John Merrow: AI Didn’t Kill Writing. The Testing Regime is the Culprit!

By dianeravitch
May 12, 2026 //
6

John Merrow was the education correspondent for the PBS Newshour for many years. Some people never forgave him for his many episodes lionizing Michelle Rhee. I forgave him when he filmed a final episode thoroughly exposing her cruel methods and her indifference to allegations of cheating.

John’s latest post seeks to correct the record, with reference to Dana Goldstein’s article in The New York Times blaming AI (artificial intelligence) for killing the teaching of writing.

No, says John, AI didn’t do it. Our hyper-focus on standardized testing and standardized writing and standardized thinking did it.

He writes:

This week the New York Times turned over a significant portion of its front page to a long piece headlined “How A.I. Killed Student Writing (And Revived It).”

In the piece, the usually reliable Dana Goldstein puts forth sweeping generalizations based on what about 400 teachers volunteered. This, in a nation with nearly 4 million public school teachers and another 1.5 million college faculty! Granted, most of these 5.5 million teachers probably aren’t teaching writing, but relying on self-selected sources seems dubious, especially for the front page. What we learn is that a few creative and dedicated teachers, frustrated by their students’ reliance on A.I., are having the kids write in class, on paper, with pens or pencils. That’s not really news, although Goldstein, a very good writer, brings their stories to life…and may make you wish you could be in their classes.

More than a year earlier Ben Cohen reported about the dramatic rise in the sale of ‘blue books’ on college campuses: Sales of blue books this school year were up more than 30% at Texas A&M University and nearly 50% at the University of Florida. The improbable growth was even more impressive at the University of California, Berkeley. Over the past two academic years, blue-book sales at the Cal Student Store were up 80%.

Both of these news reports hang on the same premise: Student writing is dead, and A.I. is the killer. I think that’s flat out false. Our obsession with test scores and our prioritizing quantity over quality are the culprits. Most education systems stopped trying to teach writing back when Artificial Intelligence was the stuff of science fiction, unfortunately. Playing up to politicians, the education bureaucrats (who generally don’t trust teachers) decided to ‘raise standards,’ which to them meant having students write more papers and read more books and plays. Any suggestion that writing one outstanding paper would be better than six or a dozen so-so papers fell on deaf ears.

And because writing skills can’t be tested by a machine, why bother? Since we don’t trust teachers, it would be foolish to rely on their evaluation of their students’ writing skills.

Happily, I know in my bones that lots of teachers have not given up. A quick Google search turns up a treasure trove of ideas for improving student writing, starting in the elementary years. Writing thank you notes, keeping a journal, and so on. Here’s one I think you will enjoy (and might want to share with teachers in your world).

It’s not semantics to assert that the goal is to develop writers, not “teach writing.” That’s an important distinction.

So what can teachers who want to develop writers in their classes do in 2026? First of all, take a deep breath because we’ve been through this before–back when the internet emerged. Soon some students discovered that they could download papers and submit them as their own. Next came profit-making companies offering papers written to order. While small-minded bureaucrats thought they could win that struggle by spending millions on technology that supposedly could scan papers and detect plagiarism, thoughtful teachers won that struggle by 1) reducing the number of papers assigned, and 2 )working with individual students as they developed their ideas and wrote drafts. It’s harder to cheat when the teacher is overseeing the process and when kids are writing about something they genuinely care about.

What’s called for now is emulating what my high school English teacher, William Sullivan, did nearly 70 years ago. Two or three times every week he would tell us to clear our desks of everything except for a single sheet of paper and a pencil. What followed was what he called a “2-8-2,” meaning that we had two minutes to think–no writing allowed–followed by eight minutes to write, and then two more minutes to read what we had written and correct any errors. He would put our writing assignment on the blackboard. Sometimes we would have to include a certain sentence, such as “I wish I had missed that train.” Or “I still wish I hadn’t missed that flight.”

Even today I still remember one particular assignment: “Turn out the light; I don’t want to go home in the dark,” which Mr. Sullivan told us were the dying words of William Sydney Porter and challenged us to explain the contradiction. After we turned in our papers, Mr. Sullivan told us that we knew William Sydney Porter as the writer O. Henry.

