Archive | August, 2026

 AI Bogus EdTech Scheme

24 Aug

By Thomas Ultican 8/24/2026

Big technology oligarchs are pushing their dangerous not-ready-for-prime-time artificial intelligence (AI) products into America’s schools. Their relentless drumbeat says don’t miss out because all schools need to implement AI tools now. Why the big rush? Technology writer Audrey Watters explains, “I mean, other than the desperate need of the tech sector to prove that the trillions of dollars invested in this endeavor will soon show some profit and that – unlike crypto and Web 3.0 – this isn’t just some giant fraud being perpetrated so executives can buy more private islands.”

Be assured, Audrey knows what she’s writing about. In fact, famed education historian, Diane Ravitch, claimed, “Audrey Watters is one of the best–maybe the very best–writers about Ed-tech.”

In her discussion of AI in education, Audrey is clearly not a fan with reasons. She shouts, ‘“AI” may be one of the biggest threats to teaching and learning, to epistemology and pedagogy that society has ever faced.” Prolific writer, Corey Doctorow, is in agreement with Audrey when he declares:

“AI is alarming for many reasons: it’s a dangerous financial bubble, an environmental catastrophe, and a tool for eroding wages and labor power. But in addition to all that, AI is an epistemic disaster.”

Both writers highlight the danger to epistemology which examines the nature, origin and limits of knowledge. Epistemologists study the concepts of belief, truth and justification. Doctorow and Watters are concerned that AI perverts this branch of philosophy.

Watters has shared:

“When we talk about AI in education, we talk less about what automation and algorithms can do and more about what they will someday be able to do, what we’d like to see the classroom become. What we talk about when we talk about AI in education: …  Science fiction. Myth. Made-up histories and made-up futures.”

AI in Education

For decades, purveyors of technology have targeted education as a profit center. They have tried to sell putting kids at screens instead of hiring expensive teachers and they promote using tech for tutoring. The sector has produced an endless stream of applications designed to control schools and educators. AI is just another feeble technology pointed at students and schools. Professionals in the education sphere are not impressed.

Randi Weingarten, President of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), spoke extensively about AI in a May speech to the National Press Club in Washington. Weingarten proposed a near total ban on computer screens for second grade and younger students. She also called for banning student-facing AI in elementary school, arguing that children need to build foundational skills which are undermined by algorithmic shortcuts.

Weingarten shared a concern about research showing that in a survey 88% of teachers reported student attention spans were shrinking. She pointed to online platforms like TikTok and YouTube as causative. Randi noted work by cognitive scientist Daniel T. Willingham’s suggesting students are not incapable of focusing, but are increasingly unwilling to do so when schoolwork feels dull by comparison to their online lives.

Last year, the AFT announced $23 million in funding from Open AI, Anthropic and Microsoft for a National Academy of AI Instruction to train up to 400,000 educators. The new entity will train teachers “on how to use AI tools for tasks like generating lesson plans.” University of Mississippi researcher, Mark Watkins, described this announcement as “a gigantic public experiment that no one has asked for.” However, teachers for the most part have gotten no AI training and this is an effort to fill that void.

After being quiet for more than a year, the Trump administration has finally provided guidance about AI and ed-tech in general. The vacant US Surgeon General’s office sent an advisory urging families and schools to reduce children’s screen time. It suggested that schools limit their computers to computer labs, invest in physical textbooks and “prioritize pen-and-paper curricula, hands-on activities and social activities for all grade levels.”

Sadly, the education department followed up with a totally unreasonable attack on America’s teachers. Education Department Press Secretary Savannah Newhouse responded to Weingarten’s allegation about the administrations lack of leadership on AI, not by addressing her statement, but by attacking the union. Newhouse’s bogus polemic presented with no foundation stated, “If there’s finally going to be an honest conversation about the damage done to American students, it should begin with the teachers unions’ enthusiastic support for a federal bureaucracy that has spent over $3 trillion only to watch student outcomes decline, along with their relentless push to keep schools shuttered during COVID,” NAEP data does not show a decline and while students were less likely to get sick than teachers, it was still a frightening problem; so, yes many teachers were worried.

