community schools as part of New York City’s public schools, and operates 19 public community schools today. The Children’s Aid Society defines a community school: “The community school strategy delivers holistic services for children and families, connecting them to resources in their communities and fostering academic success… No two community schools look alike. When we partner with a school to make it a community school, we assess the needs of that student population and community. At all of our community schools, we are placing an emphasis on chronic absenteeism. We offer services that improve attendance and get the entire family involved in the academic success of their children… Services at a community school can include comprehensive health services, after-school academic enrichment, mentoring, parent engagement, and more.”

For The Progressive, education writer Jeff Bryant further explores what community schools do: “The community schools approach looks different depending on location, but the basic idea is that schools should serve as local hubs not only for education services, but also meet the broader needs of students and families such as physical and mental health, housing, transportation, after-school care, and neighborhood improvement. To provide these services, schools partner with local organizations, including nonprofits and businesses. And students, parents, community members, and school staff help to determine school policies and activities, such as curriculum offerings and sports programs.”

More recently Bryant reported on new research confirming the effectiveness of the model: “According to a 2020 analysis conducted by the nonprofit, nonpartisan research organization RAND, schools in New York City using the community school strategy experienced… positive results. Compared to similarly matched non-community schools, community schools saw higher graduation rates; decreased chronic absenteeism, especially among Black students and high school students in temporary housing; fewer disciplinary incidents among elementary and middle school students; and significantly improved measures of student achievement—such as math scores, credit accumulation, and on-time grade progression.”

What does the Trump administration’s slashing of Community School Grants mean? Clearly the Trump administration’s sudden cancellation of Full-Service Community Schools grants is part of the administration’s broad attempt to scrub from federal policy any program or policy that furthers the goals of Brown v. Board of Education, to include, welcome, and equitably serve students in groups that have been historically marginalized. Education Department staff have not been subtle about the administration’s redefinition of civil rights protection. In a second article on the sudden cancellation of community school grants, Mark Lieberman reported: “Education Week reviewed one letter dated Dec. 12 announcing the non-continuation of a Community Schools grant. The stated reason for the cuts will look familiar to more than 200 other federal education grant recipients across close to 20 other programs that have received nearly identical letters in recent months as the Trump administration screens grants and pulls the plug on anything it claims is related to advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion…”

Lieberman quotes: “Madi Biedermann, the agency’s deputy assistant secretary for communications, (who) wrote in an email that the Trump administration is generally repurposing non-continued grants into ‘high quality programs that better serve special needs students… The Trump administration is no longer allowing taxpayer dollars to go out the door on autopilot—we are evaluating every federal grant to ensure they are in line with the administration’s policy of prioritizing merit, fairness, and excellence in education.’ ”

Lieberman reports that last week the Department of Education also cancelled a grant for “at least one recipient of a Promise Neighborhoods grant.” While federal support for Community schools goes back decades, the Promise Neighborhoods program was launched by the Obama Administration to “bolster… academic and social supports for children in high-need neighborhoods.” Lieberman adds that both Community Schools and Promise Neighborhoods were “zeroed out” of Trump’s proposed federal budget for education last year. While the U.S. Senate’s proposed education budget last summer fully funded both programs, the GOP- dominated appropriations committee in the U.S. House proposed a budget that would end both programs. In Russell Vought’s federal shutdown layoffs, only one staff member was left in the office that oversees these grants. Then, “Congress passed a law in November rescinding those layoffs, but employment for those workers is only assured through Jan. 30.”

Lieberman contrasts Trump’s cancellation of funding for community schools with the Biden Administration’s increase in 2023 of annual funding for community schools from $25 million to $150 million.

AFT files a lawsuit to block the Trump administration’s cancellation of grants for community schools. Last week, Education Week reported that the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and Chicago’s Brighton Park Neighborhood Council filed a lawsuit to block the termination of grants for Full-Service Community Schools and charged that the Education Department “cut off funding without notice, without lawful justification, and without following required procedures.” EdSource adds: “The plaintiffs also have asked the court to issue a temporary restraining order to stop the department from withholding the funds while the court hears the case.”

AFT’s Randi Weingarten points out that “there was no communication with districts or even a request to ask for modifications. These grants were simply terminated on a whim.” Patrick Brosnan, who leads Chicago’s Brighton Park Neighborhood Council, declared that programs supported by the cancelled grant, “advanced the stated mission of the U.S. Department of Education Full-Service Community School grant to support low-income students and families in our community, to ensure their access to high-quality after-school academic support, and to provide technical and career support to help mold the workforce of the future.”

Community schools have been among the most effective strategies to address the effects of family and neighborhood poverty — the educational opportunity gaps that David Berliner and other experts blame for disparities in standardized achievement test scores. Because federal dollars help school districts pay for the professionals who coordinate social service programs with the academic programs in a community school and pay for medical and social service professionals who provide specific services, the loss of federal funding will imperil the future of Full-Service Community Schools.

elaine June 3, 2026

Source

Janresseger

Curmudgucation: AI Is Coming to Evaluate You

elaine — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 16:49:46 +0000

Curmudgucation: AI Is Coming to Evaluate You

The unending tide of AI used for stupid things just keeps on coming, and as widely predicted, the major accomplices are managers and employers, sucked in with promises that AI will make their work faster and easier and less have-to-deal-with-humans-y. Take the ars technica piece "The résumé is dying, and AI is holding the smoking gun." This strikes me as a parallel to teacher letters of recommendation, which are about fifteen minutes away from being wiped out by a mountain of near-identical and completely useless AI-extruded letters.

So it's no surprise when Technological Horizons in Education Journal is happy to pass along a PR release from Edthena about a tech tool that will do some of your principal's job for him.

Edthena, mind you, is a company straight from AI hell. They've been around peddling old tech types of teacher coaching (watch yourself on video!) They have all your favorite PD buzzwords-- High Impact Feedback!! Amplify Coaching Capacity!! Scale Effectively!! Some of their marketing language feels... careful. "Evidence from video feels objective" they say, without addressing whether or not it actually is.

And they're an approved platform provider for edTPA.

So they are a perfect business for AI-ing teacher observations into a useless stupor.

Meet Observation Copilot! Your principal can feed it a half page of loose notes about what he saw in your classroom, and Observation Pilot will pad it with a bunch of professional and framework-aligned bullshit until you have pages of mind-numbing argle bargle in mere seconds. (No kidding-- the "demo" is below). The program will even generate suggestions for the teacher to implement, including all the approved soulless jargon, though unfortunately it does not appear that the program generates a suggestion to the principal that he either do his damned job or get the hell out of the profession.

And you know that this "tool" is only about five minutes away from the concept of letting a video-cam collect the "observation notes" and thereby reducing the human principal's contribution to zero.

Sadly, there are actual testimonials here, like Brent Perdue, principal at Jefferson Elementary in Spokane, Washington. Brent says, "Observation Copilot has been a true game changer for me. It took that piece of the wordsmithing, of having the language flow, where I could really go down and just put in the facts of what I'm seeing."

Or Juliana Addi, a school principal in Hoboken, who says, "Observation Copilot has changed my teacher feedback process. The writing that goes into it, it just expedites that pace - much quicker." Because speed is the important thing.

I can't begin to express the rage I would feel if a principal used this plagiarism machine to flood my evaluation with mounds of bullshit. I can only hope that the teachers who are subjected to this admin-o-bot respond by having ChatGPT write their response, or perhaps sitting in the post-observation conference and asking, "So what exactly did you mean when you write [insert quote here]." They should definitely do this while holding their copy so that the principal cannot see where the quote comes from in the fake evaluation.

This is of a piece with one through line of the LLM-in-education attack, which is the assertion that the business of turning a rough idea into a coherent sentence is an unimportant technicality that can easily be outsourced to a bot without any loss to whatever task is being completed, because human expression is no big deal. Just imagine.

Abraham Lincoln: "ChatGPT, just write me something about how this war is important to democracy and stuff."

Ernest Hemmingway: "Give me something booklength about how the Great European War made a lot of people sad."

Martin Luther King, Jr.: "As long as I'm sitting in this Birmingham jail, can ChatGPT just whip up some stuff about ignoring bad laws?"