(Fun fact: Some forty or fifty years later I discovered that Porter actually did not contradict himself. His dying words were “Turn up the lights. I don’t want to go home in the dark.” Apparently Mr. Sullivan changed his words to create a challenging paradox for us to try to explain.)

Although I went to a private school with small classes and privileged students, Mr. Sullivan’s approach can work at all levels. I know this to be true because I taught working-class kids in a public high school, first generation African American college students in an HBCU, and young men serving sentences in a federal prison.

I used Mr. Sullivan’s “2-8-2” all the time. I got to know my students’ writing, and I’m convinced that their writing skills improved. They became writers, confident in their voices.

Frequent in-class writing worked then, and it should work in the age of Artificial Intelligence and with all the other ‘advances’ in our future.

However, policymakers and administrators have to behave sensibly and understand that ‘less is more.’ That means smaller classes, fewer students per teacher, and heightened trust in teachers. Those shouldn’t be a bridge too far, if we really want our young people to be thoughtful and capable citizens.

You can stop here if you wish. What follows is the story of my own dabbling in A.I., printed in my blog in April 2023, more than three years ago.

If you’re at all like me, you’re curious about Artificial Intelligence and new applications like ChatGPT and Bard. The brilliant Thomas Friedman of the New York Times says the world will never be the same again, but my interest is narrower: If students can simply ask Bard or ChatGPT to write their papers for them, how can teachers prevent this?

So, naturally, I turned to Bard, which told me (within seconds) that, while it can help students generate ideas, do research, improve their writing, and learn about different writing genres, it’s not supposed to be a substitute for original research and writing. Then it warned me to “Monitor students’ use of Bard to make sure that they are not plagiarizing or engaging in other forms of academic misconduct.”

Yeah, right. If I’m teaching English in a public high school, I probably have between 100 and 125 students! There aren’t enough hours in the day….

Second question: Can Bard help identify cheaters and plagiarists? Within seconds, I received an answer:

“There are a few things you can look for to tell the difference between original writing and prose provided by Bard.

  • Original writing is typically more creative and original than prose provided by Bard. Bard is trained on a massive dataset of text, so it can be very good at generating text that is grammatically correct and factually accurate. However, it is not always able to generate text that is creative or original.
  • Original writing is typically more personal and engaging than prose provided by Bard. Bard is a machine learning model, so it does not have the same level of understanding of human emotions and experiences as a human writer. As a result, its writing can be dry and impersonal.
  • Original writing is typically more nuanced and complex than prose provided by Bard. Bard is a large language model, but it is still under development. As a result, it can sometimes struggle to understand the nuances of human language. This can lead to writing that is simplistic or even nonsensical.

……

  • Ask yourself if the writing sounds like it was written by a human. Bard-generated text can sometimes sound robotic or unnatural. Original writing should sound like it was written by a human.

To put this the test, I gave Bard the following task:

I am one of six children, the second oldest and the first-born son. We grew up on a small farm with chickens, a few cows, a few pigs, and one goat. I’m now 81. Please write a short memoir of no more than 200 words about my childhood.

Within seconds, Bard spit out this:

“I was born in 1942, the second oldest of six children. We grew up on a small farm in the Midwest. My father worked hard to provide for our family, and my mother took care of the house and the children. We didn’t have much money, but we were happy.

I loved growing up on the farm. I spent my days playing with my siblings, helping my father with the chores, and exploring the woods behind our house. We had chickens, a few cows, a few pigs, and one goat. I loved taking care of the animals, and I learned a lot about hard work and responsibility.

I also learned a lot about nature on the farm. I spent hours watching the birds and the animals, and I learned to identify all the different plants. I loved being surrounded by nature, and it helped me to appreciate the beauty of the world.

I had a wonderful childhood on the farm. It was a time of innocence and discovery, and I will always cherish those memories.

Now that I am 81 years old, I still look back on my childhood with fondness. I am grateful for the opportunities I had, and I am proud of the person I have become. I know that my experiences on the farm helped to shape me into the man I am today.

Boring, and also wrong, and so I responded:

This is inaccurate. I was born in 1941, and our farm was in Connecticut. Worse, however, it does not capture either the small pleasures of collecting the eggs every morning or learning to milk cows, and it also does not capture the deep pain of watching a pig or steer that I raised being slaughtered. Please rewrite.

