John Thompson, historian and retired teacher, worries that the latest fads will undermine public education and replace teachers with technology. He’s right to worry. Those are the outcomes that the new crop of reformers actively pursue.

He writes:

I’m frustrated by the need to prepare for this year’s legislature, and the dangers that Oklahoma schools will face. But, too many other states will also be targeted by Trumpist right-wingers. So, I believe we all need to connect the dots and address the potentially existential threats regarding urban education.

The Oklahoma City Public Schools survived the loss of tens of thousands of students due to the “White Flight” of the 1970s, which was a tragic response to racial desegregation. 

It also survived the No Child Left Behind, and the Race to the Top’s test-driven, competition-driven corporate school reforms. It then survived the Pathways to Greatness’ excessive closures of schools, Covid, and the Ryan Walters administration, as well as attacks on students who are immigrants. These challenges dramatically contributed to OKCPS enrollments dropping from 46,172 in 2016 to 35,652 in 2024.

And, due to demographics, it is likely that the district will continue to lose students to the exurbs. As the Bellwether Foundation reports, “Nationally, public school enrollment declined over the past decade and is projected to continue decliningthrough at least fall 2031.” It is “driven by falling birth rates, expanding private school choice programs, and migration trends.”

Our schools have survived decades of underfunding, and they face the threat of SQ 844, which could cut property tax funding, as hundreds of millions of dollars are given to private schools. And like schools across the nation, the OKCPS will have to struggle with social media, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and the so-called “end of reading.”

Moreover, the Oklahoma Voice reported, “the number of graduates completing Oklahoma teacher preparation programs, including college degrees in education, has fallen by about 40% since 2013.” And, “Emergency certified educators, once considered a stop-gap measure, were the most common of all first-year teachers in 2025. And, “They represented 38.8% of teachers in their first year.” And, “So far, they represent 45.5% of 2026 first-year teachers, but state data doesn’t yet reflect the full hiring cycle.” 

I’m worried that the legacies of these challenges and today’s education policies, will do more than undermine reading, and teaching and learning. I’m worried that the Oklahoma Readers Act could create destructive school cultures that push vulnerable school systems over the tipping point.  

I’m struck by the new surge of scholarly research and investigative reporting which reveal the growing harm being done by the politicization of the “Science of Reading,” and the “Mississippi Miracle.”Oklahoma passed the Strong Readers Act based on the unfounded claims that the “Mississippi Marathon” improved students’ reading capacities. In fact, it briefly increased test scores for 4^th graders, but not for 8^th graders, which is evidence that it did not improve reading comprehension.

Yes, there has been a debate over the benefits and harms of retaining students who do not score high enough on tests. But, it is hoped that Mississippi-style investments in tutoring and student supports will minimize the harms. However, a growing body of evidence explains how the politicization of tutoring, turning it into test prep, which is often being conducted by AI (even for kindergarteners), is hurting kids more than was anticipated.

Moreover, since Mississippi failed to increase 8^thgrade test scores, Governor Tate Reeves bragged about expanding policies that raised 4^th grade scores to 8^th grade.  So, what does that look like in middle schools?

A new report in Wired magazine documents the ways that Mississippi’s test-prep drills are degrading teaching and damaging reading. It began with a visit to a class which has:

20 eighth graders enrolled, but only 10 are present; six have been pulled out for remedial work with a consultant the district has hired to boost test scores, and the remaining four are absent for unclear reasons. The students in the room each grab a Chromebook and log in, at speeds ranging from feet-dragging to actively resistant. They open the StudySync software program, which shows them each a series of questions tailored to their weaknesses. Their faces look like they’re being marched to the guillotine.

It explains how the middle school “now begins and ends with screens.” And, “They’re not reading books for the love of books.”

The article ends with the teacher saying that she “can’t think of a single student across her five periods who reads for fun, who considers her class anything beyond an ordeal to be survived.”

And that gets back to the danger that I have long worried about. What will happen if the growing number of experts are right, and the Strong Readers Act undermines schools’ learning cultures from kindergarten to high school? After all, many advocates for the “Miracle” are also calling for a return to the reward-and-punish mindset of NCLB. And it sure sounds like they want to bring back the winners-and-losers, corporate reforms on steroids.