Me, several years ago: "ChatGPT, please whip up something about love and getting married and stuff."

Yeah, stringing together the actual words-- that scary "wordsmithing"-- isn't all that important. Just have the bot do it.

AI most easily moves into places where the humanity has already been hollowed out. If you are a principal looking at this and thinking it seems like a super great idea, at a bare minimum, I hope you sit and have a hard think about your concept of your job. But maybe you should just think about alternate careers, because this kind of disregard for the human teachers who work for you is truly, deeply discouraging.

This is a terrible idea. Teachers need support from actual humans, not pages of jargonated filler from a bot that knows nothing about actual teaching. Teachers need to work in buildings where lines of communication are open, not ones where communication comes from a bot and not a human. Teachers need suggestions and ideas that come from a knowledgeable educator, not bot scrapings from the bottom of the internet bird cage. Useful assessment is a conversation between teacher and administrator, but to have that, both parties have to show up personally. For a principal to use this kind of tool (because I'm sure there are more out there) is unethical and disrespectful.

This little toxic AI menace is current available free of charge, because of course it is. The charging money part comes later, after you're so used to this crutch that you'd really hate to give it up. But with a dollar price of $0.00, using this tool will carry a higher cost than a school can afford to pay.

elaine June 2, 2026

Source

Curmudgucation

404 Media: 'Nature' Publisher Retracts Paper on the Benefits of ChatGPT in Education

elaine — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 16:11:38 +0000

404 Media: 'Nature' Publisher Retracts Paper on the Benefits of ChatGPT in Education

“What educators, parents and policy officials really needed was high quality data and evidence to help guide them. What they have had to deal with instead is some substandard research.”

Humanities & Social Sciences Communications, a major journal in the Nature Portfolio, has retracted a paper that claimed AI had a positive impact on student learning.

The original paper, titled “The effect of ChatGPT on students’ learning performance, learning perception, and higher-order thinking: insights from a meta-analysis,” was originally published in May of last year by Jin Wang and Wenxiang Fan of the Hangzhou Normal University in China. It is a meta-analysis, meaning it combines data from 51 research studies published between November 2022 and February 2025 on the effectiveness of ChatGPT in education. The paper claimed it found that ChatGPT had a large or moderately positive impact on “students’ learning performance, learning perception, and higher-order thinking.”

“The Editor has decided to retract this paper owing to concerns regarding discrepancies in the meta-analysis,” the journal said in its retraction note. “These issues ultimately undermine the confidence the Editor can place in the validity of the analysis and resulting conclusions. The authors have not responded to correspondence regarding this retraction.”

The researchers did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

“I first noticed the paper published just a day or two after it came out on 6 May 2025,” Ben Williamson, a senior lecturer in digital education at the University of Edinburgh, told me in an email. “It rapidly picked up a lot of attention on social media, especially on LinkedIn, as it appeared to offer some of the first hard evidence that ChatGPT improves what the authors called ‘learning performance.’ Within a month it had been accessed online almost 400,000 times and had an Altmetric score of 365 after being shared hundreds of times on X and Bluesky. It was very much helped by some very influential individuals sharing it on social media as good evidence to support promoting AI in education.”

The retraction note did not provide more details on journal's decision, but a 2025 study published in European Journal of Education Policy and Practice shows that the method Wang and Fan used is often flawed, and highlighted the issues in their paper before it was retracted.

“Existing empirical evidence on AIED [AI in educations] suggests some positive effects, but a closer look reveals methodological and conceptual problems and leads to the conclusion that existing evidence should not be used to guide policy or practice,” the paper, written Ilkka Tuomi and titled “What counts as evidence in AI & ED: Towards Science-for-Policy 3.0,” said.

One problem according to Tuomi is that these meta-analysis studies use any paper that was peer-reviewed, but that a closer look at each individual paper reveals that they vary in quality or that the data doesn’t show AI improves learning outcomes.

“Despite its apparent methodological quality and apparent rigour, the heterogeneity of the analysed studies makes the quantitative results of the Deng et al. meta-analysis meaningless,” Tuomi said, referring to another study about ChatGPT enhancing student learning. “Very similar problems underpin another viral article that has been interpreted to provide final proof that ChatGPT has positive impacts on learning. This study, by Wang and Fan (2025), uses the same methodology as the Deng et al. study, to the extent that it copies their search pattern with the original spelling mistakes. Already a quick review of the journals where the original studies have been published, show that low-quality and potentially predatory journals are included.”

"When I see a 'meta-study' on the impact of ChatGPT that reviews studies done within weeks after ChatGPT was released, it is most probable that these studies cannot be of good quality," Tuomi told me in an email. "It usually takes many months to set up a decent study. To publish the study (after revising it based on review comments), you usually need a year or more."

“This meta analysis on ChatGPT effects on learning appeared only two and a half years after ChatGPT was launched,” Williamson said. “So what we are supposed to believe is that in the intervening period, dozens of high quality studies of the effect of ChatGPT on learning performance took place, were written up, submitted for peer review, and published, which the meta analysis authors then painstakingly synthesized using robust methods. What appeared actually to be the case is that the meta analysis aggregated a whole bunch of very low quality research published in disreputable journals. Ultimately, the meta analysis recycled junk science into headline-grabbing claims about the benefits of ChatGPT for learners. And those claims were simply unfounded due to methodological problems with the conduct of the study, as the retraction now appears to indicate.

"The retraction of this study should serve as a crucial reminder to the education community,” Jake Baskin, executive director of the Computer Science Teachers Association, told me in an email. “We need to teach students how this technology actually works, not just how to use it, and rigorously evaluate if and how generative AI genuinely improves teaching and learning."

Our reporting has repeatedly shown that large language models are prone to errors that can make education frustrating to both students and teachers. Multiple teachers have told us that ChatGPT has completely upended their ability to educate students and grade their work which is increasingly AI-generated. My investigation into Alpha School, the leading “AI-powered” school, used AI generated lesson plans that included errors and flawed questions.

Despite these problems, AI companies and lawmakers continue to push AI products into schools.

“ChatGPT and other generative AI applications have been incredibly disruptive in education for several years,” Williamson said. “What educators, parents and policy officials really needed was high quality data and evidence to help guide them. What they have had to deal with instead is some substandard research.”

Update: This article has been updated with comment from Ilkka Tuomi. This article has also been updated to clarify that the paper was retracted from Humanities & Social Sciences Communications, a major journal in the Nature Portfolio. The headline for this article has been updated to clarify the retraction was made by Springer Nature, which publishes Humanities & Social Sciences Communications.

elaine June 1, 2026

Source

404 Media

Code Acts in Education: AI and the Amplification of Academic Content Assetization

elaine — Fri, 29 May 2026 17:54:41 +0000

Code Acts in Education: AI and the Amplification of Academic Content Assetization

Photo by Viktor Forgacs on Unsplash

A new AI-driven digital learning platform launched by Arizona State University has set off alarm bells among academics for its exploitation of scholarly work. ASU Atomic is a pilot platform that uses generative AI to allow subscribing users to automatically create bespoke micro-courses out of content previously created by staff for other courses and purposes. The tech news outlet 404media has reported that professors at ASU were “disturbed to find their lectures chopped up and turned into AI slop” without their consent or knowledge.

The case of Atomic has attracted a lot of attention among university staff on social media, many of whom have seen as it as exploitative of academic labour without compensation. One ASU staff member interviewed by Inside Higher Ed called it “Frankensteinian.” It appears that the tool scrapes the content produced by its faculty and uploaded to its Canvas learning management system, then stitches it together into new forms according to subscribing users’ instructions.

It’s notable that ASU has positioned itself in recent years as a highly innovative, tech-friendly and pro-industry institution. It co-hosts the annual ASU-GSV edtech investment summit, has become a major provider of online degrees and courses, and is in active collaboration with OpenAI exploring how “the advanced capabilities of ChatGPT Enterprise” can be used in higher education teaching, learning and research.

ASU Atomic appears to be the next step in ASU’s efforts to innovate with tech in the design and provision of education. It combines the subscription model of online courses with the capacities of AI and automation to produce new revenue-generating educational products and consumer-based leraning services.