In just a few seconds, Bard responded by adding a few paragraphs, highlighted below to make it easier for you to read: “Sure, here is a more accurate and detailed memoir:

I was born in 1941, the second oldest of six children. We grew up on a small farm in Connecticut. My father worked hard to provide for our family, and my mother took care of the house and the children. We didn’t have much money, but we were happy.

I loved growing up on the farm. I spent my days playing with my siblings, helping my father with the chores, and exploring the woods behind our house. We had chickens, a few cows, a few pigs, and one goat. I loved taking care of the animals, and I learned a lot about hard work and responsibility.

I also learned a lot about nature on the farm. I spent hours watching the birds and the animals, and I learned to identify all the different plants. I loved being surrounded by nature, and it helped me to appreciate the beauty of the world.

One of my favorite things to do was collect the eggs every morning. I would wake up early and go to the chicken coop, where I would find a dozen or so eggs waiting for me. I would carefully collect the eggs and put them in a basket, then bring them back to the house. My mother would use the eggs to make breakfast, and I would always get to eat one of the freshest eggs in the world.

Another thing I loved to do was milk the cows. I would go to the barn in the evening and bring the cows into the milking parlor. I would sit on a stool and milk each cow in turn, collecting the milk in a bucket. The milk would then be used to make butter, cheese, and ice cream.

Of course, there were also some challenges growing up on a farm. One of the hardest things was watching the animals being slaughtered. I knew that it was necessary to eat meat, but I still felt bad for the animals. I would often cry when I saw them being killed.

Overall, though, I had a wonderful childhood on the farm. It was a time of innocence and discovery, and I will always cherish those memories. I am grateful for the opportunities I had, and I am proud of the person I have become. I know that my experiences on the farm helped to shape me into the man I am today.

OK, but even with this information, the writing remains pedestrian and without emotion. Human writers would know not to begin with their birthday, for one thing. They might lead with a sentence designed to keep the reader’s interest. Something like, “70 years later, at age 81, I can still hear the terrified squealing of the hog as it was strung up by its hind feet to be slaughtered….”

John Merrow

former Education Correspondent, PBS NewsHour

My blog: themerrowreport.com

“I don’t want to BE old when I am old.”  Jack LaLanne

Categories Literacy, Teachers and Teaching, Technology

Trump Gives No-Bid Contract to Paint the Historic Reflecting Pool Blue

By dianeravitch
May 11, 2026 //
24

Trump must spend a lot of time redesigning the nation’s Capitol. Tearing down the East Wing, without asking anyone’s permission; building a “triumphal arch” that will tower over the area; paving over the Rose Garden installed by First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy; turning the historic White House Treaty Room, where important documents were signed, into a guest bedroom.

He is treating the White House as if it were his private property, when in fact he has a four-year lease on a historic home.

His latest project is to drain and repaint the reflecting pool that connects the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial. He decided that the pool should be painted swimming pool blue. It’s been drained and the painting has begun.

The contract was awarded without competitive bids. Trump chose a swimming pool contractor who worked on the pool at one of his clubs.

Trump seems to think that he can do whatever he wants, without regard to law, tradition, or rules. Not for him!

Here is a gift article describing the situation.

At least, he didn’t paint it gold!

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Ethics, Extremism, Trump

Nancy Bailey: Robert Sweet and the Making of the “Science of Reading”

By dianeravitch
May 11, 2026 //
11

Retired teacher Nancy Bailey wrote on her blog about significant figures in the evolution of the history of reading. In this post, she focuses on the role of Robert Sweet, an important figure in the Department of Edication during the Reagan-Bush era.

Bailey writes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

Gursky, D. (1981, August 1). After The Reign Of Dick And Jane. Education Week, Retrieved from https://www.edweek.org/education/after-the-reign-of-dick-and-jane/1991/08

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

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

Categories Curriculum, Education Industry, Literacy, NCLB (No Child Left Behind)

Peter Greene: Colorado Governor Endorses Schools That Discriminate

By dianeravitch
May 11, 2026 //
5

Peter Greene knows the dirty little secret about vouchers: schools choose, families don’t.

Not only do private and religious schools choose their students, they are free to discriminate against students because of their race, religion, sexual preference, disability, or for any other reason. A religious school can exclude students who are not of the same faith. Any private school may exclude gay students or straight students if their parents are gay.