Our urban schools have been beaten down by a range of market-driven mandates, as well as other challenges that are not under their control. What happens when scripted curriculums take more time away from the essential background knowledge that comes from learning history, science, the arts, and critical thinking, and that are essential to reading comprehension. 

What is the result when test-prep undermines the joy of reading; and digital technology increasingly replaces human contact? Will our struggling schools cross over a tipping point?

Will it mean the eras of public education, and reading are coming to an end?        

Joyce Vance, former federal prosecutor for northern Alabama, describes Trump’s renewed effort to block birthright citizenship. His obsession with immigrants is odd, since two of his wives were immigrants. His mother was an immigrant. His children were born before either Ivana or Melania had become a citizen. And Melania’s parents were beneficiaries of chain migration.

The Supreme Court has spoken; birthright citizenship is part of the Constitution. Babies born here, with rare exceptions like one for children born to foreign diplomats, are American citizens regardless of their parents’ immigration status. 

There was an asterisk, of course. We discussed it at the time the decision in Barbara, the birthright citizenship case, came down. The asterisk was the concurrence by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who joined the majority but had different reasons for reaching that result. (For more detail, that piece is here.)

Justice Kavanaugh believes Trump’s executive order ending birthright citizenship violated a federal law—but importantly, not the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. That matters because although Trump can’t amend the Constitution with an executive order, Congress can change laws it has passed. Kavanaugh wasn’t particularly subtle; his opinion was an invitation for Congress to do just that, implying he would then flip sides. Congress, he wrote, could “enact new legislation” that ends automatic citizenship for babies born to people who are “unlawfully or temporarily in the country.”

But apparently Congress doesn’t want to do that, at least not now. 

Barbara did not, however, stop Donald Trump. Thursday, in a pair of Executive Orders that read more like political puff pieces than actual policy, Trump tried, again, to undo birthright citizenship.

The first order is titled “Ending Birth Tourism.” You can find it here.

That’s ironic, since Trump-branded properties in Florida were linked to Russian birth tourism back in 2018, although it appears to have involved people in his buildings leasing their property to birth tourists, with no indication Trump or his businesses were benefiting financially. 

The executive order defines birth tourism as any effort by someone with a nonimmigrant visa to enter the U.S. “for the purpose of giving birth on American soil” or any effort by someone to help such a person enter the United States. It gives the Secretaries of State and Homeland Security the authority to take:

• appropriate action to prevent the entry into the United States of, or the granting of any visa or other travel authorization to, any alien entering or attempting to enter the United States for the purpose of engaging in birth tourism; 
• revoking the visa or travel authorization and permanently barring entry of any alien who enters or attempts to enter the United States for the purpose of engaging in birth tourism.

The Secretaries can also deny entry to or remove any alien from the U.S. if they “previously engaged or plans to engage in birth tourism” and also lets them take “appropriate action” against people and entities that facilitate birth tourism. 

And, of course, there’s a loophole so Trump can still help out his friends. Because there’s always one. The Secretaries, “may exempt a foreign national from actions taken pursuant to this order on humanitarian grounds or when the foreign national’s entry is in the national interest, as determined by the Secretary of State or the Secretary of Homeland Security.” One can only imagine the subtlety with which an administration that gives every appearance of offering pardons for sale could deploy a provision like that to its benefit.

The second executive order has a title so saccharine that you know it must have given Stephen Miller a thrill when he picked it out: Continuing To Protect The Meaning And Value Of American Citizenship.

The EO, which you can read here, purports to take away birthright citizenship “when neither parent of that person (the baby) is a citizen and any of the following applies”:

• “either parent of that person is an alien enemy”. They define “alien enemy” as a member of certain designated terrorist organizations, in other words, a concept so vague as to be applied however the administration chooses to—we all remember the boats blown out of the water on baseless claims that fishermen on them were members of the Tren de Aragua gang, intent on invading the U.S. 
• “either parent of that person is a foreign government employee,” which they define to include traditional exclusions that are recognized to birthright citizenship like foreign ambassadors’ kids or embassy employees who are foreign citizens, but it also includes new categories like “persons employed by an international organization that possess international-organization immunity” or children born to a parent who “engaged in a commercial transaction to purchase or access birthright citizenship for the person, or engaged in fraudulent activity to obtain citizenship,” a concept so poorly designed it could be used to target people the administration wants to while permitting others to retain citizenship. It purports to deny citizenship to babies “born in a territory or territorial waters of the United States where citizenship is not conferred by Federal statute,” perhaps a nod at Justice Kavanaugh as there were four clear votes for the proposition that this is a constitutional right, not a statutory one.