More significantly, the Atomic platform also illuminates the growing trend of universities – far beyond ASU alone – exploring how to develop novel income-generating opportunities from their digital archives of staff content. Recently, Janja Komljenovic and I produced a report for Educational International on the challenges that digital platforms pose to academics’ intellectual property and autonomy. In the report, we argued that “platformization” of higher education, even before generative AI appeared on the scene, was already complicating questions about the academic ownership and control of content and teaching materials. AI is now set to amplify the exploitation of academics’ work.

Assetization in the academy

When universities contract with digital learning platforms such as a learning management system provider or an online learning platform, we argued in the report, user content and data can be treated as valuable assets for potential income generation by an educational institution. For example, uploaded content can be used to support further product development, which may then be offered to institutions or individuals for a subscription or similar fee.

Once academics upload content – such as lecture notes, handout or video recordings – then it becomes very difficult to remove from a platform. Moreover, institutions can continue using that content even once a member of staff has left the institution, or even died in service. During the pandemic, HE teachers and researchers became increasingly concerned about HE institutions claiming ownership of teaching materials posted on platforms. Many academics and HE institutions faced new challenges regarding their digital rights over recorded lectures and other materials posted on digital infrastructures and platforms as a result of confusing and contested legal copyright arrangements.

What these developments indicate is the increasing presence of an economic logic in higher education that treats educational materials and data as digital assets with potential financial value. In a more recent article where Janja and I worked with Kean Birch and Klaus Beiter, we described academic content assetization as the ways that scholarly materials are increasingly controlled and capitalized by higher education institutions and digital platform providers. The term digital asset works here because it refers to things that are owned and controlled without being sold or exchanged like a commodity. Assets generate income from subscriptions and fees for access, and are underpinned by complex contractual and copyright arrangements that determine ownership and control rights.

Universities were already involved in academic content assetization through platforms such as massive online open courses (MOOCs) and online program managers (OPMs) a decade or more ago. While OPM and MOOC providers typically offer digital infrastructure and services such as marketing and recruitment, universities contribute brands, reputational status, academic content, and issue certificates and awards, with both benefitting from fee-sharing arrangements when students sign up to the courses. Learning management systems like Canvas and Blackboard has amassed academic content and user data too. These often require academic staff to sign agreements transferring their copyright to their employer, or licencing their content for re-use according to the terms and conditions of each platform.

The digitalization and platformization of HE, we argued, enables the massification and acceleration of academic content creation and access as well as new modes of monetization through the construction of new audiences and, thus, new markets. Two important aspects of academic content assetization are the emergence of content-related derivative digital services and the introduction of large language models into academic knowledge practices. AI firms such as OpenAI have partnered with universities for commercial benefit while also promising institutions that they will benefit from being able to offer new AI-powered services.

We noted in the paper that many universities have sought to change their IP and copyright arrangements so that ownership and control rests with the institution rather than the individual, thus allowing the institution to re-use and re-purpose that materials produced by its own staff for purposes of institutional revenue-generation. Conventionally, universities have not claimed the copyright for teaching materials, but this has changed fast since online learning platforms became new sources of institutional income. It is through such copyright arrangements that teaching content can be configured as a value-making asset for university institutions, as well as a potentially profitable source for any platform providers with which they are in partnership.

Such technical and legal arrangements were already in place through online learning MOOC and OPM platforms, but as ASU Atomic indicates, they may now underpin efforts to capitalize on academic content through new AI services. ASU has an intellectual property policy in place asserting that the institution owns the rights to all teaching materials produced by its staff, for example, and this is the direction that other institutions are heading in too. Academic content and work is now being reconfigured as institutional property and as assets from which future value can be generated in the shape of derivative services and products, even without the explicit consent or involvement of those who produced the material in the first place.

Assetization of academic content therefore raises questions around intellectual property rights and rights to claim economic benefits. It also surfaces challenges related to academic freedom and pedagogic autonomy.

AI and academic freedom

The ASU Atomic platform illustrates how generative AI is likely to amplify the challenges and controversies associated with the assetization of academic content. It demonstrates how, once an institution has claimed ownership of its own educators’ materials, that content can be rapidly re-purposed and re-mixed as “personalized” learning materials available to subscribing individual users.

The way that Atomic allows teaching materials to be re-mixed for income generation purposes is, additionally, in tension with core values of academic freedom, particularly freedom in teaching. Freedom to teach includes:

Freedom to determine what shall be taught (course content); freedom to determine how it shall be taught (pedagogy); freedom to determine who shall teach (via transparent selection procedures); freedom to determine whom shall be taught (the right to determine and enforce entry standards); freedom to determine how students’ progress shall be evaluated (assessment methods); freedom to determine whether students shall progress (via marking criteria and grade determination).

The erosion of pedagogic autonomy has long been a problem with digital learning management platforms like Canvas, because they impose templates on how courses can be taught and what content can be used during classes. A platform like Atomic clearly amplifies these challenges over pedagogic freedom. It combines materials into new forms over which the original academic has no control. It replaces educator-led pedagogy with automated teaching provision. And it removes the academic from any direct teaching, evaluation, assessment or progression decisions by relocating all those powers to AI.

Subscriptions-based AI services that re-mix ad re-package academic content as a process of assetization and income-generation, then, exacerbate an erosion of academic autonomy and freedom that has been progressing since platforms become a routine presence in higher education more than a decade ago. It is precisely through such platforms as the Canvas learning management system that academic content has been amassed in forms and quantities that may now be exploited by institutions and companies for economic gain. When institutions claim ownership of content produced by their staff, academic themselves lose control of their own work without any compensation for their labour.

These developments change how academic materials are valued. For educators, the materials they produce are valuable as essential aspects of their pedagogy, and as artefacts of their academic freedom to choose how they teach. From the perspective of an institutional platform such as ASU Atomic, academic content is valuable from an economic rather than educational perspective.

Contractual transparency

While ASU Atomic may be generating anxiety in the sector already, it is unlikely to be the only case of institutions re-using academic content as value-creating assets that promise future economic benefits. Although it is not clear which AI model underpins Atomic (though given ASU’s partnership with OpenAI to construct new applications, we can guess), this is clearly the outcome of a contractual relationship enabling ASU to build on top of an existing model. As Janja and I recommended in our report for Education International, contractual processes between universities and edtech vendors should be made much more transparent so that it is apparent to academic workers what rights they retain over their content when universities contract with platform and AI companies.

Contracts with vendors may seem to be boring legal documents, but they constitute important processes where significant aspects of academic freedom and IP are negotiated. Yet academics are often unaware of copyright arrangements in their institutions, or of the contractual agreements being made with platform vendors, and may not be consulted regarding decisions that will ultimately impact their working conditions, rights or academic freedoms. Now that ASU Atomic has indicated how AI will amplify such problems and exploitative behaviours, by enabling universities to capitalize on the content assets produced by academic staff, educator unions and associations should act fast to protect workers’ rights and autonomy.

elaine May 29, 2026

Source

Code Acts in Education

Money Power Health: Learning From Coalie: What the New US Spokesperson for Fossil Fuel Extraction Tells Us

elaine — Thu, 28 May 2026 06:31:45 +0000

Money Power Health: Learning From Coalie: What the New US Spokesperson for Fossil Fuel Extraction Tells Us

Understanding similar past efforts tells us something about what truly matters

For those of who you may not be aware, this is Coalie. He is the new mascot of the “American Energy Dominance Agenda”, according to the US interior secretary, and it's pretty clear which interests he represents. You may be thinking this type of cartoon mascot is a cynical way of drumming up predictable anger, a meme made for “rage-baiting”, and perhaps distraction from less high-profile but potentially more environmentally or socially important policy moves, such as the walking back of efforts to protect miners from black lung. You may be right, and there is something to that perhaps, but I thought it was worth reflecting on how common this type of mascot is in fossil fuel and corporate rhetoric more broadly. What interests me here is not Coalie as a provocation aimed at us, but Coalie as part of a long-standing strategy aimed elsewhere, particularly at children. So before we dig into the meaning of Coalie, let’s look at some past examples and see what we can glean from them, including where this type of tactic perhaps originated from.

