San Diego’s Edtech Lollapalooza

29 Apr

By Thomas Ultican 4/29/2025

Titans of the digital universe and their minions gathered at the ASU+GSV conference in San Diego April 6-9. There was a lot of self-promotion and proposals for creating new education paradigm based on personalized learning powered by artificial intelligence (AI) were everywhere. This year it is almost impossible to find any reporting from the event by “negative Nellies” like myself, on the other hand there are many positive references like Forbes calling it “the Davos of Education.”

MRCC advertises itself as having “25+ years of experience designing and deploying innovative eLearning solutions in collaboration with the brightest thinkers.” On April 21, their Senior Director, Learning Solutions, Kevin Schroeder, published “Top Five EdTech Trends from ASU+GSV Summit 2025.” His list:

“1. AI Is a Fundamental Literacy”

“2. Equity in Educational Technology Must Be Intentional”

“3. The Shift to Skills-Based Credentialing”

“4. AI-Driven Storytelling Platforms Gaining Traction”

“5. Collaboration Drives Innovation”

Under point one, he says AI is “a basic literacy on a par with reading and math.” This is surprising to me. I did not realize math was a basic literacy and whatever makes AI a basic literacy is truly puzzling.

It seems like points 2, 4 and 5 were just thrown in with little purpose. I agree edtech should strive for equity but wealthy people are not likely to want their children burdened with it. AI is known for plagiarism so I guess it makes a small amount of sense as a storytelling platform. As far as point 5 goes, if they can get students, teachers and parents to collaborate, it will drive sales.

Point 3 is particularly concerning. Schroeder states:

“Traditional academic transcripts are being replaced and/or supplemented by digital credentials that recognize hands-on skills and real-world experience. Apprenticeships, internships, and project-based learning are now key markers of learner growth.”

At the 2023 ASU+GSV conference, Carnegie and ETS announced a new partnership to create functional testing for competency based education (CBE). The Wellspring Project is one of the entities angling to profit off this scheme.

A Cision PRWeb report states,

“The first phase of the Wellspring Project, led by IMS and funded by the Charles Koch Foundation, explored the feasibility of dynamic, shared competency frameworks for curriculum aligned to workforce needs. … Using learning tools that leverage the IMS Competencies and Academic Standards Exchange® (CASE®) standard, the cohorts mapped co-developed frameworks, digitally linking the data to connect educational program offerings with employer talent needs.”

Because of the limitations put on learning by digital screens, the only reasonable approach possible is CBE. Unfortunately there is a long negative history associated with CBE. The 1970’s “mastery learning” was detested and renamed “outcome based education” in the 1990s. It is now called “competency based education” (CBE). The name changes are due to a five-decade long record of failure. It is still the same mind-numbing approach that 1970s teachers began calling “seats and sheets.”

CBE has the potential to increase edtech profits and reduce education costs by eliminating many teacher salaries. Unfortunately, it remains awful education and children hate it.

One justification for CBE based education is a belief that the purpose of education is employment readiness. Philosophy, literature, art etc. are for children of the wealthy. It is a push toward skills based education which wastes no time on “useless” frills. Children study in isolation at digital screens earning badges as they move through the menu driven learning units.

In 1906, Carnegie foundation developed the Carnegie unit as a measure of student progress. It is based on a credit hour system that requires a minimum time in class. Schools all over America pay attention to the total number of instructional minutes scheduled. A 2015 Carnegie study concluded, “The Carnegie Unit continues to play a vital administrative function in education, organizing the work of students and faculty in a vast array of schools or colleges.” Now, Carnegie Foundation President, Tim Knowles, is calling for CBE to replace the Carnegie unit.

Education writer Derek Newton writing for Forbes opposed the Carnegie-EST turn to CBE for many reasons but the major one is cheating. It is easy to cheat with digital systems. Newton observed, “But because of the credit hour system, which is designed to measure classroom instruction time, it’s still relatively hard to cheat your way to a full college degree.”

The Conference and People

ASU is Arizona State University and GSV is the private equity firm, Global Silicon Valley. GSV advertises itself as “The sector’s preeminent collection of talent & experience—uniquely qualified to partner with, and to elevate, EdTech’s most important companies.” Under their joint leadership, the ASU+GSV annual event has become the world’s premier edtech sales gathering. Sadly, privatizing public education is espoused by many presenters at the conference.

The involvement of ASU marks a big change in direction for the institution. It was not that long ago that David C. Berliner a renowned education psychologist was the dean of the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College at ASU. At the same time, his colleague and collaborator, Gene V. Glass a Professor emeritus in both Psychology in Education and Education Leadership and Policy Studies was working with him to stop the destruction of public education. Glass is the researcher who coined the term “meta-analysis.” Their spirit has completely disappeared.

Recently the Center for Reinventing Public Education relocated from their University of Washington home to ASU.  

There were over 1,000 speakers listed for this shindig. They were listed in twelve categories. The “startup” group was the largest with 188 speakers. The “Corporate Enterprise” cohort had 136 speakers listed. Microsoft, Google, Pearson, Amazon, Curriculum Associates and many more had speakers listed under Corporate Enterprise.

Scheduled speakers included Pedro Martinez from Chicago Public Schools, Randi Weingarten from the American Federation of Teachers and Arne Duncan representing the Emerson Collective. Of note, the list of speakers included:

  • Michael Cordona – former US Secretary of Education
  • Glen Youngkin – Governor of Virginia
  • Angélica Infante Green – Rhode Island Commissioner of Education
  • Robin Lake – Director of Center for Reinventing Public Education
  • David Steiner – Executive Director John Hopkins Institute of Education Policy
  • Ted Mitchell – President American Council on Education
  • Timothy Knowles – President Carnegie Foundation
  • Sal Khan – Founder Khan Academy
  • Derrick Johnson – President and CEO of NAACP

Secretary of Education, Linda McMahon, spoke at the summit. Besides confusing AI for A1 several times including when saying we are going to start making sure that first graders, or even pre-Ks, have “A1” teaching every year. She also slandered public schools claiming the nation’s low literacy and math scores show it has “gotten to a point that we just can’t keep going along doing what we’re doing.” She is so out of touch with education practices that she believes putting babies at screens is a good idea and does not know that America’s students were set back by COVID but are actually well on their way to recovery.

Opinion

The amount of money and political power at the annual ASU+GSV event is staggering. It has now gotten to the point that there is almost no push back heard. The voices of astute professional educators are completely drowned out.

I have met Randi Weingarten on a few occasions and been in the audience for a speech by Derrick Johnson. I really do like and respect these people but I find their participation in San Diego unwise. Having progressive voices speaking at this conference gives cover to the billionaires who are destroying public education.

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Student Outcome Focused Governance is Impuissant

21 Apr

By Thomas Ultican 4/21/2025

The night NPE2025 in Columbus ended; I ate dinner with two ladies from Pittsburgh. They informed me about Student Outcome Focused Governance (SOFG) which I had ignored but they were right to be concerned. It is one of those things like No Child Left Behind or Race to the Top that sounds so good but is really bad. Similar to these schemes, it uses standardized testing to undermine democratic control.

SOFG was created by The Council of the Great City Schools. Specifically, it was the brainchild of their director of Governance A. J. Crabill. Harvard University has created a training course to teach board members how to implement it.