There will, of course, be litigation. The issue of standing, among others, will have to be evaluated, and then the pro-democracy lawyers will go to court. We will find out if Justice Kavanaugh meant it when he said only Congress could change the law, not another, more carefully worded but still unconstitutional directive from the authoritarian in the White House. 

These newest Trump’s executive orders are little more than a performative stunt, a smack back from a narcissist who doesn’t like to be told no, even by the nation’s highest Court, which usually tells him yes. The EO’s seem unlikely to find much love from the lower courts, given the precedent from Barbara that they are obligated to apply. But we do live in the era of the unitary executive and a Supreme Court that panders to that theory, and sometimes to its current personification. So we will watch; we will see how the administration tries to implement its new policies and how the courts respond.

The issue of who gets to be a citizen is too important to be left to the whims of Donald Trump and Stephen Miller. This whole sordid affair exemplifies why we have laws and why it’s important to be a rule of law country. Trump is trying to change the rules that determine who can be an American to suit his own whims. That’s not how a democracy works. We believe in justice and fairness, not kings. No kings. Not on this issue or any other. 

Here at Civil Discourse, we’ll keep following this story long after today’s headlines disappear. If you want to know what happens next, make sure you’re subscribed!

John Thompson, writing from Oklahoma, reviews the research on the “Mississippi Miracle,” the strategies that boosted fourth-grade test scores? Those strategies are now being turned into law in states across the country. John takes another look.

He writes:

When the so-called “Mississippi Miracle” and the “Science of Reading,” became the drivers of the Oklahoma Strong Readers Act, I pointed out the large body of research-based evidence that its advocates ignored. Yes, there was evidence that the so-called “Marathon” could raise 4^th grade test scores, at least in the short-term, but there was little or no evidence that it would do more good than harm. Negative results were even more likely in Oklahoma where our rightwing politics and our minimal amount of funding would drive the experiment.

I also asked experts and journalists about policies that common sense would say violate the norms of social science research. For instance, NAEP tests have been designed to minimize the use of test prep to jack up scores.  And, yes, I was told that there are people looking into that issue.

Being a former academic historian, I would read the way that reformers like Adam Tyner and Rachel Canter track NAEP scores. However, I was dismayed by their interpretations of those patterns. After all, whether laws were passed in 2002 or 2013, those mandates didn’t take effect immediately. If we want to learn what policies worked in what places, we need to identify what was actually happening in schools before we can figure out whether those approaches worked.

And that leads me to “NEPC Review: Inside the Mississippi Marathon” by, Gregory Camilli, Professor Emeritus from Rutgers University. Camilli was extremely precise and diplomatic, when reviewing the Progressive Policy Institute’s, “Inside the Mississippi Marathon,” written by Rachel Canter. He explained that it presents an “insider account of how the K–3 education system in Mississippi evolved over roughly two decades.” But, he “focuses on just a slice of the report: its description of the state’s performance in reading on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), and, to a lesser degree, the policy implementation.”

Camilli reports that Mississippi’s Literacy-Based Promotion Act (LBPA) was passed in 2013, but “full implementation of the various pillars of the LBPA arguably took place in 2017-2019.”

Then he notes that “the PPI report also presents no research literature on [the] effectiveness of the LBPA,” and “it is not presented or intended as a research study.”

The LBPA prioritized the lowest-performing schools. By 2015-16, full literacy support was given to 18% of approximately 700 elementary schools. 

These “designated schools,” were assigned a literacy coach (hired, trained, and monitored by the state)” who modeled and observed instruction. They also received a “reading curriculum that the state had reviewed and approved as consistent with the ‘science of reading.’” 