Governor Jared Polis of Colorado is openly gay, but he embraced Trump’s federal vouchers, which subsidizes private schools that discriminate against him and his children.

He is the first Democratic Governor to sign on to the Trump-McMahon voucher plan. They both hate public schools and are doing their best to defund them. Polis is willing to go along.

Now, New York Governor Kathy Hochul is interested in following Polis’s lead. She thinks that she will win the votes of Orthodox Jews by letting the state pay their tuition. This is truly outrageous for two reasons:

  1. The Orthodox Jews vote Republican. Hochul’s gift won’t change their behavior.
  2. The Orthodox schools have been called out repeatedly for refusing to teach the state curriculum, for teaching students primarily in Hebrew, not English, and for delivering a sub-par education.

Governor Hochul should be ashamed of herself.

Governor Polis, on the other hand, has a long history of disdaining public schools. He personally founded two charter schools.

And on a historical note, I had a personal encounter with Polis in 2010, when he was a member of Congress. I was invited by Representative Rosa DeLauro to meet with the Democratic members of the House Education Committee and discuss my book The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education.

When I finished speaking, then-Rep. Polis announced that my book was “the worst book he had ever read” and tossed it across the table at me. He demanded his money back. Another member of Congress pulled out $20 and bought Polis’s copy of my book.

Categories Bigotry, Budget Cuts, Education Industry, School Choice, Trump, Vouchers

Trump’s “National Garden of Heroes”

By dianeravitch
May 8, 2026 //
9

In Donald Trump’s eagerness to leave his mark on the nation’s Capitol, he has launched numerous renovations and new projects. His gaudy ballroom is his heart’s desire, but he also loves his triumphal arch towering over the District.

And then there’s his plan for a “national garden of heroes.”

Present plans include about 250 statues. Here is his list of honorees.

Categories Trump

John Thompson: Can We Control AI or Will It Control Us?

By dianeravitch
May 8, 2026 //
9

John Thompson, retired teacher and historian, knows that we are at a fork in the road with artificial intelligence: Will it control us or will we control it? The evolution and implementation of AI is driven by corpirations making huge investments and seeking huge profits. The well-being of children is not their uppermost goal.

He writes:

My head has been spinning since I attended the University of Oklahoma’s “Applied A.I. in the Workplace seminar.”

The session began with O.U.’s Dr. Shishir Shah who provided a detailed history of machine learning, starting with the 1940’s. Dr. Shah went into the nuances of the phases of A.I.  It culminated in today’s period of “Human Alignment” with its exploding data bases. He says that we’re entering an era where we don’t ask whether machines “think,” but what will A.I.  learn next.

In conversations with Dr. Shah, I was especially impressed with his insights into public education, and what we would need to do to prepare students for the 21st century. He also said:

As both Dr. Ali and Dr. Jones indicated, we all have to engage in open and transparent discussions about AI and its uses.  This will help improve our understanding of its potential impacts, which then can help shape appropriate guidelines, standards, and policies.  Engagement is important.

Then Dr. Kyle Jones, who leads field engineering for “Databricks,” warned that anything you think you know about A.I. changes in 6 months. Dr. Jones described a number of ways that A.I. provides useful results. But, he added that A.I. is making things easier for robots, and then asked, “What about human beings?”

Dr. Jones also questioned the role of corporate profits in rapidly expanding A.I.   

Then, Dr. Asim Ali, from Auburn University, explained that private investment in A.I. is dominated by the U.S., but we need international solutions, and more regulations. He focused on the recent history of A.I increasing, declining, and returning to growth as it approaches long-term growth. For instance, he used Anthropic’s “Claude” chatbot for an example of what’s possible, as well as its major shortcomings.

Dr. Ali advocates for engaging conversations about A.I. and its uses; if we are “passive about A.I., the future with AI will not be one we like.”  

He also reported on “the low likelihood that we will have [A.I.] Superintelligence anytime soon, but that there’s value in discussing a future with Superintelligence because it challenges us to determine our values when using AI and wrestle with the potential negative outcomes for human society.”

That brings me from the various, nuanced history and possible futures they explained to the more complicated paths towards minimizing the harms of A.I.  They offered complex appraisals of multiple paths forward. Perhaps we could refine technocratic skills to program A.I. so it doesn’t turn on humans. Or should we try to launch A.I. so that it then learns how to protect and make a better world for humans?