Before Coalie, there was “Petro Pete”, a cartoon character with a hard hat fronting a whole series of books and education materials produced for children and schools by the Oklahoma Energy Resources Board or OERB, funded voluntarily by oil and natural gas producers. This is part of the OERBs “homeroom materials”, which they call “tools to help teach Oklahoma’s students the importance of oil and natural gas in their lives.” You can find plenty of stock images of homework produced in classrooms based around Petro Pete. The books run from kindergarten up and deal with issues like the day Petro Pete wakes up to find that there are no fossil fuels, and so he has no light, no toothbrush, no way to get to school and so on. In other words, from the earliest years, embedding the idea that a world without fossil fuels is not merely inconvenient but impossible, and that those who raise questions about extraction are naive or irresponsible. I think these examples are both chilling and a reminder of the lengths such companies will go to socialise, early and deliberately, particular ways of thinking that can blunt qualities that many of us associate with childhood, like curiosity, fairness, and moral concern, when those qualities might otherwise lead to questioning or resistance. That is why if you have seen me give an online presentation from my office, you may have spotted my copy of “Petro Pete’s big bad dream”, which sits on my shelf as a reminder and teaching aid.

Before Petro Pete there was the “Truax”. When Dr Seusses story about the Lorax, a magical creature who “speaks for the trees” in a story of environmental conservation, hit the shelves, the timber industry was so incensed they created a kids book in response featuring the Truax, intended to frame the Lorax (in the book they refer to it as the “Guardbark”) as naive and hopelessly misguided about the important role loggers play, and helping kids understand the necessity of harvesting timber both to preserve forests and help biodiversity.

The way the Truax seeks to explain away the Guardbark’s concerns about issues like biodiversity loss is quite telling, and cunning in how it brushes these aside in the minds of children. To quote the Truax text:

“Would anyone mind if we lost, say, a tick
That carried a germ that made Cuddlebears sick?

Or what about something that’s really quite nice
Like the Yellow-Striped Minnow that lives in Lake Zice?
How far will we go? How much will we pay?—
To keep a few minnows from dying away?”

How does this read to you? To me, this is not simply a defence of logging, but an early lesson that environmental concern itself is indulgent, sentimental, or irrational.

Hopefully now you are starting to see Coalie in a new light. Perhaps it isn’t meant for us at all. Past examples show such characters and approaches can be a powerful messenger for other audiences than ourselves, facilitated by education systems and teachers. Along similar lines, there is the Eddie Eagle gun safety program for kids run by the US National Rifle Association (NRA) fronted by a cartoon eagle. Our recent research led by Dr May van Schalkwyk found it served to embed firearms as a normal part of everyday household life, and placed the emphasis for avoiding accidental gun deaths on children rather than product safety parameters. The gambling and alcohol industries are sponsoring education programmes in UK schools with clear similarities in terms of normalising their products, placing emphasis on childrens individual responsibility to navigate such risks, and focusing on issues such as dealing with peer pressure or understanding odds but not, strangely enough, industry marketing.

Thankfully there has been growing pressure on this kind of practice in some cases, in part due to amazing community advocates such as Irish Community Action on Alcohol Network (ICAAN), part of Alcohol Forum Ireland, who spotlighted this issue leading to the Irish government advising against such materials being presented to children. An ongoing campaign in the UK supported by a range of signatories is seeking similar goals.

“Coalie” is certainly a departure from other examples to the extent that the “OSM” on his cute little uniform stands for the US Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement, which is the government regulator for coal mining. It’s not quite the department of health being fronted by a cartoon cigarette, but it’s not that far off, and begs the question of what sort of story it tells children about the role of such regulators. When regulators themselves become part of the narrative apparatus, the line between oversight and advocacy becomes difficult for any audience to see, let alone a child. To quote a OSMRE spokesperson from the Guardian article reporting on Coalie: “[Coalie] draws attention to solutions by showing how regulation, reclamation, and responsible stewardship are actively improving real-world conditions, while supporting a reliable and secure energy future for the nation.”

Does that sound somewhat like those other examples? It does to me.

I appreciate this reads like quite a pessimistic post, and to some degree that is inevitable because discovering that kindergarten and primary school aged children are targets for this stuff should cause us deep concern, and lets face it, this is but a drop in pessimistic news we are surrounded by just now.

However, as is the case with corporate initiatives focused on employee morale or green-washing, there is another way to look at this. Greenwashing happens because public opinion still has the power to constrain corporate behaviour. These campaigns exist because legitimacy is fragile. Characters like Coalie are there because yes, children represent future markets and loyal customers, but also because if the next generation turn against these people and practices, if they become less “normal” in the eyes of children today, that spells the end of the line for these businesses as currently constructed.

Children and young people are a battlefield for these companies, a key stakeholder in the money, power, health nexus, because in them rests a hope of turning things around, and when you look at some of the youth-led advocacy efforts (I have learnt a great deal from Biteback and their counter marketing efforts for example), one can perhaps see why. Work by Unicef has produced a range of tools to help young people advocate for change in and I can think of nothing that would annoy the makers of the Truax or Petro Pete more than teachers and schools bringing this sort of corporate cartoon mascot tactic to children’s attention, sharing some advocacy tools with them, and asking the children what we should do about it. Maybe this post could help with lesson or activity planning, as an invitation for children to notice, question, and decide what they think is being asked of them.

If you are interested in finding out more about this issue, I spoke to May van Schalkwyk about industry-funded youth education programmes and their goals in a past episode of the Money Power Health podcast.

elaine May 28, 2026

Cloaking Inequity: Remembering David Berliner: A Scholar Who Lifted Others

elaine — Wed, 27 May 2026 16:42:26 +0000

Cloaking Inequity: Remembering David Berliner: A Scholar Who Lifted Others

The education field lost one of its most important scholars with the passing of David C. Berliner. For decades, David helped shape how we understand teaching, learning, and the politics surrounding public education. His work combined rigorous scholarship with a deep moral commitment to the idea that public schools are foundational to democracy.

Many people know David for the landmark book he co-authored with Bruce Biddle, The Manufactured Crisis. At a time when political leaders and media narratives were claiming that American public schools were collapsing, David’s research challenged that storyline directly. The book exposed how claims of widespread educational failure were often exaggerated or politically constructed, and it helped shift the conversation toward the real structural challenges facing schools, including poverty and inequality. For many scholars and educators, The Manufactured Crisis became a model of how research can challenge dominant narratives and defend public institutions.

David continued this work throughout his career. He consistently reminded the field that public education is not just about producing test scores or workforce credentials. Public schools are civic institutions that sustain democratic life. That commitment was reflected again in the book he co-edited with Cara Hermanns, Public Education: The Cornerstone of American Democracy. The volume brought together scholars to examine the role of public schooling in maintaining democratic society.

I had the privilege of contributing a chapter to that book. My chapter, Scrutinizing the School Choice Equity Ethos for Black Parents, examined how school choice policies are framed in the language of equity while often reproducing inequality. David invited scholars into that project because he believed these debates mattered for the future of democracy. When David Berliner asked you to write something, you said yes. He had a way of convening scholars around questions that mattered for the public good.

Beyond his scholarship, David was extraordinarily generous as a mentor and editor. He invested in emerging scholars and supported those willing to challenge powerful narratives about education. At one point he told me that I was one of America’s most important and original voices. When you are doing critical work that questions dominant policy agendas, that kind of affirmation matters more than people realize. Equity work can feel isolating, and David understood that.

The last thing he said to me was on LinkedIn. He commented on one of my posts and wrote that I was writing better than I ever had before. Coming from David, that meant a lot. And I believe he knew that comment came at just the right time. He cared deeply about scholarship, about truth telling, and about the responsibility of being a public intellectual.

Some of my favorite memories of David come from the broader community of education scholars and activists. I remember being at Diane Ravitch’s home in Brooklyn when we were beginning the work that would become the Network for Public Education. During one visit, I noticed David’s book sitting on Diane’s shelf and sent him a photo. His reply captured his personality perfectly. He wrote back, “It’s about time.”

Over the years I would also see David and Ursula at the Latino Pachanga at the American Educational Research Association conference. Those gatherings reflected something important about David. Even though he was one of the most accomplished scholars in the field, he remained present in the community. He showed up, listened, encouraged people, and supported the next generation of researchers.