It was estimated that the time available for administrative duty and travel, and coaching, “may equate to approximately 15-35 minutes per week per teacher.”

So, how could Mississippi’s full LBPA gains provide more than a small contribution to NAEP test score increases? 

Camilli concludes LBPA “most likely had modest impact on NAEP scores due to the relatively small number of students in designated schools and the even smaller number selected for the NAEP sample.”

Conversely, low-performing students in 82% schools were subject to some assessments, and retention, but not the comprehensive supports that were said to be crucial for the Miracle. Camilli explains, “In non-designated schools, LBPA exposure consisted of a modest state-wide bundle of supports including retention screening.”

So, was it the threat of retention that played the largest role in increasing test scores? Or, was it test-prep that improved scores? If so, is there any reason to believe those scores meant reading levels improved? After all, even though Camilli focused on the 4^th grade NAEP scores that “Inside the Mississippi Marathon” emphasized, he noted Mississippi’s failure to improve 8^th grade NAEP reading scores. 

That leads to the question as to whether reading comprehension improved.   

Camilli wrote that threat of retention was a prevalent incentive: 

It could be argued that the threat of retention was the primary treatment for the majority of Mississippi students, because students in non-designated schools received only distal instructional support in the form of teacher training. This threat itself may have caused principals, teachers and students to devote more instructional time and effort to literacy. 

(Distal instructional support means interventions, guidance, or systemic resources delivered remotely, indirectly, or at an organizational level rather than through immediate, face-to-face coaching.)

And, “This threat (of retention) itself may have caused principals, teachers and students to devote more instructional time and effort to literacy.”

Moreover, “the National Assessment Governing Board (NAGB) suggests that in 2015, the MDE revised its state assessment to align more closely with the NAEP assessment.”

Camilli noted the “vast literature on the outcomes and efficacy of test preparation, which is a notoriously controversial topic,” and the way that “it may lead to increases in test scores without enlarging students’ capabilities.”

And that leads to the question as to what was the effect of Mississippi’s use of NAEP materials in order increase its State Proficiency scores. When defending their failure to increase 8^thgrade NAEP reading scores, advocates for the Miracle argue that their scores decreased less than other states. But, it’s possible (or likely) that those Mississippi scores have only declined by 2 points since NCLB became law in 2002 due, in part, to the use of NAEP materials.

On the other hand, from 2019 to 2024, the dubious Mississippi State 8th grade Reading Proficiency rates increased by 6 points, while its NAEP Proficiency scores dropped by 2 points, increasing its State/NAEP Proficiency Gap to 19 points. And the 4th grade gap reached 25 points!   

Those gaps again call into the question about whether Mississippi’s data-driven accountability and mass retentions actually improved reading, as opposed to producing short-lived surges in 4^th grade test scores. And it further calls into question Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeve’s plan to ramp up those policies up until 8^th grade. And I would further ask why Oklahoma should commit to Mississippi’s model, before they can present solid evidence that it has worked.

New reporting and scholarly research, like Dr. Camilli’s, indicate that the so-called “Miracle” is doing even more harm than anticipated. To defend public education, and the joy of reading, we need to better explain to its advocates why the benefits that once seemed possible, and the predictable harms of the “Marathon,” are imposing even greater threats on school cultures. We must also increase our conversations with Democrats and adult Republicans, who have questions about mass retentions of students.

In my experience with education advocates, which I suspect is similiar to education supporters in many Red states, they knew that legislation based on Mississippi’s experiment was bound to become law. So, they focused (usually unsuccessfully) on providing more social supports, like high-dosage tutoring, and better funding in order to provide human contacts, where students would be seen as persons, not test scores.   
But, now we must focus on the damage that we now know is being inflicted on K-12 education in Mississippi, and push back against those policies in our states.

Some years back, I was invited to lecture at Notre Dame University. My views of charter schools and vouchers were well known. I wasn’t sure how to frame my critique of school choice at this great Catholic university. When I spoke, I warned that public support for vouchers might eventually lead to public accountability, meaning regulations. Independence, I argued, mattered more than money.

I doubt that anyone who believes in vouchers for religious schools changed their mind. But I was treated with great warmth and appreciation. Notre Dame is simply an awesome university.