And, yes, companies want us to use more data, despite the environmental damage that results.   But shouldn’t we ask whether our rampant use of digital tools and social media is meaningful enough to justify the harms done by data centers? 

And, shouldn’t we do a better job of teaching critical thinking?

So, when I drove home from those sessions, my plan was to first reread my notes and to deepen my understanding of their research.  But, the first thing I found in my mailbox was Jill Lepore’s “We, The Robots.”

And Lepore’s opening sentence was a quote from Geoffrey Hinton, a “Nobel Prize-winning godfather of A.I.” “’Unless you can be very sure that it’s not going to kill you when you grow up, you should worry.’”

Lepore asks Daniel Roher, the director of the documentary “The A.I. Doc,” which quotes an A.I. insider who says, “I know people who work on A.I. risk who don’t expect their children to make it to high school.”

Roher further explains that the government has “abdicated the regulation of artificial Intelligence, just as it failed to pass any meaningful legislation regarding social media.” 

Lepore uses  Anthropic’s “Claude’s,” effort to create an A.I. “Constitution” as a “trying” example of the problems with A.I,  during a time when President Donald Trump is attacking the American Constitution. 

And, she asks whether Anthropic’s efforts are designed to “move toward human participation and democratic governance instead of relying on what appears to be technocratic automatism.” 

Lepore recalled reasons for hope when OpenAI formed a “Superalignment team” and President Joe Biden issued an executive order “calling for Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence.  But “In Trumpworld, this was the equivalent of DEI for computers.”

And that brings me back to the O.U. seminar. I don’t know enough to compare and contrast its experts’ detailed findings on A.I. with those of the experts Jill Lepore drew upon. I heard them as being less pessimistic, emphasizing the long histories of challenges that humans have overcome. But, I believe the biggest difference between them is the tone of their analyses. 

For instance, Dr. Jones told me, “There is no single inevitable path that A.I. will follow. As humans we have free will and we get to choose.  So, his “response is to engage with this, rather than ignore it and hope for the best. After all, hope is not a strategy.” 

Categories Ethics, For-Profit, Technology

Denny Taylor: The Science of Reading is Behaviorism in a Digital Wrapper, Funded by For-Profit Corporations

By dianeravitch
May 8, 2026 //
35

Denny Taylor, a distinguished scholar in the teaching of literacy, has done impressive research to identify the origins of the “science of reading.” The roots of this latest fad are deeply entwined in the work of behaviorist Edward Thorndike. She explains how one view of literacy got embedded in the report of the National Reading Panel. Other views, other research was excluded.

It’s a fascinating article.

She writes:

This Substack post documents how George Bush and the Texas Business Council took control of how children are taught to read through their alignment with Reid Lyon and reading researchers on the Thorndike-Skinner-Engelmann-Carnine, stimulus-response, operant conditioning continuum, and delivered American children to technology companies, owned by hedge funds and private equity firms that capitalize on the profits of adaptive AI technology that constantly evaluates a child’s performance to adjust their instruction in real-time.

The post provides the historic foundations of how the integration of real-time adaptive AI into K-3 reading programs marks a shift from education as a social exchange to a closed-loop feedback system between child and machine. In future Substack posts I will focus on how this dynamic reshapes the learning process into a form of “distributed cognition,” where the boundaries between human and artificial thought – the child and the machine begin to blur.

**

Taylor then goes on to document the relationship between Reid Lyon and George W. Bush in the late 1990s. From 1992 to 2005, Lyon served as  the Chief of the Child Development and Behavior Branch within the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development at the National Institutes of Health. He met up with Texas Governor George W. Bush and persuaded him that he had the key to reading success. Bush became a true believer in Lyon’s ideas and embedded them in No Child Left Behind after he was elected President in 2000.

In 1997, Lyon created the National Reading Panel, whose research leaned strongly towards one side of the “reading wars.”

Taylor narrates a historical account that should interest anyone interested in the origins of the “science of reading.”

She concludes:

The damage to the American public school system is extreme and for children the Science of Reading laws are catastrophic. The state laws that have been passed mandate beginning reading instruction in public schools that is developmentally inappropriate, and children’s health and wellbeing, as well as their academic development are at risk. The digitization of reading instruction exponentially compounds the risks.