David’s legacy also lives in the way he treated people. Just the other day, an emerging faculty member reached out to me. I told them that when they reached out, I knew I had to reach back. I said that because David would have done that for me. That is the example he set for many of us.

His scholarship reshaped how we think about educational inequality, accountability, and the political narratives surrounding schools. But perhaps even more importantly, he modeled what it means to be a scholar who uses research in service of democracy.

I think about him almost every day. I miss his voice, his humor, his clarity, and his courage. Below is my final goodbye.

[Watch video here.]

elaine May 27, 2026

Source

Cloaking Inequity

Shanker Blog: The Wright Hire: What Maryland's Decision Tells Us About Literacy Reform

elaine — Tue, 26 May 2026 16:33:58 +0000

Shanker Blog: The Wright Hire: What Maryland's Decision Tells Us About Literacy Reform

When Maryland recruited Dr. Carey Wright to lead its public school system, the choice seemed striking: a strongly Democratic state turning to the architect of literacy reforms from a deeply Republican one. You could read that as a political story. But it might be more useful and accurate to understand it as evidence of something else: that beneath the visible layer of policy, literacy reform is spreading in ways that don't follow partisan lines.

A survey of state legislation by the Albert Shanker Institute found that 45 states and the District of Columbia enacted reading reform laws between 2019 and 2022 — investments in teacher training, early screening for reading difficulties, reading coaches, alignment of practices and materials with literacy research — and characterized the effort as nonpartisan and state-driven (Neuman, Quintero & Reist, 2023). The non partisan momentum is visible at the federal level too. The Science of Reading Act of 2026 (H.R. 7890) passed out of the House Education and Workforce Committee in March 2026, co-led by a Democrat and two Republicans.

But legislation is what we see, it doesn't tell us how reform takes hold inside a school system. That process is harder to see. It happens through professional networks, staffing decisions, and relationships — the kind of work that unfolds over years before it shows up in outcomes. Last year, a Maryland Democrat and a Tennessee Republican — both former teachers — made exactly this point in a joint piece, arguing that staying the course on science of reading reform requires of cross-partisan commitment.

Researchers who study how change spreads across school systems have found that professional networks and trust relationships are often better predictors of whether change takes hold than the policies themselves (Fullan, 2001; Spillane, 2004). Alan Daly and Kara Finnigan's work on social networks in education reform shows that how ideas travel through systems — who talks to whom, who learns from whom — shapes implementation in ways that policy mandates alone cannot (Daly & Finnigan, 2010). Bryk and Schneider's research on trust in schools points in the same direction: relational infrastructure is not the soft backdrop to reform; it's a core condition for it (Bryk & Schneider, 2002). Dr. Wright herself has noted this as well. Speaking at the Reading League Conference last fall, she shared, half-jokingly, that she'd had more breakfasts, lunches, and dinners with people than ever before.

The Wright hire is indeed the right one; but also, not just a pragmatic decision by a state looking for someone with a strong track record — though it is that. It's also a signal that something real is moving at a level that's harder to see. Education leaders and practitioners are crossing political lines and passing similar bills in red and blue states because people doing the work are learning from each other across those lines — through networks, relationships, and hiring decisions.

There may be value in learning to notice these early signals — a leadership hire, a cross-state collaboration, a professional network that's pulling in the same direction. These don't guarantee outcomes but they suggest that something is taking hold, and that it may be worth paying attention to even before the results are visible. In Maryland's case, state officials are starting to claim some promising results — see Governor Moore's announcement during his 2026 State of the State address.

In short, when a Democratic state hires the architect of a Republican state's literacy reforms, that's not a political story. It's evidence that the work of reform is less partisan than we sometimes assume – and in this case, demonstrably so. Other prominent voices have begun making this case, emphasizing the importance of keeping literacy tethered to evidence and away from politics. Perhaps the blue-red frame matters less than we think — and holding on to it makes it harder to see where things are shifting and what is actually working.

elaine May 26, 2026

Source

Shanker Blog

Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice: Once It Was Pocket Calculators Altering the Teaching of Math, Now It’s AI (Bronwen Everill) (Guest Post by Bronwen Everill)

elaine — Fri, 22 May 2026 12:37:07 +0000

Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice: Once It Was Pocket Calculators Altering the Teaching of Math, Now It’s AI (Bronwen Everill) (Guest Post by Bronwen Everill)

“Bronwen Everill teaches writing at Princeton and is a Research Affiliate at the Laboratory for the Economics of Africa’s Past in the Department of Economics at Stellenbosch University. She is the author of three books, including, most recently, Africonomics: A History of Western Ignorance.”

This article appeared April 30, 2025 in History News Network (HNN)

Those intrigued by the possibilities of AI in classrooms often rope history into their argument. Advocates for AI’s use in educational settings suggest that it should be used, like the calculator, to “break through the paperwork” of reading and writing and allow students to concentrate on the “big questions.” They attempt to assuage worries about AI by drawing attention to the apparent silliness of the late-20th century panic around calculators in classrooms. One recent Scientific American article explained that “From the Gutenberg press to online math classes, technologies that improve access to quality learning opportunities are routinely dismissed by critics and skeptics, especially by those who hold the reins in the classroom.” The eventual adoption of calculators in classrooms, per these arguments, proved that concerns raised by educators and parents were invalid. The Scientific American authors ground their embrace of AI in the classroom with an assuring claim that “History supports this view.”

But does it? A closer look at the contours of the calculator debate reveals that the analogy may not hold up. Survivorship bias in writing about history is a hazard of the job, made infamous by the adage, “History is written by the winners.” For historians of technology, survivorship bias emerges through explorations of technological counterfactuals: would Betamax have been a better video technology? What were the features that led internal combustion engines to overtake steam engines? As the economist Dominique Foray discussed in a 1997 article, while a “natural selection” model of technological progress would assume that we end up with the best possible technological results through a process mirroring natural selection — “the fittest survive” — in reality, technological adoption is more path dependent: “it is only the sequence of choices — driven by chance and trivial circumstances — that will eventually give to one technology the attributes of the fittest.” The history of calculators offers a case study of the contingencies involved with the adoption of specific technologies and challenges the idea that technological progress — or history — follows a linear historical path.

Pocket calculators were a long-standing goal for computing and chip-making firms. Competition amongst Texas Instruments, Sharp, Canon, Busicom, and Hewlett Packard led to a rush of innovation in the 1960s as innovations in integrated circuits made the race to produce smaller, more powerful computers possible. Introduced first in Japan in 1970 and transformed with Hewlett Packard’s HP-35 in 1972, pocket calculators initially cost hundreds of dollars. But competition was fierce and demand was insatiable. By 1976, models were available for as low as $8, and the pocket calculator entered the classroom.

Schools and teachers were left to fend for themselves. The first wave of debates over math instruction — the “new math” of the 1960s — had pitted a “constructivist” approach that, as historian Christopher Phillips wrote in his 2014 book The New Math: A Political History, focused on training students in the “structure of mathematical knowledge” against a “back to basics” approach that focused on “discipline and tradition.” After fierce arguments, math education seemed to settle into a consensus of a back-to-basics approach to skills by the 1970s, but the introduction of the pocket calculator set off the debate anew. Calculators seemed to provide incontrovertible proof that the reform argument was on to something: technology that would replace the need for arithmetic skills existed. But they also triggered successive waves of traditionalist arguments that students were becoming too reliant on technology and had little in the way of basic skills competency.

As with many debates about American education policies, the math wars quickly became party-coded: back-to-basics became a predominantly Republican talking point, while reform was associated with progressivism and the Democrats. In this polarized environment, sensible explanations showing that “the basics” weren’t being neglected were overlooked in favor of anecdotal stories about parents who had to teach their children basic multiplication tables.

Media coverage reflected popular ambiguity about the benefits and drawbacks of calculators for children. It portrayed some teachers and administrators embracing calculators as tools of the future and recognizing calculator education as an important component of workforce preparedness. An Illinois newspaper reported that in Chicago, “science teachers look at the calculator as a ‘great technological breakthrough,’” one that “breaks through the paperwork” and allowed students who were weak in math to “concentrate on the science rather than the arithmetic.” One teacher in Cincinnati explained that calculators could provide “motivation”: “students decide they can do a problem if a machine can do it.”