The SOFG idea is school boards should be solely focused on student outcomes. They are supposed to create 3 to 5 SMART goals for improving student outcomes. SMART is an acronym that has been around in education circles for a few decades meaning specific, measurable, attainable, results-focused and time-bound. The measurable part of this is normally based on testing.

Here is an SOFG framework example SMART goal, “The percentage of free and reduced lunch-eligible students in kindergarten through 2nd grade who are reading/writing on or above grade level on the school system’s summative assessment will increase from W% on X to Y% by Z.”

The superintendent is the professional in the school who is to run all things and deal with non-student outcome items like school safety, transportation, maintenance, discipline and more. He is also tasked with achieving the boards 3 to 5 SMART goals. If something is not strictly student outcome focused, the board should not waste their time on it. That is the superintendent’s job.

The former Senior Campaign Manager of Democracy for America, Robert Cruickshank, reported on how SOFG is working in Seattle. His 2023 article begins:

“Parents and students from Franklin High School in Southeast Seattle packed the Seattle Public Schools (SPS) board of directors meeting on Wednesday, June 21, urging the board and the district to save the school’s beloved mock trial program from budget cuts. A few weeks earlier, families from nearby Washington Middle School had filled the room to oppose cuts to the school’s jazz band. Both schools are majority BIPOC; nearly a third of their students are Black.

“The board did not vote to save either program. Instead, board directors deferred to administrators, referencing the Student Outcome Focused Governance (SOFG) model as part of their discussion.”

Amazingly, mock trial programs and jazz band are not viewed as having anything to do with student outcomes. Therefore, instead of being able to petition elected representative on the school board, the parent’s only recourse was the superintendent who had already decided to cut these two programs.

This past October, Uriah Ward, a school board member from Saint Paul, Minnesota, went to SOFG training in Texas.  Writing in Medium he noted, “SOFG is anti-democratic.” He went on to say:

“One of us asked if we could create a goal about making schools safer for students. We were told no, because school safety is not a student outcome.

“Under Monitoring & Accountability, boards are supposed to spend no less than 50% of their time monitoring student outcomes, and are only allowed to evaluate the performance of the superintendent based on whether or not they have met the student outcomes goals.

“School safety isn’t a student outcome. Culturally-welcoming schools aren’t a student outcome. Small class sizes aren’t a student outcome. Healthy school lunches aren’t a student outcome. So many things that our community will ask us for are not considered student outcomes.

“The unelected district employees are the ultimate authority on all things outside of the 3–5 student outcomes goals. Even then, administrators are given complete autonomy to figure out how to meet those goals, with school board input or direction being banned.”

School Board in Action

The Genesis of the SOFG Model

The Council of the Great City Schools has tremendous influence with America’s urban school districts. Since its founding in 1956, the Council has grown from ten urban school districts to 78. It is a 501 C3 non-profit [TIN: 36-2481232] that has an unusual structure. Most non-profits have between 5 and 20 members on their boards; Great City Schools has 153 on its board. The member urban schools districts typically have a least two voting members on the board.

A. J. Crabill, The Council of the Great City Schools director of governance, is credited with developing the SOFG scheme. He also travels extensively training school boards to use it.

Interestingly, Crabill does not have a college education. Born in Kansas City, Missouri in 1979, Crabill spent time in and out of foster care.

In 2008, he won a seat on the Kansas City school board. The schools were in danger of losing accreditation and needed a superintendent. In 2009, Crabill and his board hired new Broad Superintendents Academy graduate John Covington to run the schools. During the first year of leadership by Covington and Crabill, they solved a looming budget deficit by closing 29 schools and laying-off 285 teachers.

In 2011, Covington resigned and the Kansas City School District lost its accreditation. He went to Detroit while many people in Kansas City blamed Crabill for Covington leaving. They claimed he had been too involved in district operations. It was not until 2016 that the Kansas City Star reported Covington did not want to leave Kansas City but Eli Broad called saying, “John, I need you to go to Detroit.” Two days later, on Aug. 26, 2011, Covington was introduced as the first superintendent of Michigan’s new Education Achievement Authority.

While serving on the school board, Crabill’s name was Airick Leonard West but in 2016 he changed it to Airick Journey Crabill. The new surname came from his childhood foster parents.  

That same year, Crabill left Kansas City to work for Mike Morath and the Texas Education Agency (TEA) as a deputy commissioner. When the Austin ISD needed help understanding the new Lone Star Governance (LSG) system they hired Ashley Paz. The Austin Chronicle reports:

“Paz was trained by one of the people most involved in the formation of LSG – a former TEA deputy commissioner, A.J. Crabill. The agency’s boss, Mike Morath, hired Crabill in 2016 to help create and administer Lone Star Governance. He was an LSG coach for years, and in 2020 he became a conservator sent by the TEA to deal with the DeSoto school district, south of Dallas.”

Crabill states on his website, “School systems do not exist to have great buildings, have happy parents, have balanced budgets, have satisfied teachers, provide student lunches, provide employment in the county/city, or anything else.” It seems to me that great schools need all those things.

Crabill recently suggested there ought to be “automatic recalls if student scores drop dramatically.” He is pushing the NCLB test and punish scheme. The big difference, it is delivered by a private institution and not a government entity.

Of course there is a billionaire behind The Council of the Great City Schools and A.J. Crabill. Bill Gates [TIN 56-2618866] has sent them more than $3 million in 2021 – 2023. This is almost half their recent grant dollars.

Opinion

In many ways, America’s school boards are the training ground and foundation for democratic ideals. Student Outcome Focused Governance is an anti-democratic attack on that structure. I recently checked the San Diego Unified School Districts web site and found to my dismay that they are supporting SOFG.  

Please join me in opposing this outrageously bad public policy.

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The South’s Long War on Black Literacy

14 Apr

By Thomas Ultican 4/14/2025

Derek Black’s masterpiece of research, Dangerous Learning, reveals the centuries of struggle for Black Americans to become educated. When I arrived at the Network for Public Education conference April 4, I ran into Professor Black (University of South Carolina Law School) and mentioned to him I almost finished reading his book on the airplane. He absurdly wanted to know how boring I found it. The truth is that this beautifully written book is extremely engaging.

Denmark Vesey

Growing up in Idaho, my knowledge of American slavery is quite lacking. I had never heard of Denmark Vesey, who played a major role in the suppression of education for slaves.

Joseph Vesey was a slave trader who brought 390 enslaved people including Demark to St. Thomas and Saint-Domingue (now known as Haiti) in 1781. Joseph’s slave ship brings the first record of the approximately 14-year-old Denmark. He was sold in Haiti along with the other 390 people but it seems he feigned epilepsy and Joseph was forced to take him back. Soon after, Denmark became Captain Vesey’s trusted assistant.

Black tells this story in about 20 pages in the book. I will cut it down a little.

Denmark learned to read and in 1799 he won the lottery ($1500). He paid Joseph $600 for his freedom and through various means; Denmark became highly educated. He was also inspired by the slave revolution in Haiti. Denmark became an authority on the Bible being known in the community as “a man of the book”. (Page 16) He taught classes at the African Church which became the famous African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church also known as the AME Church. Denmark was obsessed with learning and read widely including classical literature.