For children in crisis in America the situation is dire, and we must respond. There is substantial evidence that between 60%and 70% of children in U.S. public schools have had Adverse Childhood Experiences and many of these children are coping with ongoing toxic stress which is compounded by 45 state lawswhich mandate state approved “Science of Reading” programs and excessive standardized assessments developed by technology companies owned by hedge funds and private equity firms….

The six year forensic analysis has provided extensive evidence that the experimental research studies that form the four cornerstones of the “Science of Reading” have no scientific validity. Of particular concern are the dog-whistles and lies that have been “sold” to policy makers and the public about the National Reading Panel Report, which has no scientific legitimacy. A compelling case can be made for the removal of the NRP Report from all documents that policy makers have used to require by law the fundamentally flawed “evidence-based reading instruction” in U.S. public schools. Such an action would remove the ban on cueing and the requirement of direct instruction in the “five pillars,” and thus, nullify the 45 state laws that mandate the Science of Reading. It would also mean that universities would be able to base reading courses on the peer-reviewed articles and books of reading researchers whose scholarship has been banned, and curriculum decision-making would be returned to teachers, parents, and local school districts.

Categories Curriculum, Education Industry, Ethics, Literacy

Should Women’s Colleges Admit Trans Women?

By dianeravitch
May 7, 2026 //
13

The Trump administration is suing Smith College–one of the nation’s most elite women’s colleges–for admitting transgender women to its student body, a policy adopted in 2025. Trans women were male at birth,

My own college–also an elite women’s college–asked the student body in 2023 about whether to admit trans women. The final vote was not disclosed but it passed; students appeared to be strongly supportive of the change. When the New York Times wrote about the debate at Wellesley, my classmates and I had our own debate. Like the old fogies we are, we were uncomfortable that our stodgy, traditional alma mater was admitting men who transitioned to become female.

But when I visited the campus, I saw a different reality. The students really don’t care about gender identity. They welcome other students and close ranks around those who are vulnerable. Wellesley is a women’s college; the students welcome others who identify as female. It’s a non-issue.

But it’s not a non-issue to the Trump administration. At every opportunity, it tries to eliminate the very existence of trans people. And that’s why it is now taking legal action against Smith.

The Boston Globe wrote about the new offensive against Smith College:

NORTHAMPTON — For more than a decade, Smith College, one of the nation’s largest and most prestigious all-women schools, has admitted self-identified transgender women, with little public blowback. 

But after the election of President Trump to a second term, Smith’s policy inevitably caught the attention of an administration consumed with eliminating any form of diversity practices in higher education. Late Monday, the federal government announced it had opened a civil rights investigation of Smith for its admission of transgender women. 

Smith got on the administration’s radar via a conservative watchdog group in 2025, when the college awarded Admiral Rachel L. Levine, a transgender woman and former US assistant secretary for health under President Joe Biden, an honorary degree and invited her to be one of the speakers at the school’s commencement ceremony that May. 

At the time, the news “piqued my interest as to what the policies were relative to single-sex admissions and gender identity at the college,” because Smith receives federal funding, said Sarah Parshall Perry, vice president of the conservative group, Defending Education.

In June 2025, Perry filed a federal civil rights complaint with the US Department of Education that has since morphed into a government investigation probing whether Smith’s admissions policy violates Title IX, the law prohibiting sex discrimination in education programs that receive federal assistance.

The investigation could have implications for other women’s colleges, including Mount Holyoke and Wellesley, which both admit transgender women.

“Title IX contains a single-sex exception that allows colleges to enroll all-male or all-female student bodies — but the exception applies on the basis of biological sex difference, not subjective gender identity,“ the US Education Department’s Civil Rights office said in a statement Monday.

“An all-girls college that enrolls male students professing a female identity would cease to qualify as single sex under Title IX,” the statement said.

A spokesperson for Smith said the school is aware of the investigation and “fully committed to [Smith’s] institutional mission and values, including compliance with civil rights laws,” but “does not comment on pending government investigations.”

Levine, the first openly transgender federal official to be confirmed by the Senate, is a favorite target of Republicans, drawing particularly intense criticism for her opposition to government-imposed restrictions on transgender care for minors, which she has called a health equity issue. The Trump campaign featured her image in ads attacking Kamala Harris on trans rights issues in the 2024 presidential race.