But even that teacher cautioned that calculators should only be introduced in junior high school, so that they didn’t “become substitutes for learning basic computations.” Even the most enthusiastic teachers knew that students were probably already using them for homework, even when they weren’t supposed to. One administrator, from the Princeton school district, reflected in 1976 that “the danger may be the school not dealing with the question because the kid has them anyway.” In a 1977 special editorial section on the “invasion” of calculators into Texas high school math classes, a teacher complained that using calculators would mean students’ “skills may deteriorate.” Ten years later, the debate was largely unchanged. In 1988, the Californian carried a full-page viewpoints section with debates about the merits and problems of the proliferation of calculators in classrooms. The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) Standards, published in 1989, argued for a reformed math curriculum that was better aligned with new career opportunities: “Businesses no longer seek workers with strong backs, clever hands, and ‘shopkeeper’ arithmetic skills.” Many parents, on the other hand, saw homework assignments that no longer resembled either the format or the content of their own educations and felt adrift.

Since the introduction of the calculator in the 1970s, there was a consistent demand by math teachers for training in when to use calculators and when not to, how to incorporate them into lessons, and how to talk to parents about their use. An article published by the NCTM focused on teacher anxiety about calculator introduction: “teachers ask, ‘When should I use calculators?’ and ‘What should students know before I allow them to use calculators?’,” the authors noted, and “In particular, teachers want to be able to justify their answers to these questions to other teachers and parents who might be concerned about including calculator use in the middle school curriculum.”

When the NCTM adopted its 2000 Standards, reminding everyone that both basic skills teaching and more abstract thinking, facilitated by calculator use, were part of their recommended standards, its argument was that individual teachers should decide how to best integrate calculator use in the classroom. This was both a plea for parents — and journalists — to trust teachers, anda concession to the localized nature of American education. But it was clear that teachers didn’t always know how to integrate calculators into their lesson plans, and how to keep up with the ever-evolving technology. That created an opportunity.

A number of commentators have remarked on the long persistence of the Texas Instruments (TI) Graphing Calculator, TI-84 plus. They have been flummoxed by the 20-year-old technology’s continued dominance even in the age of smartphones and free online calculators. The technology in the TI-84 plus calculator is not particularly sophisticated, and hasn’t changed since it was introduced in 2004. It was neither the first mover in the space of graphing calculators, nor has it been updated with new innovations. This increasingly retro product’s endurance points to the active role of educators, textbook companies, and technology companies in shaping the adoption of the calculator in all classrooms and helping to resolve the math wars, which many historians say finally fizzled out with the implementation of the Common Core (and a set of new debates around reading and writing).

Keith Houston’s 2023 book Empire of the Sum: The Rise and Reign of the Pocket Calculator highlighted how Texas Instruments worked with teachers to produce curricula and training resources. Recognizing that Hewlett Packard and Casio had the first mover advantage, TI instead focused on building its relationship with teachers and textbook companies. And the company found that teachers actually didn’t want the technology to advance at the rate of computing power, in part because of the relentless adaptation of lessons, but also because the debates over basic skills had shown that there was a balance to be struck. As the NCTM president, John C. Egsgard, had argued back in 1977, “You need the basics to make the calculator do what you want it to.”

And the TI-84 plus decidedly hasn’t advanced at the rate of computing power. In a relentlessly digital world, the graphing calculator works for teachers because it is a limited technology that can only be used for certain functions in a controlled environment. Twenty-year-old calculator technology is allowed in tests so that the internet or AI are not. This might be referred to as “path-dependent inefficiency”: it emerged out of a political debate in a way that is illustrative of technological advancement more broadly. It was not inevitable that calculators would end up in classrooms, but because Texas Instruments responded to the needs of teachers, within the context of a debate over the balance between teaching basic skills and using calculators to move more rapidly on to conceptual learning, students are still using them today.

Although worries about AI in education often focus on its use to cheat in writing assignments or expedite reading (poorly), the tools pose just as much trouble for math teaching. An app store search for math games for my children turned up innumerable AI tools for “doing your math homework for you.” And as difficult as it was to reconcile the needs of teachers, students, parents, businesses, and politicians with the calculator, that reconciliation could be even more difficult with AI. The technology continues to change and develop as it is being pushed into homework settings by companies that are actively looking to shortcut learning. When the debate isn’t “teach the basics” versus “use technology to facilitate higher-order thinking,” but rather “use technology to get around thinking” versus “writing is existential,” the analogy with calculators seems strained. Still, a closer look at the contours of the historical calculator debate sheds light on the dynamics of history itself, and the extent to which the technologies we inherit from the past are products of complex contestations that could have, under slightly different social and political conditions, just as easily have turned out differently.

elaine May 22, 2026

Source

Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

The Third Hemisphere: Silicon Valley’s Mythology of Human Amplification

elaine — Thu, 21 May 2026 16:21:08 +0000

The Third Hemisphere: Silicon Valley’s Mythology of Human Amplification

Third Hemisphere art by noted human Matteo Farinella

Welcome to The Third Hemisphere, where I try to make sense of how AI is reshaping work, thinking, and creativity, often by watching my own assumptions get upended.

Today’s essay started with an argument I couldn’t win. A friend asked me what’s actually wrong with using Google Maps anyway, instead of a paper map. I had a strong intuition but not really a strong answer. So I went looking for one, and this essay is the result. Hope you enjoy…

In 1981, a young Steve Jobs—bearded, bespectacled, brown corduroy blazer over an open-collared shirt—sat in front of an Apple II and explained what he thought a personal computer was for. He’d read an article in Scientific American that compared the efficiency of locomotion across species. The condor, he said, came out on top. Humans ranked about a third of the way down, “not too proud a showing for the crown of creation.” But then someone had the insight to test a human on a bicycle, and the cyclist blew the condor away.

“What it really illustrated,” Jobs said, “was man’s ability as a tool maker to fashion a tool that can amplify an inherent ability that he has. And that’s exactly what we think we’re doing.” The computer, he said, was “a 21st century bicycle” for the mind.

Curiously, the original 1973 article on locomotive efficiency makes no mention of a condor, but Jobs’s point is taken. (source, retrieved here)

In the age of AI, Jobs’ quaint bicycle has received an update from Silicon Valley. With the launch of ChatGPT, gushed Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella in early 2023, “We went from the bicycle to the steam engine.” Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn’s CEO, routinely calls AI a “steam engine of the mind” that will usher in a “cognitive industrial revolution.” In a Time magazine article modestly entitled “A Roadmap to AI Utopia,” venture capitalist Vinod Khosla writes that “AI amplifies and multiplies the human brain, much like steam engines once amplified muscle power.”

I find the shift from bicycle to steam engine instructive for the current AI moment.¹ In invoking the steam engine, there’s something about the bicycle that Jobs’s heirs seem to have forgotten. Like another 19th-century invention, the steam locomotive, the bicycle was a technological revolution. But a train traveler sat back and enjoyed the ride, while a cyclist still had to put in effort. With a bicycle, “you are traveling,” wrote a cycling enthusiast in 1878, “not being traveled.”

I think about this distinction a lot: between traveling and being traveled. Bicycles and trains are both technologies that move us from place to place. In that sense, in the sense of their outward function, it’s fine to lump them together. But the comparison falls apart when you consider their effects on the traveler. In terms of effort, a steam engine doesn’t really “amplify an inherent ability.” It replaces it. You sit back and the coal does the work. You arrive, but you’ve been traveled. So one way to look at a technology is how powerful it is, what it can enable humans to do. But an equally important question is what happens to humans when they use the technology.

I’ve started calling this the mythology of amplification—the assumption, buried so deep in Silicon Valley’s rhetoric that it goes unexamined, that its tools merely add capability without subtracting anything meaningful. Some tools really do work this way, or close enough to it. Perhaps the personal computer, in its early days, was one such tool. A true, literal “computer,” a machine that computes. But general-purpose AI, at least as the tech titans envision it, is not like that. And the difference has nothing to do with how powerful the tool is or how impressive its outputs are. It has to do with what the tool asks of you. Whether you travel with it or are being traveled by it.