AI in Education Dangers

Local parent organizations in New York City are calling for an AI moratorium in that city’s schools. They point to a growing opposition to AI and “to evidence that it represents substantial risk to student privacy, cognitive development and skills, critical thinking, creativity, mental health, and the environment.”

AI in school turned into a hyper-plagiarizing issue when ChatGPT became ubiquitous in classrooms. Mass plagiarization has left, educators, administrators and students grappling with AI policies and ethics.

A recent Rand Corporation study says, “As of December 2025, 67 percent of students endorsed the statement “The more students use AI for their schoolwork, the more it will harm their critical thinking skills”

A Brightly analysis says, “The biggest risk of AI tools in education is security.” Students have little understanding of how much personal data is being harvested. In addition, psychologists and educators believe computer interfaces are stopping the development of critical thinking and social-emotional learning. Children lose natural creativity which is replaced by dependence on digital tools.

There are also clear ethical concerns with AI. Its answers come from tainted sources which are often violent and sexually derived. These sources are informed by racism, misogyny, homophobia, nationalism, antisemitism, etcetera which come from the internet. AI is even trained on child pornography. The AI well is poisoned.

The Center for Universal Education at Brookings posted a major AI study this January. A key takeaway stated:

“Ultimately, we find that at this point in its trajectory, the risks of utilizing AI in education overshadow its benefits. This is largely because the risks of AI differ in nature from its benefits—that is, these risks undermine children’s foundational development, for example, when trust between students and teachers is diminished—a current risk of AI implementation—the benefits of AI-enriched teaching and learning materials cannot be fully realized. Understanding the distinction between enriched and diminished learning experiences is an important first step toward mitigating AI’s risks and harnessing its benefits in education.” (Page 12)

Conclusion

Like all new technologies, AI has potential to contribute to society but it also has potential to do harm. A lot of the information about AI is hype from billionaires. In the introduction to their book The AI Con, Emily Bender and Alex Hanna write:

“We are writing now, in late 2024, from the inside of what feels like the height of the AI hype bubble. As we say on the podcast: each time we think we’ve reached peak AI hype—the summit of bullshit mountain—we discover there’s worse to come.”

If you have not read these brilliant ladies’ book, it is not too late.

The bottom line is that in many cases we are being lied to about AI. It does have risks and its adoption into education needs to be slowed significantly.

Facebook Billionaires Walkout on Impoverished Students

12 Aug

By Thomas Ultican 8/11/2026

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) withdrew support for The Primary School (TPS) a private school in East Palo Alto that they founded. CZI also withdrew support for the associated smaller Woodroe Woods School across the bay in San Leandro. When it was revealed that CZI support would be withdrawn, both schools announced closures at the conclusion of the 2025-2026 school year.

TPS was founded by Pricilla Chan and Marideth Liu in East Palo Alto, a poverty area in the center of opulence. Chan is Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s wife and a former pediatrician. Liu earned a BA in Economics from Dartmouth and an MBA at Harvard Business School. She is a graduate of the D.C. Public Schools and was the chief financial officer at Match Education, a charter management organization. Unfortunately, Liu died in April 2023 which probably precipitated these closures.

However, one of the more prominent reasons for pulling support according to Chan was performance. Or as Diane Ravitch put it:

“[T]hey are withdrawing their funding because they are disappointed by the school’s test scores. Test scores!”

A report from Stanford University says, “From the beginning, TPS focused on starting earlier in children’s lives, building sustained relationships with families, and aligning supports across the systems that shape development.” The tuition-free school aimed to support the “whole child” with wraparound services which included free dental checkups, early-intervention screenings and wellness coaching for parents.

What happened? Was it Boredom?

When billionaire business leaders “look at K-12 education and go, ‘Man, how hard can it be to improve this thing?’” The director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, Rick Hess replies, “Well, it’s incredibly hard.”

