To Dismantle Democracy, You Subvert Public Schools

For at least the past fifty years*, conservatives have made substantial efforts to dismantle public education, through a variety of policies, practices, and story-lines: budget cuts, vouchers, charter schools, anti-tax measures, anti-union initiatives, “free to choose” and “failing school” narratives. And of course, through education technology initiatives. As much as many people want to insist that ed-tech is the site of progress, even “progressive education, the industry has long served to shift control of education from the public to the private sector, outsourcing the management of infrastructure as well as curriculum, assessment, and teaching itself, hollowing out the expertise within institutions and in turn shifting the mission of many schools -- in practice if not in the mission statement itself -- to meet the demands of business (or more accurately, the demands of capital) rather than the needs of the communities schools serve.

Despite all the talk that Silicon Valley has “suddenly” taken a rightward turn, its push for education technology has always been part of this ideological endeavor. In the past few decades, tech entrepreneurs and tech investors been some of the loudest voices (with the deepest pockets) pushing education in a certain direction -- my god, has anyone ever had as much influence in shaping education policy as Bill Gates?! And no surprise, that direction has been towards classrooms that are more mechanized and more surveilled -- full of “personalized” gadgets but increasingly devoid of sociality, humanity, civics.

At the same time as the tech industry has destabilized public education -- from within, with its products, and from the outside, through its rhetoric -- it has been building and funding a variety of “alternative” educational pathways as well: online, video-based programs focused on technical education (MOOCs and bootcamps), most obviously; micro- and private school programs for younger students; as well as “startup schools” for aspiring entrepreneurs. In all of these, one can see Silicon Valley’s efforts to reshape both the content and the form of education -- and I don’t simply mean here lessons about technology delivered via technology. These efforts do involve a Ayn-Randian vision of radical individualism, market power and what Lisa Duggan called “optimistic cruelty,” to be sure. Even in the programs that might seem the farthest from training the next cadre of Y Combinator founders and hustlers -- that is, high tech small schools for kindergartners, for example -- that “hidden curriculum” remains: what matters are competition, hierarchy, the accumulation of resources, speed, selfishness, and scale. Money, power, and data -- not necessarily in that order.

*Let’s push that date back farther to 1954, to Brown v Board of Education. Forced to integrate “their” public schools, many white folks -- and hardly just conservatives -- have scrambled to find ways to keep segregation, to keep white supremacy intact -- primarily by keeping housing segregated, of course, so that the schools that serve these neighborhoods remain that way as well. There are other tactics too: with an embrace of standardized testing to funnel certain students -- and you’ll never guess which ones!! -- into separate, “gifted and talented” classes or into special “accelerated” schools.

The subversion of democracy -- at its core, that is what the efforts to undermine public school truly are -- has shifted the burden of changing “the system” onto the individual. Such is goal of the neoliberal fantasy, in which everything is reduced to a market transaction.

As such, it’s up to individual parents and individual students to make “the right choices” -- even though it’s so clear that the institutions they must navigate are social, both in origin and in practice, and the only way to address the grave flaws that remain in these systems is political. The only way forward is together; our responsibility is shared; it is collective.

But we can see, so beautifully and painfully laid out in Nikole Hannah-Jones’s new piece in The New York Times -- “In Fighting for Every Black Child, Did I Betray My Own?” -- how the pressures of making “the right choice” are always so cruel, particularly for parents who already face the impossible task of protecting and preparing their children for a hostile world. In the face of violence and racism and economic precarity, there is no “right choice” -- there simply isn’t.

“The threat is already here. Panic won’t fix it. Politics will.” – Tressie McMillan Cottom

Over on Bluesky, responding to Ben Riley’s latest reporting on AlphaSchool, Tressie writes that “Like many things these days it is hard, but necessary, to figure what is a continuity and what is a rupture.” “EdTech has always been a private sector parasite feeding off the public sector,” she argues. “The rupture is AI EdTech is experimenting on the rich instead of the poor.”

I wrote something similar a couple of weeks ago, noting that there had been a massive shift between the tech industry’s vision for education and ed-tech in a school like Rocketship -- a charter chain that primarily served low-income students of color -- and the storytelling (and horrific reality) emerging from the very expensive and exclusive AlphaSchool.

There may be a rupture. But we should recognize too the continuity.

On Wednesday, the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz announced $35 million in funding for “an unaccredited San Francisco-based two-year alternative to traditional college for students ages 16 to 22.” The school, the Andreessen Horowitz Academy, will be run by Gagan Biyani, founder of a video-based education company called Udemy.

(Udemy, for those keeping track at home, launched way back in the 2010s, around the time of the “MOOC” mania, and like many of that era’s startups, offers a pretty lousy product.)

“There will be no traditional grades, tests, or homework,” Biyani writes. “Instead, you’ll get to learn from Silicon Valley’s most storied founders and operators in short, high-impact classes and spend the rest of your time working and exploring. And by ‘working,’ we mean - starting companies, operating at companies, and tinkering on projects that will make you an indispensable addition to any fast-growing startup in the Valley. We also believe students will enjoy a robust social life in one of the most vibrant cities in the world–San Francisco, California.”

The companies that have signed on to partner with the school include Anthropic, Anduril, OpenAI, Palantir, and Coinbase -- that is, a nexus of military technology companies; companies that are already building out the kind of techno-fascist future that Marc Andreessen envisions.