The rifle and the GPS

I was recently reading an ethnographic study by Claudio Aporta and Eric Higgs,² about GPS adoption among Inuit hunters in Igloolik, a small community in the Canadian Arctic. The Inuit had been navigating that landscape for millenia using methods that took years to learn: reading wind-shaped snowdrifts, tracking animal movements, interpreting tidal patterns, memorizing thousands of place-names passed down through generations. Elders would wake children early and send them outside to report on wind and sky conditions, a practice called anijaaq. The knowledge was hard-won, but it was “perfectly reliable,” as the ethnographers state. The Inuit may have several words for snow,³ but they had zero words for being lost, a concept which, the researchers noted, was “without basis in experience, language, or understanding.”

Figure 3 from the ethnographic study “Satellite Culture: Global Positioning Systems, Inuit Wayfinding, and the Need for a New Account of Technology.” Personally, I would would need chemical augmentation to endure in an environment like this.

When GPS units arrived in the mid-1990s, the Inuit did what they’d done with other new technology: they assessed it, experimented with it, and adapted. This was a culture that had already adopted rifles and snowmobiles. These technologies weren’t neutral: Rifles made hunting more solitary, more distant; snowmobiles were loud and fast, replacing the slow dog-sled travel that had been an ideal context for teaching younger hunters to read the land. With rifles and snowmobiles, the texture of Inuit culture changed. But neither struck at something that the elders felt was fundamental to cultural knowledge and identity. You could hunt differently, travel faster, but you still needed to deeply understand the natural world.

GPS was different. The ethnographers put it bluntly: “For the first time in history the navigator can completely rely on technology and travel successfully knowing nothing about navigation and very little about the environment.” The device didn’t amplify the Inuit’s famous wayfinding skills but bypassed them entirely. This skill erosion had consequences: During a search for an overdue traveler in a blizzard, an elder realized the GPS was leading the party directly toward pressure ridges and dangerous ice. He took over and guided the party using traditional knowledge of the wind and snowdrifts. The GPS had given the correct answer to “where is my destination?” while removing any need to understand the journey.

Most of us will never navigate a blizzard in the Canadian Arctic. But you’ve probably experienced a milder version of this when navigating a new city. If you unfold a paper map, you study the streets, trace a route, convert the bird’s-eye abstraction into the first-person POV of actually walking—and by the time you arrived, you’d have a nascent mental model of how the city fits together. Or you could fire up Google Maps: A blue dot, an optimal line from A to B, a reassuring robotic voice telling you when to turn. You follow, you arrive, you have no idea, really, where you are. A paper map demands something from you, and that demand leaves you with knowledge. GPS requires nothing, and leaves you with nothing. A paper map and GPS are tools with the same purpose, but opposite cognitive consequences.

Neuroscience suggests a mechanism. In one study, participants had their brains scanned while they virtually navigated London streets they’d previously walked. When participants worked out routes themselves, hippocampal activity crescendoed with the complexity of each intersection. When they followed GPS directions, the hippocampus went quiet because there was nothing for it to compute. Neuroscientists Louisa Dahmani and Veronique Bohbot then connected the neurological changes to real-world GPS habits: they tracked drivers over three years and found that GPS use caused subsequent declines in spatial memory. A 2024 meta-analysis of 23 studies confirmed the pattern: GPS use is negatively associated with both environmental knowledge and sense of direction.

With GPS, the stakes are relatively low for most people. But AI tools are now mediating the same trade-off across far more consequential domains: reasoning, analysis, writing, clinical judgment, scientific thinking. I thought about this after Anthropic recently released a small study that reveals how offloading affects skill formation. Researchers had software developers complete coding tasks using a new Python library—some with AI assistance, some without. The AI group finished slightly faster. But when tested afterward on their understanding of the library, they scored 17 percent lower than the control group. The gap was largest on debugging questions: the very skill required to catch AI errors.

Psychologists Elizabeth and Robert Bjork explain why. They distinguish retrieval strength (how easily you access something now) from storage strength (how durably it’s encoded in the brain). Struggling to generate an answer builds storage strength. Being handed the answer builds nothing. As the Bjorks write: “Any time that you, as a learner, look up an answer or have somebody tell or show you something that you could, drawing on current cues and your past knowledge, generate instead, you rob yourself of a powerful learning opportunity.” Just as the Bjorks would have predicted, the AI group in the Anthropic study bypassed the struggle and thus bypassed the learning that came with it.⁴

One Inuit elder, Alianakuluk, put what was happening in his community this way: “The wisdom and knowledge of the Inuit are being diminished with these gadgets.” It might be easy for a Western reader to admire this sentiment from a comfortable distance—to see the Inuit relationship to their landscape as something rare and culturally specific, an interesting testament to human ingenuity but ultimately like studying astronomy with an astrolabe. The Anthropic study should make that distance harder to maintain. Software developers lost measurable comprehension in an hour. The knowledge at stake wasn’t an esoteric art of extreme orienteering. It was a Python library. The mechanism was identical. A tool that bypasses cognitive effort doesn’t care what culture produced the knowledge it’s replacing.⁵

What Silicon Valley is blind to

Artist’s rendition of your hippocampus on GPS (source)

So the Inuit elders could see what Silicon Valley leaders seem unable to grasp: that some tools extend human capability while demanding skill, and others replace the skill entirely. But this raises a question. The elders weren’t uniformly suspicious of technology. They integrated the rifle and the snowmobile. Why could they see the difference when Nadella and Hoffman and Khosla cannot?

Part of the answer is glaringly obvious: tech executives have products to sell. But I don’t think that fully explains it. Return to Steve Jobs for a moment. “Not too proud a showing for the crown of creation.” That phrase slipped out so casually because there’s a deep tradition in the West of treating human limitation as a problem technology exists to solve—you can trace it from Prometheus to Francis Bacon to the singularitarians if you want.6 But I’m not sure you need intellectual history to explain what’s happening here. I think it comes down to something simpler: what you believe effort is for.

The Inuit elders and the Silicon Valley executives are looking at the same phenomenon and seeing different things because they’re asking different questions that come from a different set of values. The executives seem to be asking: what kind of output does this human produce? The elders seem to be asking: what kind of person does using this tool produce?

If output is your only metric, then the steam engine really is just a better bicycle. Both get you from A to B. One gets you there faster with less effort. Case closed. The fact that you arrive having done nothing, learned nothing, built nothing—that’s not a bug, that’s the point. Effort is a cost to be minimized, not a value to be preserved.⁷

But embedded in that worldview is that the journey is merely instrumental. The only thing that matters is arrival. That it doesn’t matter if you travel or are traveled. The Inuit elders seem to operate on a different premise. Arrival, of course, mattered. These were hunters who needed to find caribou and get home alive. But only through the journey could you acquire deep knowledge of the terrain. You couldn’t separate arriving at the destination from what you learned on the way there.

So when Nadella is rhapsodizing away about steam engines, he’s telling you what he values. He values arrival. The faster and more effortless, the better. The passenger who shows up rested and refreshed is, in his framework, strictly better off than the cyclist who shows up tired and sweaty. What he doesn’t seem to care about—what the output-only frame makes invisible—is what happens to the cyclist along the way. The increase in muscle strength, in cardiovascular fitness. The knowledge of the landscape. And, crucially, the capacity to do it again tomorrow, alone, if necessary.

“To choose Inuit wayfinding,” the ethnographers conclude, “becomes increasingly heroic in the face of wayfinding that depends on an advanced technological system.”

“Heroic.” It’s an odd thing to say about basic competence, about knowing where you are and how to get home. But when learning a new skill, or even just maintaining an old one, requires you to opt out of convenience, to refuse assistance, to insist on doing things the slow way, that choice starts to feel like stubbornness or eccentricity or affectation. Try telling someone in the passenger seat that you’d rather not use GPS to find your way around a new town. The social pressure is already there: just use your phone, we’ll get there faster, why are you making this harder than it needs to be.

It may be a losing battle to demand that basic acts of competence don’t require heroism. But I still think it’s worth noticing what assumptions that Silicon Valley’s steam engine metaphor is trying to force us to accept. When bicycles and steam engines get talked about as though they’re the same kind of thing, a concession has already been made: output is all that matters. The cyclist’s legs and lungs and mind are incidental, and the only interesting question is how fast you can get from A to B.

