I Know What You Did Last Summer
If you were to tell the story of the end of public education in the US, you wouldn't begin with the Trump Administration's bluster about closing the Department of Education. You wouldn't begin with Trump Administration policies at all – as awful and destructive as
Back to School Talk (Obligatory)
[Depending on your geographic location] It's almost/already back-to-school season, which always means a flurry of aspirational, inspirational stories (and their opposite) about ed-tech gadgetry, along with a fair amount of sponsored content and affiliate marketing. ("You're Probably Wearing Your Backpack Wrong" in The
Toast
Education as Prediction Market
In their bestseller AI Snake Oil, Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor open their chapter on "How Predictive AI Goes Wrong" with a story from Mount St. Mary's University: how, in 2015, the school had conducted a survey of freshmen to identify ones who were struggling – an
LLM as MLM
No one likes to be wrong. But perhaps what bothers people even more than making a mistake is being made a fool, being tricked or duped. It's no surprise then that many folks bristle at the assertion that "AI" is a con. They stamp their feet
Measure for Measure
Prescriptive Practices
Math teacher Michael Pershan wrote an excellent newsletter this week, and I'd like to start there rather than with the ubiquitous stories about the underwhelming roll-out of OpenAI's latest GPT. Michael's insights are interesting and important; OpenAI, not so much – unless you want to
Education and the New Cult of Efficiency
Raymond Callahan's 1962 book Education and the Cult of Efficiency remains a classic study of public education in the US, chronicling how in the early twentieth century schools' goals became business goals. "The procedure for bringing about a more businesslike organization and operation of the schools
Heretic Pride
Ballistic Misses
Simon Ramo published his essay "A New Technique in Education" in 1957 in Engineering and Science, a journal published by Caltech to showcase the institution's research. "A noted scientist proposes some radical changes in our educational system to bring it in line with our increasingly