The Defending Education complaint argues Smith discriminates against “biological women” by admitting students whose assigned sex at birth was male but identify as female, while barring students whose assigned sex at birth was female but identify as male.

The US Department of Education did not respond to a Globe request for more information on Tuesday.

Perry, who served as a high-level official in the Department of Education during the first Trump term, said the investigation should encourage Smith to agree to a resolution with the administration.

“Smith College, obviously, is under no obligation to receive federal funding, but once they do, they have to follow federal civil rights law,” she said. “Smith can’t have its cake and eat it, too, by saying, ‘We’ll give lip service to Title IX, but we will violate the spirit, letter, history, and plain text of Title IX at the same [time].’ ” 

If Smith wants to keep its current policies, she added, it can rely on private and state funding instead.

Shiwali Patel, senior director of education justice at the National Women’s Law Center, said the probe is proof the Trump administration is more interested in “focusing on fake problems than addressing the actual issues that women and girls are facing in education.” Patel also argued that admissions to private undergraduate colleges are exempt from Title IX’s requirements. 

“The Department of Education’s investigation into Smith College is not civil rights enforcement. It’s the weaponization of Title IX and its protections,” she said.

Within hours of the Trump administration’s announcement of the investigation Monday, colorful chalk messages began to appear all over Smith’s campus: “You belong here,” “We love our trans sisters,” “Trans people belong at Smith.”

The college also alerted the campus community about the investigation via an email that shared mental health and other resources. 

“We recognize that this development is very difficult for our community,” wrote Alexandra Keller, dean of the college and vice president for campus life.

Margot Audero, a transgender woman in her senior year at Smith, understands her college’s need to be cautious, but she also wants to hear its leaders speak up.

“This does fundamentally change the calculus,” she said. “Smith no longer has the option of staying out of the spotlight. . . . I do think they have the opportunity to loudly state their values.”

The Smith investigation is part of the White House’s broader campaign against transgender rights. On his first day back in office, Trump pledged to “defend women’s rights” by recognizing sex as immutable and binary — biologically male or female — and ordered federal agencies to “ensure grant funds do not promote gender ideology.”

The administration has since pursued a raft of antitrans policies, from blocking federal funding to hospitals that provide gender-affirming care to minors to mandating the removal of transgender personnel from the military. It even changed Levine’s name on her official portrait to her previous name, NPR reported.

The legal and political fight has resurfaced divisions over the difference between sex and gender, along with what it means to be a women’s college today. Both Smith and Wellesley have evolved significantly since first opening their doors around 150 years ago, while Mount Holyoke College, founded in 1837, is the most gender-inclusive of the trio.

Mount Holyoke dubs itself “the leading gender-diverse women’s college” and welcomes everyone but cisgender men (who identify as male, in accordance with their assigned sex at birth). Wellesley admits students who live and consistently identify as women.

Smith currently “considers for admission any applicants who self-identify as women,” including those who are cis, trans, and nonbinary, according to its website. The college changed its admissions policy to include self-identified transgender women in May 2015, amid pushback from some alumnae. 

Genny Beemyn, director of the Stonewall Center at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, a resource for the LGBTQ+ community on campus and beyond, wasn’t surprised by the DOE investigation of Smith. 

What is surprising is that “it took this long, quite honestly, given the [Trump] administration’s hatred of trans people,” Beemyn said.

As a nonbinary educator who often speaks publicly about transgender issues at schools across the country, Beemyn is receiving far fewer invitations as colleges keep a low profile to avoid the glare of the Trump administration. 

Campuses are “scared to do trans events, to have trans speakers, to demonstrate that they support trans rights . . . because they’re so fearful of being targeted, being singled out, being attacked, maybe having federal funds taken away,” Beemyn said, adding that institutions should be careful, but not invisible in the fight.

Beemyn noted that they’ve also heard from transgender students at UMass Amherst and other schools “who are feeling like they don’t have a lot of support because their administrations are not coming forward and saying, ‘We support you.’ And that makes a difference.”