1 If you look closely, the Scientific American chart also includes jet fighters, helicopters, and automobiles, all of which cover far more ground than a bicycle. Jobs could have compared the computer to any of them. He chose the one where the human effort is amplified in constructive, athletic, freeing ways. His heirs chose the machine that makes human effort nearly irrelevant. When Nadella says "we went from the bicycle to the steam engine," it’s not so much an upgrade to the metaphor but a change to the metric. Rather than the efficiency of human movement, it’s simply the distance that a machine can travel.

2 I think I first read about this study in Nicholas Carr’s excellent book, The Glass Cage.

3 Well, sort of

4 The researchers identified six distinct patterns of AI use. Three preserved learning: asking conceptual questions, requesting explanations alongside generated code, or using AI to check understanding after attempting the work. Three undermined it: delegating the task entirely, progressively offloading more work to the AI, or repeatedly asking the AI to debug without trying to understand why. I think this has promising implications for AI tool design, but whether people would actually choose to use tools designed for cognitive engagement is another question.

5 A reasonable response is that this is how technology has always worked. Every wave of automation fiddles with what humans need to know. Factory workers moved from manual labor to supervising machines. Accountants moved from calculation to strategy. The skills change, but things work out. Maybe so. But “worked out” depends entirely on what you’re measuring.

6 Historian David Noble’s The Religion of Technology describes this theological substrate in detail, arguing that the Western technological project has been “literally and historically” suffused with the conviction that advancing knowledge recovers what was lost in Adam and Eve’s Fall.

7 A related assumption is that AI will automate drudgery and free us up for "what matters." I examined this claim in a previous essay on the substitution myth, and found that equilibrium shifts in joint cognitive systems don't work that way. When dishwashers reduced time spent washing dishes, total work didn't decrease but was redistributed in response to economic pressures and social norms. This redistribution had many benefits and some drawbacks, but the point is the freed-up time went where the system's incentives sent it, not necessarily where individuals hoped.

elaine May 21, 2026

Source

The Third Hemisphere

The Education Wars: Students Unite!

elaine — Wed, 20 May 2026 17:30:41 +0000

The Education Wars: Students Unite!

The high school student protests aren't getting enough attention

If you need a bit of inspiration, might I suggest that you spend some time perusing a few stories about the walkouts by middle and high school students that are sweeping the land. Among the most under-covered developments right now, these grassroots protests are bubbling up, well, everywhere. Here’s Nebraska, here’s south Florida, here’s Oklahoma, here’s Baltimore, here’s Utah, here’s Kentuckiana, which, admit it reader, you did not know was really a place. While some of these events have been part of coordinated national protests, most appear to reflect what activists referred to, back in the day, as a ‘prairie fire,’ moving swiftly from school to school.

As for why these students are protesting, I’ll let them explain it. Here’s El Paso, TX junior Sophia Gutierrez, on why she organized one of the walkouts:

It’s heartbreaking to see what ICE agents are doing to students, to kids, to mothers, to fathers across the country. And I’m just so disappointed in the country. Seeing how our democracy is under attack is making me feel hopeless. But these protests have reignited something in me and my peers.

In other words, these students feel exactly the way that so many of us do, and they’re determined to do something about it. There’s also a strong sense that students have to take action because adults are failing to meet the moment. “If an older generation cannot recognize those truths, then let it be the younger generation that takes a stand, makes the right decisions and shows them,” explains Jack McNally, one of hundreds of students in Carmel, Indiana—that would be two hours-ish north of Kentuckiana—who walked from their high school to city hall to protest ICE.

The kids are all right

I’ve been thinking a lot about student protests of late, thanks to an amazing new history of teen activism. The work of scholar Aaron G. Fountain Jr., High School Students Unite! Teen Activism, Education Reform, and FBI Surveillance in Postwar America is a first-of-its kind exploration of the teen-led high school movement that swept the country during the 60’s and 70’s. You can hear my interview with Fountain in the latest episode of my podcast, Have You Heard. As Fountain observed recently:

High school students are organizing politically in ways reminiscent of their counterparts more than 50 years ago. When people think of student activism, they typically picture college campuses. Yet, during the 1960s and 1970s, teenagers built social movements that intersected with broader grassroots struggles and responded to both local and national issues.

Another key overlap between today’s student walkouts and the protests of yore? The freakout by adults, who insist that students are being manipulated by other adults, aka ‘outside agitators.’ As Fountain uncovered by submitting more than 1,000 information requests, student activists back in the day were routinely surveilled by the FBI, local police departments, and military intelligence units. The spying often commenced at the request of the activists’ own parents, like the North Carolina mother who penned a missive to J. Edgar Hoover, warning that the student group her 17-year-old was involved in was likely a Communist front. (Hoover, by the way, got right on it.)

Fast forward to the present and the accusations that student protestors are under the influence of some indoctrinating force are a staple of the right-wing outrage machine. Texas Governor Greg Abbott was quick to lay blame, first at the feet of the state’s teachers, threatening teachers who “facilitate walkouts” with investigations and even the loss of their teaching licenses, then on entire school districts, which now face a loss of funding if the walkouts continue. The deep-pocketed conservative advocacy group, Defending Education, has even identified the devious entity that is secretly pulling the student activists’ strings: the climate change org known as the Sunrise Movement. Spoiler: the group’s ‘real’ agenda is every bit as nefarious as the one that J. Edgar Hoover was out to unmask sixty years ago:

Activists say they’re “fighting fascism,” but their aim is something else entirely: dismantling Western cultural norms and eroding the institutions that hold society together — like orderly conduct and meritocratic standards. The leftist playbook is clear, cold and alarmingly effective.

Not just ICE

One of Fountain’s most insightful observations is that the surge of high school activism in the 60’s and 70’s was never just about the issues themselves: civil rights, racial segregation, and opposition to the Vietnam War. Students were also pushing back against what they saw as the oppressive nature of schooling in America. And the harder adults sought to restrict the students’ political activities, the more the activists questioned whether the Constitution and democracy applied to them. Fountain’s book is filled with vivid examples of students in unlikely places pushing for more freedom within their schools, but I’m going to cite a more recent case. Here’s 17-year-old Angel Chavez questioning Governor Abbott’s efforts to keep Texas students like him from protesting:

It’s really just disheartening to see everything that’s happening and see that just because we’re a minority, they think they could shut our voices down. Just because we go to public school, they think that there’s a new way that they can stop us from speaking out. I’m not a political science major, but this feels unconstitutional.

Students today have reasons-a-plenty to protest. They’re on the receiving end of book bans, limits on what they and their teachers can discuss in school, and restrictions on what kinds of organizations they can join. As Jack Schneider and I document in our book, The Education Wars, Gen Alpha is also the first generation to experience a roll back of their civil rights. Then there is the ‘discourse,’ which has taken a sharply anti-student turn. To quote my recent post: “The kids are dumb and getting dumber. They can’t add or read the books they are no longer assigned, rousing themselves from their stupid stupors only to demand extra time on tests or another (now meaningless) A.” And don’t forget students’ refusal to protest, something their elders were bemoaning just months ago.

Perhaps the most important lesson from High School Students Unite! is on the impact of student protests. As Fountain documents, teens helped turn public opinion against the Vietnam War and led a grassroots movement in support of desegregation. They transformed their own school districts and successfully pushed for expanded student rights. In the process, they learned that action and solidarity are contagious, and that the adults who try to shut them down or shut them up are fighting a losing battle.

The teens who are walking out of school right now are learning these same lessons. And unlike the Vietnam era, when the public was broadly hostile to student protestors, today’s activists start out with the public overwhelmingly on their side. According to a recent poll, 59% of Americans say that the protests against ICE are legitimate; among college graduates, that number rises to 73%. As one political analyst observed, this is the stuff of landslides.

When students in Dekalb County, Georgia planned a walkout last month, they expected 50-100 of their classmates to join in. Instead, 2000 students participated. Organizer Sinnit Siye said students were initially scared to protest, for fear of being targeted by ICE or other enforcement groups:

I saw my friends who were feeling afraid, who were just not feeling okay coming out here. They came out here. Nearly the entire school was here. People who said they were too scared to come, they came because of the numbers.

elaine May 20, 2026

Source

The Education Wars