Curmudgucation: Student Surveillance Is Still A Scary Thing Curmudgucation: Student Surveillance Is Still A Scary Thing Back in January of 2020, I predicted that one of the big stories of the coming year would be a growth in the student surveillance industry. I’d been following the story as it popped up, because it was everywhere.  Florida (you know–the Freedom State) was implementing a h…

Curmudgucation: When Schools Are Businesses Curmudgucation: When Schools Are Businesses Tech writer Cory Doctorow writes a lot these days about enshittification, for instance in this piece that spins from Prime’s continued addition of advertising to the content you thought you had already paid for. The explanation isn’t complicated: The cruelty isn’t the point. Money is the …

Curmudgucation: Computers And Defective Children Curmudgucation: Computers And Defective Children Kristen DiCerbo is the “chief learning officer” at Khan Academy, the hot new ed tech firm that is using computer programs to replicate some of the oldest problematic behavior in the educational universe.  “If bringing AI into the classroom is a marathon,” asserts DiCerbo in a recent …

Curmudgucation: Even in a Red Wave, Voters Reject School Vouchers Curmudgucation: Even in a Red Wave, Voters Reject School Vouchers As has often been noted, school vouchers have never survived being put to a vote. Despite all the noise voucherphiles make about how beloved school choice is among the people, when you actually ask voters if they want vouchers, they say no. Three states tested that r…

Curmudgucation: Why Do State Report Cards Stink Curmudgucation: Why Do State Report Cards Stink Morgan Polikoff (USC Rosier School of Education, FutureEd) and some folks at the reformy Center for Reinventing Public Education along with the Data Quality Campaign wanted to put together a report on what state report card sites had to say about pandemic learning loss trajectories.  …

Curmudgucation: Stop Calling It School Choice Curmudgucation: Stop Calling It School Choice When framing a debate, it helps to pick just the right names. Just ask the folks who decided to call their respective sides “pro-life” and “pro-choice.”  One of earliest victories for education privatizers was to coin the name “school choice.” I don’t know if somebody cleverly designed …

Curmudgucation: Failing Charters Go Private Curmudgucation: Failing Charters Go Private Last month, Amelia Pak-Harvey at Chalkbeat Indiana ran a story about a failing charter school that had been approved for a new lease on life–as a private school. Ignite Achievement Academy was supposed to improve its “checkered academic record,” but instead the State Board of Education …

Curmudgucation: Something Else AI “Teachers” Can’t Do Curmudgucation: Something Else AI “Teachers” Can’t Do “Okay, I think I see where you went wrong…” “Hmm. Can you explain to me why you took this step here…?” “That’s an interesting interpretation, but I think you might have overlooked this…” There are so many ways in which generative language algorithms (marketed as AI) can’t …

Curmudgucation: Curriculum as the Next Reformy Frontier Curmudgucation: Curriculum as the Next Reformy Frontier Just stay with me for a minute. The right-tilted Hoover Institute has a publication out for the fortieth anniversary of A Nation At Risk, the Reagan-era hit job on public education, a collection of essays by various members of the reformster world. Some of these are not very e…

Curmudgucation: Curriculum as the Next Reformy Frontier Curmudgucation: Curriculum as the Next Reformy Frontier Just stay with me for a minute. The right-tilted Hoover Institute has a publication out for the fortieth anniversary of A Nation At Risk, the Reagan-era hit job on public education, a collection of essays by various members of the reformster world. Some of these are not very e…

Curmudgucation: A Voucher By Any Other Name Curmudgucation: A Voucher By Any Other Name Voucher supporters have one major problem: school vouchers are unpopular. The tern doesn’t test well. Measure of public support is iffy– if you ask people if they would like every student to have the chance to ride to a great school on their own pony, people say yes, but if you ask a mor…

Curmudgucation: A Voucher By Any Other Name Curmudgucation: A Voucher By Any Other Name Voucher supporters have one major problem: school vouchers are unpopular. The tern doesn’t test well. Measure of public support is iffy– if you ask people if they would like every student to have the chance to ride to a great school on their own pony, people say yes, but if you ask a mor…

Curmudgucation: The Panic Is No Accident Curmudgucation: The Panic Is No Accident There was a curious piece in Education Week Friday, in which Deborah Loewenberg Ball ponders the question, “Why Is the Nation Invested in Tearing Down Public Education?”  She focuses in particular on the most recent iteration: For the past four years, we have been retelling a shared narrativ…

Curmudgucation: TX: Using Computers To Make STAAR Test Worse Curmudgucation: TX: Using Computers To Make STAAR Test Worse There are several fundamental problems with trying to use standardized testing on a large scale (say, assessing every student in the state). One is the tension between turnaround time and quality. The quickest tests to score are those based on multipole choice questions; …

Curmudgucation: Voucher Bankruptcy’s Feature Future Curmudgucation: Voucher Bankruptcy’s Feature Future It is no longer news that school voucher programs lead to increasing costs, costs that swiftly balloon to suck up extraordinary piles of taxpayer dollars in state after state, threatening to bust the budget.  Public education advocates have been pointing this out in state after st…

Curmudgucation: Let’s Just Test All The Damned Year Curmudgucation: Let’s Just Test All The Damned Year One of the repeated techniques of reformsters is this: when a proposed policy fails, insist that we need to do it more harder. Using the Big Standardized Test as the foundation of all school evaluation is a failure. It hasn’t provided teachers with actionable data. It hasn’t impro…

Curmudgucation: How Vouchers Bust State Budgets Curmudgucation: How Vouchers Bust State Budgets One of the consistent features of voucher programs is that they grow, sometimes rapidly, to suck up huge chunks of the state budget. Nobody understands this better than Arizona’s Governor Katie Hobbs. She posted this memo on the Dead Bird app yesterday: Hobbs has rung this alarm bell…

Curmudgucation: Yes, Engage Curmudgucation: Yes, Engage Intuitively, you’d think that student engagement was a clear positive. As a teacher, I certainly found it easier to teach a student who was engaged and involved than one who was checked out. And there is, in fact, a boatload of research that supports what we intuit. But there is also research that sugges…

Curmudgucation: Questions for Voucher Supporters Curmudgucation: Questions for Voucher Supporters In Pennsylvania, the GOP is still pursuing the voucher program that Governor Shapiro just vetoed. Their dismay over his veto is understandable– it’s a version of the long-pitched voucher program that was tooled to meet his requirements. So the GOP can be forgiven for feeling as if t…

Curmudgucation: Feds Tells SCOTUS To Let Charter School Remain Public Curmudgucation: Feds Tells SCOTUS To Let Charter School Remain Public I have written more than I care to about the Peltier v. Charter Day School case, a case that is nominally about an antediluvian dress code but has ended up hinging on a bigger question– are charter schools really public schools?  Charter Day School says no. Afte…