In the Old Testament, Vesey found the story of the Israelites’ path from slavery. He taught his friends how the children of Israel were delivered from bondage in Egypt. Professor Black explains:

“In it [the Old Testament], Vesey found a God who stood on the side of the oppressed, not the oppressor, and who intervened in the world not to reinforce slavery but to free the Israelites from it. God consistently assured the Israelites that He would deliver their enemies into their hands if they would follow His will. And following His will did not mean turning the other cheek, fleeing from conflict, or suffering in silence. It often meant smiting those who stood against them, including women and children.”   (Page 20)

In 1822, Vesey having been deeply and fundamentally changed by his literacy planned a slave rebellion. He chose July 14th for the liberation of Black people in Charleston.  The plan was workable but an enslaved man came forward on May 30th claiming he had been recruited to participate in a slave revolt. After that, Vesey’s plans fell apart and he along with his co-conspirators were put to death. Black noted, “When Frederick Douglass implored crowds of Black men to join the Union Army in 1863, he offered a simple message: ‘Remember Denmark Vesey of Charleston.’” (Page 35)

Unfortunately, it was remembering Denmark Vesey that pushed southerners into an all out suppression of Black literacy that lasted well into the twentieth century.

Suppressing Education

The last open debate on slavery in the South was conducted by the Virginia legislature in 1832. William M. Rivas, a lawyer and member of a wealthy colonial family claimed that elite planters had “held the state’s democratic process in a death grip for decades.” (Page 107) He said they had intentionally limited education not just for slaves but for poor and middle-class White people as well.

While the North was engaged in developing a state supported public education system, the South, under the influence of wealthy elites, absolutely opposed state funding for education.

It was a shock for me to discover that Thomas Jefferson was a white supremacist. In Notes on the State of Virginia he wrote that Black people were “inferior to whites in the endowments of both of body and mind.” (Page 65) He said that this reality posed a powerful obstacle to emancipation.

After the 1832 debate, censorship and anti-literacy in the South took on a life of their own. The South became more and more isolated and intolerant.

For the slaves, seeking literacy was hidden and secretive. Finding the time to study was difficult and a flickering candle could draw attention and suspicion. It is reported that enslaved people would study in caves or in holes they created in the woods.

“In Mississippi, people told of holes large enough to accommodate a group. They called them ‘pit schools.’” (Page 188)

After the Civil War, former slaves were able to openly attend school and the Reconstruction Act of 1867 attempted to force states to pay for it. The Act created three requirements for states to be readmitted to the Union: extend the vote to black men, ratify the 14th Amendment and guarantee a republican form of government. Black noted, “A republican form of government meant, among other things, ensuring public education.” (Page 244)

However the citizens of the south were not going to accept Black people having equal rights. Terrorist groups attacked schools and teachers. The more Union troops were drawn down, the greater the violence became.

1874 Harper’s Political Cartoon by Thomas Nast

During Reconstruction, 631 attacks on black schools have been documented. White citizens of Tennessee under the leadership of the KKK destroyed 76 Black schools. (Page 261)

In order to secure victory in the 1877 Presidential race, Rutherford B. Hayes agreed to a compromise between southern Democrats and pro-business Republicans to end Reconstruction. Soon after, southern states started rewriting the required constitutions they needed to rejoin the Union. There was a two pronged agenda: “disenfranchise Black voters, and segregate and underfund Black education.” (Page 168) Jim Crow laws became enshrined in the new southern state constitutions.

In 1896, the Plessy v. Ferguson case held up the bogus concept of separate but equal facilities. That same year saw a new Louisiana law that took Black male voter registration from 95.6% of the population to 1.1% by 1904. In 1902, Nicolas Bauer, a man that would become superintendent of public schools in New Orleans, wrote:

“I realize from my limited observation that to teach the negro (sic) is a different problem. His natural ability is of a low character and it is possible to bring him to a certain level beyond which it is impossible to carry him. That point is reached in the fifth grade of our schools.”

The lack of justice and abundance of ignorance is what the Supreme Court tried to rectify with Brown v. Board of Education.

The fact is these two centuries of hostility toward educating all American citizens is still causing harm. Derek Black’s Dangerous Learning is a must read for anyone that cares about justice.

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NPE2025 Columbus Impressions

8 Apr

By Thomas Ultican 4/8/2025

Last weekend, it was a rainy sad environment greeting the 2025 Network for Public Education (NPE) conference but inside the Columbus Hyatt it was blue-skies. When I left Ohio Monday morning, the local environment matched the hope and determination generated for three days.

The first conference event was a Friday evening session with Diane Ravitch and Professor Josh Cowen discussing vouchers. They made three things abundantly clear. As Cowen noted, “By every standard of the policy debate, vouchers have failed.” They always get defeated by voters at the poles and have become welfare for the wealthy. Funding for vouchers is wrecking state budgets.

As people were exiting the room, I got Diane and Pastor Charles Foster to pose for a picture. This created a wonderful example of tolerance and communication needed today. Ravitch is a Jew from New York City, Charles is a devout Baptist from Texas and I am a Nichiren Buddhist from California; yet we are all three genuine friends.

Charles and Diane

Day 2, Saturday

It was a marathon of sharing. At 8 AM, participants gathered in a large room for breakfast and speeches. Ravitch shared that “The Department of Education was not created to raise test scores but to raise equity.” She noted that America is a diverse country and that we must live with diversity and not deny it.

Jesse Piper, an NPE board member from rural Missouri, passionately ended the breakfast meeting claiming that when you start defunding schools, the community goes next. Jesse used the demise of her on small town as an example. Piper also stated, “Christian nationalism is teaching women to be submissive to their husbands and husbands to be submissive to their bosses.” She concluded by asserting to this large room full of public school educators, “You’re not indoctrinating students, that is what religious and private schools do.”

Jesse Piper

From there we broke into sessions in several rooms. Unfortunately, wonderful sessions were occurring at the same time making it hard to pick which one to attend. I presented on Science of Reading (SoR) in the first breakout presentations of the day. Nancy Bailey and Elena Aydarova PhD joined in the sharing. We had a large audience and people kindly told us they liked the presentations. (I am willing to share the Power Point file I used.)

Nancy Bailey

After lunch and a wonderful speech by John H. Jackson president of the Schott Foundation, I went to learn about Lifewise. I had no idea how fast that organization is growing. It was founded in 2018 in Ohio. There are now organizations in 26 states including California. Lifewise promotes RTRI (Release Time for Religious Instruction). Schools that participate must release children during the school day for a bus trip to the Lifewise facility where they learn a benighted form of Christianity based on the ancient Nicene Creed.

There are two types of states that authorize Lifewise, may-states and shall-states. Ohio just became a shall-state that mandates schools to participate if it is offered.

Lifewise wants kids younger than 14 because they are more successfully indoctrinated. When the kids come back to class, they show their presents and tell stories of ice cream parties. Kids that are at Lifewise often miss out on important learning. An Ohio science teacher showed pictures of his kids getting ready for the total eclipse that the Lifewise students missed.