As the founders and investors tell it, with this new high school, there is a rejection of traditional notions of “education” -- “AI” has made all that passé, we’re informed -- and even perhaps a rejection of “pedagogy,” as there doesn’t appear to be plans for explicit instruction, at least by teachers. (There is, to be sure, plenty of implicit training, my god.) “Traditional teaching credentials won’t be required of the academy’s instructors,” Biyani told The Wall Street Journal, arguing that “there is a limited correlation between having a Ph.D. in a given subject and being a good teacher. He envisions lectures from prominent tech figures, mentorship from partners at the firm and Montessori-inspired learning.” (Some real “citation needed” bullshit going on there, for sure.)

“Our goal isn’t to tell students what to build,” Biyani writes. “It’s to inspire them to set audacious goals and exercise extreme ownership and agency over the outcome.” Students do all this on their own, as all aspiring John Galt figures do, I suppose. All alone, except for “the network” that the academy promises to introduce them to.

Or perhaps there isn’t a rejection of “pedagogy” at all -- I kept thinking about this as I read more about students’ experiences with AlphaSchool; it’s actually a re-emergence of an older order of (religious) indoctrination. There’s a rejection of teachers -- of the humans (gender-coded: feminine) who help care for young bodies and help develop young minds. There seems to be a real hatred of children too, quite frankly. For all the accusations that the right-wing has made about schools being sites of leftist brainwashing, the only way they actually envision education (and by extension ed-tech) is as a system of behavioral engineering and ideological adherence. It’s no surprise then that in all these private tech-heavy ventures, there’s a total rejection of the shared experience of school, in all its messy flaws -- school as civics, school as democracy, schools as us.

The “I Didn’t Send a Newsletter Last Week” Link Dump

If anyone still demands you “prove” that “AI” will harm students, you don’t actually need to concoct some speculative story about how, perhaps in the future, we might find some damaging side-effects of all this “cognitive surrender.” The harms are here and now. You can say, “quite literally, ‘AI’ kills children” and you won’t be lying. Exhibit A, via Bloomberg: “Inside the US ‘Kill Chain’ that Destroyed an Iranian School.”

“Big AI to Humanity: Drop Dead” by Matthew Butterick.

Via Inside Higher Ed: “The ‘Nonexistent’ Research on AI’s Benefits for Education”

Via The Walrus: “Canadian Students Say AI Is Hurting Their Critical Thinking”

Sound the multiple author klaxon! “An M.I.T. Report Warns A.I. Is Causing ‘Cognitive Surrender.’ Universities Are in a Bind.” by Mark Arsenault, Dana Goldstein, Alan Blinder, and Sarah Mervosh in The New York Times.

Anastasia Berg in The Chronicle of Higher Ed: “The Ivy League’s Surrender to AI Is Insane.” Something something “AI” “leadership” lulz at Dartmouth something something, but listen, there’s only so much Ivy League-ing (and eye-rolling at provosts) I can do in one newsletter.

And then, he just tweeted it out! “Microsoft exec called AI scraping the “largest theft of labor in human history”,” Ars Technica reports.

Phil Hill on “A Clearer Picture of AI and the College Job Market”

“Here’s what happens when colleges make the SAT optional,” by Matt Barnum. (Spoiler alert: maybe not much?)

“Students didn’t get answers from Khanmigo. They didn’t want its questions, either,” writes Jill Barshay.

I’m working on a talk on the history of TurnItIn, which is I suppose the pre-history to AI detection, so this, in Bloomberg, caught my eye: “The World’s Most Reliable AI Detector Has a Human Problem.”

Related, in the "AI" writing / plagiarism detection software market, from Reddit: “PSA: Grammarly will send unhinged messages to all your users if you try to cancel.”

Wired wrings its hands that “The EU Wants to Break Up Kids and Their Chatbots.”

“NYC schools restrict student YouTube access as tech backlash grows,” Chalkbeat reports.

Via Hellgate NYC: “New York Ditches the Rite-of-Passage Regents Exams.”

(I have so much more to say about what comes next after the “AI” moratorium. Tune in next week for that. Hopefully. Unless there is more AlphaSchool nonsense to talk about.)

The problem isn’t just “AI,” FWIW. “The bombarding of childhood” -- Natalia Kucirkovai argues in Aeon that “the problem with children’s media is that it has become relentlessly hectic, loud and bright.”

And by Hana Kiros in The Atlantic: “This Is Your Brain on Short-Form Video

More villainy, elsewhere, with reporting from Beth Hawkins and Nicholas Perez in The 74: “Private Equity Is Cashing in on Autism Therapy. Children Are Paying the Price”

More villainy, same villainy, via ProPublica: “Several States Rejected This Private School Chain as a Charter. Now It’s Eligible for Texas’ Taxpayer-Funded Vouchers..” The school in question? AlphaSchool.

Still more villainy, via The New York Times: “Inside the Outrageous Collapse of a ‘Montessori Ponzi’.” Do stick around for the AlphaSchool connection! And let's chuckle, shall we, that the Andreessen Horowitz Academy invokes "Montessori style education" in its promotional materials. Why, it's as if that's the only "alternative education" model these people – most people – have even heard of. And they still have no clue what it even means.

Today’s bird is the barn owl, a medium-sized owl with a pale face – distinguishable from other owls, in part, by the shape of its tail. The barn owl also flies really slowly and really silently, which is why I chose it today. I needed a bird that symbolized a little bit of "STFU."

Interestingly, the barn owl's feathers function to both amplify the sounds of its prey as well as to muffle the sounds of its own movement. “The barn owl’s solution to quiet flight has proved especially intriguing to engineers,” writes materials science professor Lorna Gibson. (But not to software engineers and venture capitalists, I’d have to clarify. That lot still gets so amped up on speed and scale and big loud flapping noises, don’t they. Like pigeons.)

Thanks for reading Second Breakfast. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber as your financial support is what enables me to do this work.