Last fall after Perry filed her complaint, Smith president Sarah Willie-LeBreton told the Globe she hadn’t heard from the DOE and wasn’t prepared to “offer legitimacy” to it by commenting. “Our admissions policies are firmly within the law,” she said at the time, “and we’re very proud of those policies.” 

Now that a federal investigation of Smith has been announced, “The proof will be what Smith decides to do in response: if they capitulate, or if they stand up and say, ‘This is something we value, and we are not going to give into the administration,’ ” Beemyn said.

Categories Gender, Higher Education, Trump

Tennessee GOP Rushes to Eliminate Sole Majority-Black District

By dianeravitch
May 7, 2026 //
3

The U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decision eviserated the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The far-right 6-member majority struck down Section 2 of the Act, which required states to provide Black voters opportunity to represented. In effect, the ruling rejected Louisiana’s redistricting, which would have created two majority-Black districts.

Most black voters live in urban districts. It does not require a gerrymander to produce a Black-majority district.

To eliminate districts that are not likely to elect a Black candidate does require a gerrymander. The compact urban district must be sliced like a pizza, so that most Black voters are in districts where they are a minority.

That’s what’s happening now in Tennessee and other states that to reduce districts that are currently held by a Democrat, usually a man or woman of color.

Tennessee Republicans wasted no time slicing up Memphis in the expectation that the new districts would never elect a Black candidate.

The New York Times reported:

Tennessee Republicans on Wednesday proposed a congressional map aimed at diluting the state’s lone majority-Black district, a swift response to last week’s Supreme Court ruling that weakened a landmark voting rights law. 

The new map slices Memphis, a majority-Black city, and Shelby County into three districts and likely will give Republicans the ability to flip Tennessee’s lone remaining Democratic seat, which includes the city. 

Democratic lawmakers, whose opposition means little under a Republican supermajority in the state’s General Assembly, and Black leaders across Tennessee have compared the effort to carve up the Ninth Congressional District to Jim Crow-era voter suppression tactics. They have accused conservatives of a power grab that undermines Black voters in Memphis, who have long favored Democrats. 

Republicans, cheered on by President Trump, have rejected those claims. Instead, they have said, they are responding to the Supreme Court ruling, which raised the bar for what constitutes a racial gerrymander under the Voting Rights Act of 1965. 

Under the map, Shelby County — which includes Memphis — is split into three districts. One district now runs along the state’s western border before extending down to include part of Williamson County, a suburban county just outside Nashville. Two other districts now share part of Shelby County and more rural, conservative communities in Tennessee.

“The Supreme Court has opined that redistricting, like the judicial system, should be colorblind — the decision indicated states like Tennessee can redistrict based on partisan politics,” Speaker Cameron Sexton said in a statement. “Tennessee’s redistricting will reduce the risk of future legal challenges while promoting sound and strategic conservatism.”

The General Assembly is expected to vote as soon as Thursday. 

The Supreme Court struck down a Louisiana congressional map that included two majority-Black districts, arguing that it violated the Constitution by using race as the primary factor in redistricting. The ruling has set off a scramble across Southern states with Republican leadership, all of which have at least one majority-Black district, before the 2026 midterms.

Categories Elections, Racism, Tennessee, Trump

Should Foreign Investors Own Mainstream Media in the U.S.?

By dianeravitch
May 7, 2026 //
2

The only Democrat on the board of the FCC (Federal Communications Corporation) wants to know why two of the major sources of news in the U.S.–CBS and CNN–are likely to have major investors from foreign sources.

Status, a first-rate site for coverage of media, describes the situation;

Ellison’s Sovereign Scrutiny: The lone Democrat on the FCC is pushing back on what looks like a fast-tracked blessing for one of the biggest media deals in history.

Commissioner Anna Gomez on Tuesday demanded a rigorous national security review of the foreign money flowing into David Ellison’s takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery, a merger that would reshape Hollywood and fuse CBS News with CNN. Paramount recently revealed that 49.5% of the combined company will be owned by foreign investors—including Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Abu Dhabi—if the deal gets a green light. 

► “The American public deserves to know who owns the airwaves that carry their news,” Gomez said. “I am alarmed by what appears to be an effort to rubber stamp a financial structure that places nearly half of one of America’s largest broadcast and media companies into the hands of foreign governments with documented records of press suppression and a troubling willingness to silence journalists.”

Categories Media
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