That evening, we enjoyed a speech by the 2022 national teacher of the year, Kurt Russell. Russell says he no longer thinks of public education as important. Rather because it is the foundation of our democracy, it is vital, it is essential and “it is bigger than that; it is life.” Usually I am not impressed by someone being named teacher year whether it is of the school, district, county, state or the country. In this instance, he seemed totally deserving of the accolade.

Kurt Russell

Day 3, Sunday

I was really moved by the New Orleans presentation. We heard from a former charter school student and a brilliant mom. They made it clear that control is the byword in the district’s charter schools. The young man, a former charter school student, described a hair-raising ordeal which sounded like child abuse designed to keep the black community in its place.

Last year, when a charter school failed the superintendent replaced it with the first New Orleans public school since 2017. She was fired, but that is what the mom speaking to us claimed parents want. She said they desire that every time a charter school fails it is replaced by a more stable public school. Charter schools have become a revolving door with a large percentage of schools going out of business every year. Unfortunately, those in power want to maintain their portfolio model school district that does not include public schools.

She also said that charters in New Orleans are being sued regularly for some of their practices with children. However, there is almost no reporting about the suits because the settlements always include a non-disclosure agreement (NDA). She told the story of asking a KIPP administrator how many NDA’s they had created. He said none but when she retorted that she was in court just the week before and saw a KIPP NDA created, he backed off and promised to get back to her. She is not holding her breath.

The New Orleans Panel

The brunch time speaker was state representative from Texas, Gina Hinojosa, who has been in an all out battle with Texas Governor Greg Abbott to stop his universal voucher scheme. She says private equity is the plan that is causing billionaires Dunn, Wilks, Yass, Musk and others to finance vouchers in Texas. Hinajosa stresses that the most sinister aspect of the voucher plan is profiting through finance. She reports that a Texas Catholic Credit Union has already been established.

Gina Hinohosa

The last event on Sunday afternoon was special. American Federation of Teachers President, Randi Weingarten, presented us with a fiery speech when she introduced the final keynote speaker of the conference, Governor Tim Waltz of Minnesota.

Waltz was definitely not a disappointment. He made many vintage Waltz type statements:

“I know in this room I’m preaching to the choir. The choir needs to sing louder.”

“Some people say ‘I’m just not into politics.’ Well too damn bad, politics is into you.”

“We should not call them oligarchs, we should call them what they are greedy bastards.”

He was proud of the fact of being cited as the least wealthy person ever to run for Vice-President of the United States.

Waltz asserted that the middle class was built by public education and labor unions. As for what we are going through now, he speculates that it will get worse; so be ready for it.

Governor Waltz surprised us by staying in the room and taking picture with hundreds of us.

Tom and Tim

My impression was that this was the best NPE event to date. The breakout sessions that I attended were amazing and I did not hear of any disappointments. The keynote speakers were excellent and finishing with Governor Waltz was the cherry on top.

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AI in School is the Latest Edtech Scam

30 Mar

By Thomas Ultican 3/30/2025

For more than thirty years, technology companies have looked to score big in the education sector. Instead of providing useful tools, they have schemed to take control of public education. At the onset of the twenty-first century, technologists claimed putting kids at computers was a game changer that would fix everything. They followed that up by promoting tablets with algorithmic lessons replacing teachers and claiming they provide better education. Today’s hoax is that artificial intelligence (AI) will make all these failed efforts work. What it actually does is undermine authentic learning. 

The release of ChatGPT in November 2022 is responsible for the Edtech sales-forces switching their sales pitches from personalized learning to AI. However, AI has always been at the root of personalized learning. It just did not have the advantage of large language models (LLM) that emulate writing in English. However, AI expert Yann LeCun notes:

“LLMs are really good at retrieval. They’re not good at solving new problems, [or] finding new solutions to new problems.”

Artificial Intelligence is a misnomer. There is no intelligence; just algorithms. The term, “Artificial Intelligence”, was first coined by Professor John McCarthy at a Dartmouth College conference in 1956. That same year AI became an academic discipline.

Machine-learning has been part of AI since its 1950s beginning. Algorithms are created to allow a machine to automatically improve its performance on a given task. For almost two decades, Netflix has used machine-learning to create personalized recommendations, based on a customer’s previous viewing history. Deep-learning is an advancement in machine-learning. It layers algorithms into computer units ridiculously referred to as neurons. Google Translate uses it for translation from one language to another.

With the advent of LLMs, the energy use associated with AI has risen dramatically. Professor Jonathan Koomey, who founded the End-Use Forecasting group at Lawrence Berkley National Laboratory, worked on a report funded by the US Department of Energy. He estimated that data centers currently use 176 TWh of our country’s electricity which is about 4.4% of it. Koomey forecasts that this consumption might double or even triple by 2028 to between 7% and 12% of our electricity usage.

Selling to Schools

For serious educators, AI is a set of computer algorithms, making cheating easy. It is another tool for creating an easier to control and more profitable education system. Billionaire Laurene Powell Jobs is a leader in the AI-revolution in education. Her Amplify digital lessons liberally apply AI and her XQ Institute is working to integrate AI into classrooms. Edward Montalvo, XQ institute’s senior education writer has claimed:

‘“The future of AI in education is not just about adopting new technologies; it’s about reshaping our approach to teaching and learning in a way that is as dynamic and diverse as the students we serve,’ XQ Institute Senior Advisor Laurence Holt said. … Through AI, we can also transcend the limitations of the Carnegie Unit — a century-old system in which a high school diploma is based on how much time students spend in specific subject classes.

“Changing that rigid system is our mission at XQ.”

The advocates of computer learning in K-12 classrooms need to get rid on the Carnegie Unit to maximize profits. The “unit” is a minimum requirement creating a nationwide agreed-upon structure. It does not control pedagogy or assessments but insures a minimum amount of time on task.

Education writer, Derek Newton’s article for Forbes, opposed ending the Carnegie unit for a host of reasons but the major one is cheating:

“Cheating, academic misconduct as the insiders know it, is so pervasive and so easy that it makes a complete mockery of any effort to build an entire education system around testing.” (See here)

“But because of the credit hour system, which is designed to measure classroom instruction time, it’s still relatively hard to cheat your way to a full college degree.”

The system XQ is trumpeting has students doing online lessons and then testing to receive a credit. It eliminates class levels and also undermines student socialization.

In a recent interview Kristen DiCerbo, Khan Academy’s chief leaning officer, mentioned that when ChatGPT was seeking more funding, they needed the Academy’s help. Bill Gates wanted improved performance as a condition for his support. Khan Academy helped train the new startup to pass the AP Biology exam which was a Gates requirement. This probably means that Khan gave ChatGPT access to his data base so they could feed the information into their LLM.

Earlier this year, an American Psychological Association (APA) magazine article claimed, “Much of the conversation so far about AI in education centers around how to prevent cheating—and ensure learning is actually happening—now that so many students are turning to ChatGPT for help.” The big downsides to AI includes students not thanking through problems and rampant cheating. In the AP physics classroom, I started seeing students turning in perfectly done assignments while being unable to solve the problems on an exam.

The APA article noted that for several years AI was powering learning management tools, such as Google Classroom, Canvas, and Turnitin. I experimented with Canvas for a few years and found two downsides and no upside. The front end of Canvas was terrible and they claimed ownership of all my work posted to Canvas. APA sees it as a positive that “educators are increasingly relying on AI products such as Curipod, Gradescope, and Twee to automate certain tasks and lighten their workload.”