At the time, I couldn’t imagine that the federal government would ever adopt a voucher program.

Yet here we are, and Peter Greene has a warning for private schools.

He wrote in Forbes:

State level school vouchers have enjoyed a period of growth largely free from regulation and oversight, but the advent of federal vouchers has the potential to change that. 

Most states have voucher laws that explicitly forbid the state from interfering in any way with how a voucher-receiving school conducts business. Education Savings Account style vouchers provide parents with a grant of funding they can spend on many sorts of education-related expenses, but again, these programs often come with little oversight. As the Florida Department of Education announces on their website:

The Florida Department of Education does not have jurisdiction over private schools. Legislative intent not to regulate, control, approve, or accredit private educational institutions, churches, their ministries, religious instruction, freedoms, or rites, is explicit. The owners of private elementary and secondary schools in Florida are solely responsible for all aspects of their educational programs,

The One Big Beautiful Bill created a federal voucher program, a program that may help further the goal of pushing voucher programs into states that have resisted vouchers. Yet those states may move to insure that federal vouchers do not bring with them the fraud and abuse seen in other states.

In Arkansas, the LEARNS Act allowed students to qualify for a voucher for students with disabilities with nothing more than a note from a doctor.Jennifer Smith Richards and Jodi S. Cohen reported for ProPublica on a private school that had students attack a fellow student, under the direction of a school leader whose only qualification is a degree in occupational therapy. Arkansas does not review private school curriculum or the qualifications of the school leaders; anyone is free to open a private school.

In Florida, ProPublica found that the state of Florida had stripped a teacher of her license for sexual abuse of a 16-tear-old boy a decade ago, then, last year allowed her to open a private school. 

Arizona’s taxpayer-funded school vouchers have been plagued with reports of misuse. State auditors found in 2018 that $700K in voucher money being spent on cosmetics, clothing, and other inappropriate items. Craig Harris reported at 12News that the level of fraud and unallowable purchases was not the 1% declared by voucher supporters like state Schools Chief Tom Horne, but closer to 20%. According to the Department of Education’s own records, of 385,000 purchases made with voucher dollars, 84,000 violated the rules governing what is allowed.

When Harris followed up in 2025, he found voucher money still being spent on a variety of items such as iPhones, smart TVs, jewelry, hotel stays, airline tickets, diapers, gift cards, lingerie, and other unallowable expenses. In November 2025, the Department of Education began automatically approving all voucher spending requests because it had become swamped with a backlog of such requests.

Utah’s brand new program was just audited, with Carmen Nesbitt reporting for the Salt Lake Tribune that some spending was found to be “wasteful and extravagant.”

Utah has already added some guardrails to its program, and other states are also seeing a push for greater accountability and transparency. In Arizona, a proposed ballot initiative will likely call for greater accountability for the state’s voucher program. In Pennsylvania, the House passed a bill that left voucher funding untouched, but add transparency and accountability. 

State Rep. Matt Bradford said, “No one should ever fear transparency,” and has argued for more oversight, according to Maddie Hanna and Gillian McGoldrick at the Philadelphia Inquirer. 

Vouchers also bring with them questions of taxpayer-funded schools that pick and choose which students to accept, what Kevin Welner, director of the National Education Policy Center has called an “outsourcing of discrimination.” Voucher-funded schools have, in some states, reserved the right to reject students for coming from homes have an atmosphere “that is counter to or in opposition to the biblical lifestyle.” There are also examples of schools that reject students with academic or behavioral struggles. There are at least two cases currently working through the courts that seek to establish a private school entitlement to state funding even as they violate the state’s laws forbidding discrimination against LGBTQ persons.

All of this serves as an indication to governors considering signing on for the federal voucher system may want to make sure that they put legislative guardrails in place to protect both the academic integrity of the education system as well as the rights of marginalized student communities. 

Some voucher supporters are already anticipating that outcome. It would not be the first time; as Jennifer Berkshire reported in In These Times, some of the strongest opponents to Governor Greg Abbott’s Texas school vouchers were conservatives, who see in vouchers a way for government to extend control over schools. 