Here is some historical perspective. Zuckerberg announced one of he and Chan’s first major charitable gifts, a $100 million grant to Newark, N.J., public schools, on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” in 2010. The Facebook billionaire thought he could pick the next superintendent and send Newark down the road to privatization. He did not understand the nature of Newark’s school district or how public education actually worked. He ended up with Cami Anderson as superintendent instead of his choice Jean-Claude Bizard, the billionaire education reformers’ hero of Rochester, who had just received a 90% no-confidence vote from that city’s teachers. Brizard took Rham Emanuel’s offer in Chicago and Zuck’s $100 million generated surprisingly little influence in Newark. (The Prize Pages 97-149)

The TPS effort was completely under CZI control. In 2015, they put up a little more than $7 million and established a non-profit entity. A board was created with five members including Director CEO, Pricilla Chan, President COO, Merideth Liu and three others including Director Diane Tavenner. Liu was the only paid board member. (see 2015 tax form 990 ID: 47-3334579)

Diane Tavenner was the founder and CEO of Summit Public Schools in 2003. It is a charter management organization that serves schools in California and Washington State. She also served in various capacities on the board of the California Charter Schools Association (CCSA). Mark Zuckerburg became aware of Tavenner’s approach to digital learning in 2013 and offered to upgrade the software she was using. Like other tech-billionaires, he wanted to prove the viability of personalized learning, meaning kids at screens. Tavenner last served on the TPS board in 2017.

Big changes came to the TPS board in 2022. Jean-Claude Bizard came on board as chair. Pricilla Chan announced she will no longer be on the board in 2023 as did five other board members. For the first time in 2021, Merideth Liu no longer served in a paid position and in 2022 she was no longer on the board. This is just supposition, but it appears the she was already sick and the entire board was aware of it.

Some of the personnel choices at TPS were bizarre. Both Diane Tavenner and Jean-Claude Bizard went through training in the Broad Superintendents academy. Broad trained administrators have a horrible reputation for hiring many consultants, stirring up labor problems, promoting school privatization and creating budget deficits. An egregious example of this is the damage inflicted in Oakland, California by four consecutive Broad trained administrators.

It looks like Merideth Liu’s illness was the likely culminating incident that led to CZI stepping away from their billionaire financed experiment in East Palo Alto.

The Primary School Enrollment

It May Have Been Working

In the Stanford study, TPS preschoolers were compared with results from The Big Lift a San Mateo County education effort:

“Although the overall Big Lift population outperformed TPS, with rates ranging from 53% to 61% across the same years, that group is generally higher income and faces fewer of the adversity factors linked to lower school readiness. When compared to the demographically similar subgroup, whose readiness rates ranged from 28% to 32% over the same period, TPS outperformed that group consistently across all four years.” (Page 28)

In grades three and up testing, the study found:

“Across both subjects, TPS consistently outperformed local East Palo Alto schools, including both charter and non-charter schools. In Spring 2025, though results varied across individual schools, 14% of local East Palo Alto students met or exceeded the literacy standard and 10% met or exceeded the math standard, compared to 26% and 25% respectively at TPS. This gap held consistently across all three years of available data.

“At the same time, TPS’s results remained below the California statewide average, which stood at 47% in both literacy and math in Spring 2025.” (Page 30)

In their conclusion, the Stanford researches stated:

“The Primary School (TPS) set out to prove that children thrive when the systems around them work together. Nearly a decade later, the evidence is clear that this approach makes a real difference for children and families, and the evidence is also instructive about what it took. Children who moved through TPS’s early childhood programs developed stronger language skills, received developmental support earlier, and entered school more ready to learn. Families grew in resilience, built social connections, and navigated systems that had previously felt inaccessible.” (Page 36)

The TPS approach to serving the “whole child” was clearly working.

Conclusion

It is very clear to me that Pracilla Chan’s low test score complaint was baloney. She was tired of TPS. She had lost her friend in the adventure and lost interest in East Palo Alto. Like the billionaire reformers who proceeded them, CZI dropped a mess on the local public school district and wiped their hands of the adventure.

The Wall Street Journal article on the closing noted that having one major backer in perpetuity hadn’t been the original plan. CZI claimed to be after a model that “could be sustained through primarily public investment.” That indicates that from the very beginning Zuckerberg and Chan were looking for taxpayers to assume the burden.

Poorly thought-out billionaire philanthropy is a too common plague on the public.

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