Curipod is an AI edtech product from Norway focused on test prep.

Gradescope is an AI grading tool from Turnitin LLC.

Twee is an English language arts AI application that aids with lesson development and assessment.

These products are selling the fact that they use AI. However, they appear to be a waste of time that may marginally help a first or second year teacher.

Benjamin Riley is a uniquely free thinker. He spent five years as policy director at NewSchool Venture Fund and founded Deans for Impact. His new effort is Cognitive Resonance which recently published “Education Hazards of Generative AI.” With his background, I was surprised to learn he does not parrot the party line. In an article this month Riley states:

“Using AI chatbots to tutor children is a terrible idea—yet here’s NewSchool Venture Fund and the Gates Foundation choosing to light their money on fire. There are education hazards of AI anywhere and everywhere you might choose to look—yet organization after organization within the Philanthro-Edu Industrial Complex continue to ignore or diminish this very present reality in favor of AI’s alleged “transformative potential” in the future. The notion that AI “democratizes” expertise is laughable as a technological proposition and offensive as a political aspiration, given the current neo-fascist activities of the American tech oligarchs—yet here’s John Bailey and friends still fighting to personalize learning using AI as rocket fuel.”

John Bailey is American Enterprise Institute’s AI guy. He has worked under Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin, done some White House stints, was vice president of policy at Jeb Bush’s Foundation for Excellence in Education and is a member of the Aspen Global Leadership Network. In other words, he and his friends disdain public education and are true believers in big-tech.

Every time big-tech claims its new technology will be a game changer for public education they have either lied or are deluded by their own rhetoric. According to technology writer, Audrey Watters, generative AI is built on plagiarism. Besides being unethical, AI is also unhealthy. A new joint study by Open AI and MIT found that the more students ask questions of ChatGPT the more likely they are to become emotionally dependent on it.

The way AI is presently being marketed to schools obscures the reality it is another big-tech product that is both unhealthy and retards learning.

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Questioning the Mississippi Miracle Again

21 Mar

By Thomas Ultican 3/21/2025

The national assessment of education progress (NAEP) is a biennial effort of the Department of Education. At the end of February, Chad Aldeman of The 74 – a billionaire created propaganda rag – asks, “How did Mississippi go from 49th in the country a decade ago to near the top today?” The simple answer is they didn’t. Still Aldeman’s article carries the title, “There Really Was a ‘Mississippi Miracle’ in Reading. States Should Learn From It.”

Australian, Noel Wilson, published his dissertation “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” in 1997. This work, which has never been refuted, says that error in standardized testing is too large to reliably compare student outcomes. Psychologist Donald Campbell observed, “The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.” This is known as Campbell’s Law. Together, these two seminal works tell us that standardized testing to monitor and evaluate education is both unreliable and bad policy.

I have finally found something positive coming out of our felonious president’s administration. ABC News reports that he has ended the agency that compiles the “Nation’s Report Card” also known as NAEP. He eliminated the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) which had existed for more than 150 years. Now, we won’t know how many students or schools our nation has or other important data about them, but we will no longer be wasting money on standardized testing.

This may be the last time we get a chance to look at billionaire sponsored deceptions based on NAEP testing.

Not a Miracle

Aldeman states:

“… [W]hen the Urban Institute adjusted NAEP scores based on each state’s demographics, Mississippi’s fourth-grade reading scores came out on top.”

“Some people have even tried to cast doubt on Mississippi’s NAEP gains by arguing they’re merely a function of testing older kids. But this has been debunked: Mississippi does hold back more kids than other states, but it always has, and the average age of Mississippi’s NAEP test-takers has barely budged over time.”

The Urban Institute and every other report that shows reading scores surging in Mississippi are based on 4th grade NAEP scores. It is remarkable how well Mississippi fourth graders have performed on NAEP reading tests since 2013. In 2024, they moved all the way up to 10th in comparison to the 49 other states, the District of Columbia, Department of Defense schools and Puerto Rico.

The first link in the second paragraph quoted above is a post by Diane Ravitch. She did not say anything about student ages but did state, “The surest path to success in fourth-grade reading on NAEP is to hold back third-graders who did not pass the third-grade reading test.” She also linked to a post from the right-wing Fordham Institute which posits, “A partial explanation for its NAEP improvement is that it holds students back.”

The second link in the paragraph is from a Fordham Institute article refuting Michael Hiltzik of the Los Angeles Times. Fordham asserts, “His claims about Mississippi’s NAEP scores and retention policy are based on a debunked theory and are demonstrably wrong in ways that he should have known.” This latest link is to a Magnolia Times article by Carey Wright, who as secretary of education in Mississippi instituted its reading program including third grade retention. Ms. Wright has too much skin in the game to be a powerful source that “demonstrably” sets the LA opinion writer straight.

If Mississippi’s reading program is really working not just 4th graders but 8th graders should also be showing gains. They do not. NCES publishes comparison lists of state results.

Using the 2024 data, we see that indeed Mississippi’s 4th graders were number ten in the country but why are their 8th graders still number 43? The Mississippi reading program has been in effect since 2013 which means the 8th graders have been subjected to it their entire school life.

Another way to look at this is by plotting Mississippi reading scores against national averages.

This data shows us there is something fishy about the Mississippi’s 4th grade reading scores. They are hardly miracles but seem more like subterfuges.

It does not conclusively prove anything but science of reading, which is employed by Mississippi, started to be widely implemented in 2013 at the same time national reading scores started getting worse.

Carey Wright and the Right-wing

Carey Wright began her education career in 1972 as a teacher in Maryland.

In 2010, Michelle Rhee hired her to be chief academic officer for Washington DC public schools. Wright was an administrator in the DC schools during the height of their cheating scandals. Besides working with some of the most callus and harmful education leaders in American history, she is a member of Jeb Bush’s Chiefs for Change and a graduate of the late Eli Broad’s superintendent training academy. Both organizations are or were widely seen as enemies of public education.

In a 2023 Magnolia Times article, Wright claimed:

“Students who are retained in third grade because of reading deficiencies are provided with intensive interventions and support throughout the school year so they will be successful in later grades. 

“A recent report from Boston University’s Wheelock Educational Policy Center found this strategy is working. The report reviewed English Language Arts scores and later academic outcomes from the first cohort of third graders promoted and retained under Mississippi’s Literacy-Based Promotion Act of 2013.”

Upon opening the link Wright provided, we discover that the cited report was commissioned by the Foundation for Excellence in Education, which is Jeb Bush’s non-profit. He is chairman of the board and his girl Friday, Patricia Levesque, is the CEO. Their organization is known for working to privatize public schools and promoting Edtech.

Evidently ExcelinEd’s researchers discovered that the 6th grade results do not look as bad as the 8th grade results. The reports first key finding states, “For students who were in the third grade in 2014-15, being retained under Mississippi’s policy led to substantially higher ELA scores in the sixth grade.” This appears to be an example of looking for data to sell your ideology.

After spending four years in the classroom, Wright transitioned to various administrative roles. When leading special education services in Montgomery County during the early 2000s, she was serving in the middle of a corporate education reform triumvirate. John Deasy was promoting charter schools and teacher “pay for performance” in Prince George County. Baltimore had Andres Alonzo firing teachers and closing schools. Just a few miles away, Michelle Rhee was promising to “fix” Washington DC’s schools by firing teachers and principals.