That may go double for federal vouchers. Writes American Enterprise Institute fellow Daniel Buck,“The greatest risk in my mind is that in time this program will become a stick that the federal government can wield to thwack private schools into submission.”

Yet currently, there are no sticks attached to the federal voucher program. When Governor Tony Evers vetoed the Wisconsin legislature’s attempt to force participation in the federal voucher program, he stated

This nationwide voucher program has no student achievement metrics, no school accountability measures, no minimum or maximum scholarship size, no certain end date, and no cap on how much the federal government can spend. Republicans in Washington have given private voucher expansion carte blanche to run roughshod over public education in this country — and a blank check to do so at taxpayer expense, clearly without any regard for whether it actually does what is best for kids.

School vouchers occupy a unique policy position; no voucher program has ever been put into place by the voters. Instead, these programs have always been installed by legislatures working around the voters. Now the federal government has launched a voucher program by making an end run around state legislatures. It will be up to those legislatures to install guard rails to protect the interest of their taxpayers and students. 

Audrey Watters says in this post that she never wanted to be the Cassandra of Ed-tech, but she can’t help herself. There are simply too many for-profit phonies that are coming on to the market and too many dupes willing to buy them.

She writes on her blog “Second Breakfast”:

“The future is here. It’s just not very evenly distributed.” This quotation, attributed to science fiction author William Gibson, is often used to imply that some lucky few, particularly those surrounded by silicon gadgetry, live in some glorious high-tech promised land; while the rest of us, without access to that machinery, remain stuck in an industrial, even pre-industrial past.

That always strikes me as a huge misread — not just of the fictional tomorrows that Gibson has imagined, but of the realities of various technologies today. The uneven distribution isn’t simply about the “haves” and “have-nots” of the latest in fancy consumer electronics. Rather, it’s about what sorts of possibilities, what sorts of agency, what sorts of freedoms these technologies might afford us. Who even gets to have a future.

“The future is here” — and let’s just say that “the future” is some sort of automated classroom – what exactly does it look like? What’s the distribution of that future? And for the community in and around that classroom, what sort of future, whose future, does the robot teacher enable?

“The future is here.” Or at least, some version of a rather Gibson-esque dystopia looms threateningly: “Rural NY School District Will Be One of First to Bring Humanoid Robot Into Classroom,” Melissa Manno reported this week for New York Focus. The Salamanca City Central School District, located on the Seneca Nation reservation, has agreed to purchase a robot from Realbotix for use in the upcoming school year. “The female robot, named Sally, will have a “lifelike appearance” with silicone skin and long brown hair. … Students will use a unique identification code when interacting with the robot during class, allowing it to access their learning data and provide personalized support based on their past communication with the avatar, [Realbotix CEO Andrew] Kiguel said. ‘They’ll be able to say, “Hey, I’m student number 1234,” and then the robot will be like, “Hey, we were talking about this yesterday, do you want to continue that conversation?”’

“Hey, I’m student number 1234” – number 1234 in a district where about 80% of the students are classified as “economically disadvantaged” and almost 32% live in poverty. Number 1234 in a district where 32% of students identify as indigenous. Uneven distribution indeed.

And Sally, ah Sally. Sally “will be stationary in a seated position but have a wide range of upper-body movements and facial expressions.” The district reportedly will pay $57,590 for the robot, which “unlike other Realbotix robots … will not have advanced features such as facial recognition and recording.” Realbotix, “previously known as Tokens.com,” Kotaku’s John Walker informs us, “a crypto company that has since pivoted to the latest fad, after purchasing sex doll maker Simulacra.”

Realbotix, for its part, insists that this new education-focused product and the old, sex companion robot RealDoll “do not share employees, payroll, physical locations, or technology.” But as robotics researcher Julie Walker notes on Bluesky, “a ‘teacher’ robot built by a company whose core embodiment expertise is companion and sex robots is going to carry that design logic into the classroom, whether anyone intends it or not.” And as all the AI-in-education evangelists keep insisting – and have insisted now for one hundred years – the automation of the classroom means that the teacher can focus more on caring for her students, the very gendered practices that these robots (both embodied and as chatbots) also promise.