Unfortunately, Carey Wright was drawn into this kind of billionaire school reform. She was probably a talented administrator, but many of her decisions were tainted by her friends in education.

The data does suggest that there has been some education progress in Mississippi. That improvement is most likely due to the dedication of poorly compensated public school educators.

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Movement to Destroy American Democracy

12 Mar

By Thomas Ultican 3/12/2025

Author Katherine Stewart is a friend of mine. OK, we are not bosom buddies and have only met face to face once briefly. However, in 2017, I wrote about her book The Good News Club and we began communicating by email. In 2019, when she published The Power Worshippers, I again reviewed her book and our email communications were enhanced. Now, she has completed the trilogy with Money Lies and God, her just released book, which continues a deep dive into Christian nationalism and the extreme right’s anti-democratic agenda.

On Money Lies and God’s cover, Congressman Jamie Raskin insightfully labels the book, “An indispensable citizen’s guide to the antidemocratic MAGA right.”

Whenever I read a book, the first thing I do is read everything on the cover and all introductory material. I was amazed by the well known people commenting on this book. Besides Jamie Raskin, I was particularly stuck by comments from Nancy MacLean and Steve Schmidt. Not that their selected comments were so mind blowing but because they are such heroes of mine.

Maclean, the famous historian and author of “Democracy in Chains”, states, “A bracing must-read story of how the varied streams have merged into a mighty river moving toward massive destruction—and it explains how together, we can divert it.”

Schmidt, John McCain’s campaign manager, political strategist and cofounder of the Lincoln Project, wrote, “Pieces through the fog and noise to reveal the dangerous forces gathering, planning, and plotting against liberty.”

The comments made me think this book could be special. I was not disappointed.

Building toward a Trilogy

Living in Santa Barbra, California in the early 2000s, Stewart was stunned to learn that her daughter’s elementary school had a protestant after school program for students called “The Good News Club.” For the past almost two decades this discovery has driven her to research how religious organizations are now allowed to proselytize babies in public facilities. The more she dug, the scarier reality became.

A significant figure in the tearing down of the separation of church and state was lawyer Jay Sekulow. Born into a Jewish family he converted to evangelical Christianity in the 1980s. In 1990, Pat Robertson brought Sekulow together with a few other lawyers to form the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ) (notice how close the acronym is to ACLU). In 1994, the Alliance Defense Fund (ADF) added its name to the growing roster of well financed Christian legal organizations and is backed by groups that are a veritable who’s who of the Christian Right.

In 2001, this legal juggernaut succeeded again in their efforts to undermine the separation of church and state with its victory in Good News Club v. Milford Central School. Stewart commented:

“An alien visitor to planet First Amendment could be forgiven for summarizing the entire story thus: Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia, together with a few fellow travelers on the Supreme Court and their friends in the ADF and ACLJ, got together and ordered that the United States should establish a nationwide network of evangelical churches housed in taxpayer-financed school facilities.”  

The destruction of the first amendment was well underway.

In “The Power Worshippers”, Stewart dove deeply into the world of Christian nationalism. Among the many insightful items she shared were the actions of Paul Weyrich. He coined the term “moral majority.” He also co-founded the Heritage Foundation, The Free Congress Foundation and the American Legislative Exchange Council.

Weyrich made 12 trips to Russia and Eastern Europe before his death in 2008 and became a strong supporter of closer relations with Russia. Stewart reports, “He was writing and speaking frequently in defense of Russia and facilitating visits between U.S. conservatives and Russian political leaders.” (Power Page 270)

In 2013, Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association called Putin a “lion of Christianity.” In 2014, Franklin Graham defended Putin for his efforts “to protect his nations’ children from the damaging effects of any gay and lesbian agenda.” He also lamented that Americans have “abdicated our moral leadership.” In 2015, Graham met privately with Putin for 45-minutes. In 2016, Mike Pence said Putin was “a stronger leader in his country than Barack Obama has been in this country.” (Power Page 272)

Donald J. Trumpski’s embrace of Putin and other despotic world leaders is an outcome spurred by Christian nationalism.

Completing the Trilogy

In the introduction to “Money Lies and God”, Stewart states, “There is no world in which America will become the ‘Christian nation’ that it never actually was; there is only a world in which a theocratic oligarchy imposes a corrupt and despotic order in the name of sectarian values.”  (Money Page 7)

In these pages, Stewart expands beyond just the evangelical community to include the Conservative Catholic community that has joined forces with the evangelicals. The reader is introduced to Opus Dei, the ultraconservative and secretive Catholic group founded in fascist Spain. “Opus Dei does not disclose its membership, but Leonard Leo has a listed entry on the website of the Catholic Information Center in Washington, D.C., which is operated by Opus Dei …” (Money Page 43)

 Stewart reports on the big 2023 Mom’s for Liberty event in Philadelphia. That same year, she attended the Network for Public Education event in Washington D.C. which is where I had my face to face encounter with my “friend.” She writes extensively about both events.

The book does a lot of documenting of the tremendous amount of money right wingers are pouring into their agenda. She cites the spending by the DeVos-Prince family, Texan Tim Dunn, Jeff Yass, Richard Uihlein, the Corkerys, Mike Rydin, Rebekah Mercer, Charles Koch and more. You meet the Ziklag group, a secretive organizations for high net-worth Christian nationalists. A ProPublica article asserts, “Ziklag appears to be the first coordinated effort to get wealthy donors to fund an overtly Christian nationalist agenda …”

I was surprised that our American psychosis is being spread rapidly around the world. Stewart attended the 2023 National Conservatism Conference (NatCon) in London where she saw representatives of the ADF and the Heritage foundation.

Stewart summarizes the NatCon pitch:

“The sum of all our problems—and the greatest threat that the United States and its sister republics around the world have ever faced—is the rise of the ‘woke’ elite. Cosmopolitan, overeducated, gender-fluid, parasitic, anti-Christian idolaters who worship at the shrine of diversity, equity, and inclusion, the leaders of this progressive cabal are bent on elevating undeserving people of color while crushing hardworking ‘real’ Americans (or real Britons, or whoever is in the audience).” (Money Page 100)

In the “The Rise of the Spirit Warriors” chapter, Stewart notes,

“In October 2023, the spirit warriors notched another stunning victory when one of their own … became Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. Congressman Mike Johnson of Louisiana indicated on his first day as Speaker that God himself had a hand in his ascension to a position second in line to the presidency.” (Money Page 163)

Late in the book, Stewart contends, “The axis around which a sector of the global antidemocratic reaction now turns is an extraordinary alliance between a dominant wing of the Republican Party in the U.S. and the Russian dictator Vladimir Putin.” (Money Page 214)

I hope you read “Money Lies and God”.  It is an extraordinarily well written and researched endeavor.  

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“Educational Pluralism” Another Name for Privatization

5 Mar

By Thomas Ultican 3/5/2025

Johns Hopkins University and The 74 teamed up one more time to satisfy their billionaire donors and promote privatizing public education. Ashley Berner, Director of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy, is featured in a The 74 interview entitled “‘We’re the Outliers’: Ashley Rogers Berner on Public Funding for Private Schools.” She notes that many other countries openly pay for religious schools and calls for America to follow their lead.