“We anticipate benefits we cannot yet fully foresee,” the Realbotix press release insists. It gestures at a future that’s both here and not-yet-so. What’s being distributed unevenly in this future isn’t simply gadgetry: it’s surveillance, ideology, racism, patriarchy, control. Dystopia. The sexbot just embodies, makes explicit, what’s a more subtle message encoded into the rest of AI-in-education.

The future that’s promised is a return to some imagined, idyllic past, others try to tell us. “Bring back testing,” we hear over and over and over, as though the polycrises faced by schools and students and communities are because too many people balked at bubble-sheets.

“The Debate Over Standardized Testing Is About to Converge With Two Scary On-Campus Realities” Nick Ripatrazone writes in Slate. Those scary realities that demand a return to more standardized testing and, by extension, better “standards,” he implies. The latest college students – those who’ve somehow made it to campus without adequate SAT scores – simply aren’t “college-ready,” he argues. “Already hampered with budgets cuts and bloated class sizes, professors will now regularly be tasked with remedial instruction in all subject areas, not merely in unique situations. Without standardized testing as a reasonable barometer of student skill, colleges will be flooded with students of unknown abilities. American higher education might not be able to withstand such a crisis.”

And of course, plenty of the pressures to keep and expand testing don’t simply come from the tsk-tsking professoriate or contributors to The Atlantic. They come from tech companies, who’ve profited from the push to digitize not just teaching but testing. (These two are, as education psychologists insisted a century ago, inseparable – that is, if you see the classroom as simply a laboratory where students can be trained and tracked and measured like mice in mazes.)

Meanwhile…

“Teachers save time with AI. Their students may pay the price,” Jill Barshay reports. (I’m not sure I really even believe the “save time” bit, to be honest.)

“The End of Homework? Teachers Grapple With Cheating in the Age of AI” by Greg Toppo. (Obligatory reminder: Generative AI is itself built on data theft and plagiarism. It’s pretty rich to expect young people to look at a world rife with fraud and exploitation and then notcheat. These are the values one implicitly encourage when one tells them they must use “AI” to secure their future.)

“To AI-Proof Lawyers, Some Law Schools Restrict Technology,” Kathryn Palmer writes.

I’m willing to retire the “ed-tech’s Cassandra” title – trust me, I’ve never really wanted it – because damn, I would not have predicted that Colin Kaepernick, of all people, would become an ed-tech villain. And yet here we are, with Kaepernick and his AI company Lumi Story AI engaged in some awfully shady shit across multiple school districts.

I mean, it’s bad enough to sell schools a product in which students’ imagination is co-opted and corralled by “AI.” But to use his celebrity as a marketing gimmick to quite literally buy students’ and shape superintendents’ support is pretty gross.

Back in May, 404 Media wrote, in horror, that “Researchers Wanted Preschool Teachers to Wear Cameras to Train AI.” Parents too were angry that their children might be recorded – audio and video – in order to “develop and evaluate AI models for assessing classroom interaction quality.” What about privacy protections? How would this data be used? What rights did families have to consent or to refuse, and what would be the implications of the latter – that is, how would those children who opted out retain access to their classmates and teachers?

None of these sorts of questions come up in a similar sort of research scenario, described in a story this week in The 74– a reminder that too often, education technology journalism gets far too excited about the education technology at the expense of the very humans involved: “Nebraska Head Starts Use Vests With ‘Talk Pedometers’ to Boost Early Literacy.” In this particular project, preschoolers’ conversations are recorded; their vocalizations quantified, analyzed. But here, rather than a privacy invasion, the technology is framed as a superpower.

The reference to the pedometer in the headline should immediately give us pause because those fitness devices sold the world on the importance of “10,000 steps” – a figure that was always more about marketing than an indicator of some threshold for actual health. (Indeed, the “30 million word gap” is a problematic and questionable framing in and of itself.)

To finish the post, open the link.

Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education, wrote about the harm that charters and vouchers are inflicting on public schools. Her article appeared in The Progressive.

It begins:

‘School Choice’ Does Not Provide Better Education for All Families

Voucher and charter school programs are taking funds that could make our public schools stronger.

Please open the link as I cannot copy the article.

https://progressive.org/public-schools-advocate/school-choice-does-not-provide-better-education-for-all-families-burris-20260724/