In this interview, Berner tells many half-truths dripping with deception. She states:

“There’s dogmatism on both the left and the right. On the left, it’s tied into the unions and their claim to sole authority — that only the district schools, which they run, are legitimate. And on the right, you have the argument that parent autonomy is the desired end goal, that it’s sufficient to determine school quality and the government has no legitimate role.”

I do not agree that on the right “parent autonomy is the desired end goal.” Their goal is ending public education. And Berner’s claim that unions have “sole authority” over education policy or the district schools she says they run is farcical. Teachers unions certainly have an influence but so does the business community and the voting public of which they are members.

She is implying that it is mainly teachers unions that are opposed to privatizing public education. This dismisses the rest of us who believe that public schools are the bedrock that created the world’s greatest, freest and most powerful nation. It is this school system that people like Ashley Berner, Johns Hopkins University and the billionaires funding The 74 are out to end.

Berner’s Argument

In 2017, Berner published her book “Pluralism and American Public Education: No One Way to School.” In it she describes how many European and Asian countries pay for various types of schools. They fund private schools, religious schools and district schools. Because they fund all types of schools, there are no warring sides. She is spreading this argument widely in conservative circles.

Her essay at the Manhattan Institute starts:

“For more than a century, public education in the U.S. has been defined as schools that are funded, regulated, and exclusively delivered by government. The past 25 years have brought some diversified forms of delivery through charter schools and various private-school scholarship mechanisms. Nevertheless, most discussions and debates over school reforms take place within the existing paradigm: only district schools are considered truly public, and all alternative models (whether charters, tax credits, or vouchers), must justify themselves on the basis of superior test scores.”

This 2019 article continues in the same misleading vain. Charter schools are the privatized alternative schools that were originally an experiment. The charters that were given to these schools by states had some performance demands attached. The reality is that these demands were never onerous and in most cases not equivalent to the demands put on district schools. Voucher schools have no demands attached and for two decades the results posted by voucher schools have been horrible.

At the Manhattan Institute, researchers know that even oblique shots at government schools plays real well and Berner does not miss the opportunity. In the interview she stated, “Meanwhile, many critics of the ubiquitous district public school also seek independence from state control and accountability, even if it comes with funding attached.”

In her book, she applies the noun pluralism to education. While for more than a century Americans have been paying for public schools, that is not good enough for Berner. She is calling for school choice paid for by taxpayers. Quite unlike former President Grant’s position:

 “Leave the matter of religion to the family altar, the church, and the private school, supported entirely by private contributions. Keep the church and state forever separate.” (Good News Pages 73-74)

At the Fordham Institute, they published Berner’s article “3 ways to increase choice and decrease polarization in U.S. schools.” In it she asserted:

“Third, build the infrastructure to support both choice and quality. A great example is Indianapolis’s The Mind Trust, a nonprofit that, since 2006, has recruited teachers into the state, launched four dozen charter schools and partnered with the city’s public school district to design schools that by design meet their communities’ specific needs.

In 2018, I wrote a piece about The Mind Trust. My conclusion stated:

“Lubienski and Lubienski conducted a large scale research of education data and came to the surprising conclusion that public schools outperform privatized schools. They also saw that most of the “studies” that claimed otherwise were paid for by advocates and not peer reviewed. The claims of success by The Mind Trust seem to fit this description like print to wood block.”

It should be noted; the Mind Trust bringing in hundreds of Teach for America teaching candidates with 5 weeks of training and a two year commitment harmed Indianapolis’s teaching corp.

Berner Ignores Why America has a Separation between Church and State

There is a document in the library of Congress called “Religion and the Founding of the American Republic.” The first line of the document states, “Many of the British North American colonies that eventually formed the United States of America were settled in the seventeenth century by men and women, who, in the face of European persecution, refused to compromise passionately held religious convictions and fled Europe.”

Eighteenth century Americans knew of the suffering brought by the Anglican and Catholic churches. They saw theocracies as the road to terror and wanted strict boundaries separating the secular government and religious life.

In The 74’s interview, Burner speaks about finding an elementary school for her children when she was studying at Oxford:

“The Anglican Church was the top local provider of elementary education, but there was a state-funded Jewish school down the street. There was a Montessori school, all kinds of secular schools.”

This does not seem like enough of a justification for the United States to abandon its constitution and tear up the world’s foremost K-12 education system. But strangely enough, that is exactly what the extreme right has been angling to achieve. This is not conservatism. This is radical anti-Americanism.

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Teach Truth

23 Feb

By Thomas Ultican 2/23/2021

In “Teach Truth: The Struggle for Antiracist Education,” Author Jesse Hagopian takes his readers inside the struggle and shares Black culture. At the 2018 Indianapolis Network for Public Education conference, Journey for Justice Chairman, Jitu Brown, introduced Jesse as “a freedom fighter who happens to be a teacher.” What I did not understand then is that he also happens to be man who can write.  This book is exceptional.

Jesse defines two concepts that he uses throughout the book: uncritical race theory and truthcrime law.

He states, “Uncritical race theory denies that racism exists at all, or maintains that racism primarily victimizes white people, or rejects any systemic or institutional analysis in favor of an inter personal explanation that understands racism as only sporadic and merely the product of individual bias.” (Page 7)

He explains:

“A truthcrime is any act of honest pedagogy in a jurisdiction where truthful teaching has been outlawed. Truthcrime is enforced disremembering. A truthcrime law, then, is one that makes lying to children obligatory and effectively renders honest educators as truthcriminals.” (Page 16)

Interesting Take on CRT

A goofball white guy from Seattle, Washington became famous by attacking critical race theory (CRT) in a completely dishonest way. Unfortunately, right-wing billionaire money trumpeted his assertions. At a time when the vast majority of America’s teachers had never heard of CRT, he claimed that public schools were indoctrinating students with CRT. For a short period of time, CRT became the racist rights number one anti-public schools slogan and a Republican campaign tool.

CRT emerged amongst scholars and lawyers in the late 1970s and early 80s as a way to understand the forces upon Black citizens after Brown v. Board of Education in 1955, The Civil Right act of 1964 and the Voting Rights act of 1965. It was pretty much the purview of graduate school seminars. (Page 6)

At a June, 2022 “Road to Majority Policy Conference” in Nashville, Tennessee, Texas Senator Ted Cruz declared, “Let me tell you right now, critical race theory is bigoted, it is a lie, and it is every bit as racist as the Klansmen in white sheets.” Hagopian observed, “The irony here is profound; while Cruz compares those who teach CRT to the KKK, his own attack on antiracist education aligns with one of the Klan’s primary objectives: thwarting Black education and antiracist pedagogy—which they have done ferociously throughout US history.” (Page 40)

Hagopian discusses why feckless Democrats did not effectively respond to the GOP’s CRT attacks. He gives the example of Democrat Terry McAuliffe’s race for the Virginia Governorship against Glenn Youngkin. When Youngkin made a full throated attack on CRT calling it “toxic” and “flagrant racism, plain and simple” that is a “poisonous left-wing doctrine,” McAuliffe replied, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” This response might have cost him the race. (Page 150)

Why was McAuliffe’s answer so weak in this contest between two multimillionaire white men? Hagopian think he knows. He says, “Because many liberal politicians don’t actually support CRT, they are placed in a difficult spot during elections when Republicans attack it.” Although opposing bigotry, they do not want to support a movement that could upset their corporate sponsors. (Page 150)

Diane Ravitch wondered why so many people were silent in the face of a coordinated effort to teach inaccurate history? She wrote:

“Where was Bill Gates? Although right-wing nuts attacked Bill Gates for spreading CRT, Gates said nothing to defend schools and teachers against the attacks on them. He is not known for shyness. He uses his platform to declare his views on every manner of subject. Why the silence about teaching the nation’s history with adherence to the truth? Why no support for courageous teachers who stand up for honesty in the curriculum?” (Page 153)

Hagopian concludes, “Their lack of gusto for racial, economic, and social justice stems instead from the fact that, as with the GOP, they are predominantly funded by white billionaires who see no advantage to teaching students about systematic racism or capitalist exploitation.” (Page 156)

President Trump invokes maximum hyperbole with his unenlightened view of CRT:

“Getting critical race theory out of our schools in not just a matter of values, it’s also a matter of national survival. We have no choice, the fate of any nation ultimately depends upon the willingness of its citizens to lay down—and they must do this—lay down their very lives to defend their country” (Page 79)

Billionaire Dollars Push the Lie

Jesse began his career as a teacher at Hendley Elementary School in South Washington DC. The school’s neighborhood had a dearth of grocery stores and jobs. Hendley had a completely segregated 100% African American student population. It was 2001 and that September, the World Trade Center attack was coincident with him becoming an educator.  (Page 223)

He tells the story of his first year teaching noting seeing a police officer jack-up a fifth grade boy against a wall; the boys feet were dangling. The student was accused of throw paper in class. Jesse also describes a whole in the middle of the classroom chalkboard that his students called a bullet hole.

A poster session on US history revealed another hole in the classroom. The posters were all hung on a Friday and that weekend it rained. Upon arriving at school on Monday morning, Jesse found the floor flooded and the posters soaked. After the second classroom flooding, he wised-up and put a large trash bin below the hole in the roof. His work orders to fix the roof were never filled.

Hagopian observes, “I received a graduate degree in education theory that year by witnessing the cynicism of our nation’s ability to mobilize armies to bomb people on the other side of the world while refusing to find the money to fix the hole in the ceiling of my classroom or properly care for these children in the shadow of the White House.” (Page 224)

The attack on teaching truth in America’s classrooms is being financed by right-wing billionaires. People like Julie Fancelli, an heir of the Publix grocery fortune, former secretary of public education, Betsy DeVos, oil magnate, Charles Koch, the secretive electronics billionaire, Barre Seid, and so many more.

Jesse notes that:

“Maintaining an economic system such as ours, where eighty-one billionaires have more wealth than the bottom half of all people on Earth, doesn’t just happen by accident. It takes careful investment in institutions that shape ideas, and those investments see the biggest returns in the mass media and the system of schooling.” (Page 157)

A Surprise to Me

I was aware that homosexuality was illegal in America until the 1970s and that the legal turning point came in 1969 at the Stonewall Inn. This gay bar in Greenwich Village was the site of a gay uprising when police raided the bar. Today’s annual pride festivals originate from and celebrate the Stonewall riot.

What I did not know until reading Teach Truth is that the rebellion was led by Marsha P. Johnson and a host of Black and Brown queer people. (Page 97-98)

I highly recommend reading this book. It is full of surprises like this one.

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Strange Science of Reading Law Suit

20 Feb

By Thomas Ultican 2/20/2025

December 4, 2024, two law firms from New York and Chicago respectively filed a class action law suit against reading curriculum developers not steeped in science of reading (SoR).  One of the attorneys behind this Massachusetts suit, Benjamin Elga, said he listened to the Sold a Story podcast and immediately saw “an injustice that cried out for redress.” Their main claim is that “the National Reading Panel commissioned by Congress in 1997 confirmed, all credible education and literacy research shows that daily phonics instruction is necessary for literacy success” and that these curriculum developers were deliberately deceiving schools and parents when they did not focus on systematic phonics instruction.

The suit was brought against: Lucy Calkins and her Units of Study, Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell and their Reading Resources, The Reading and Writing Project at Mossflower, Teachers College Columbia University, Greenwood Publishing Group, Heinemann Publishing and HMH Education Co.

First of Its Kind Law Suit

Never before have curriculum providers been targets of this type of suit.

In paragraph-22 of the filing, the plaintiffs claim, “For decades, scientists and educators have understood that the first step in teaching literacy is robust, daily, and extensive instruction in phonics.” Unfortunately, this statement is not true.

The ideology supporting phonics comes from the National Reading Panel (NRP) that was supervised by the National Institute of Child Health and Development (NICHD). NRP was founded in 1997 and presented its findings in 2000. The report was supposed to end the reading wars but it came under immediate attack including in the minority report by Joanne Yatvin, who wrote: “At its first meeting in the spring of 1998, the Panel quickly decided to examine research in three areas: alphabetics, comprehension, and fluency, thereby excluding any inquiry into the fields of language and literature.”

Yatvin was the superintendent of a school district in Oregon, held a PhD in education and was the only panel member with classroom experience teaching reading.

Yatvin published “Babes in the Woods: The Wanderings of the National Reading Panel” for Kappan (January 1, 2002) in which she directly addressed the phonics piece:

“The situation worsened when the phonics report was not finished by the January 31 deadline. NICHD officials, who wanted it badly, gave that subcommittee more time without informing the other subcommittees of this special dispensation. The phonics report in its completed form was not seen, even by the whole subcommittee, of which I was a member, until February 25, four days before the full report was to go to press. By that time, not even all the small technical errors could be corrected, much less the logical contradictions and imprecise language. Although a few changes were made before time ran out, most of the report was submitted ‘as is.’ Thus the phonics report became part of the full report of the NRP uncorrected, undeliberated, and unapproved. For me, that was the last straw, and I informed my fellow panel members that I wanted my minority report to be included.”

The blow-back to the original report was strong. Elaine Garan is an award-winning researcher, author of “Resisting Reading Mandates” and educator with 24 years of experience as a reading teacher.  In March 2001, she wrote, “Beyond the Smoke and Mirrors: A Critique of the National Reading Panel Report on Phonics” published by Kappan. When two NRP panel members, Linnea Ehri and Steven Stahl, attacked her in their Kappan article, she responded:

“I used the data and words of the National Reading Panel (NRP) to establish that its report was fatally flawed in terms of the fundamental research protocols, including validity, reliability and generalizability.  I established that, rather than living up to the highly publicized claims of ‘scientific’ accuracy, the report was riddled with errors.”

Garan was right. There are no “strong correlative and causal relationships between systematic phonics instruction and reading success.”

Despite the suits claim that “all credible education and literacy research shows that daily phonics instruction is necessary for literacy success”, there are in truth many highly credentialed scholars who disagree.  Posted on Ferman University Professor Paul Thomas’s blog are many articles with links to hundreds of scholars opposing SoR. In a recent post, he noted,

“The hand wringing over the 2024 NAEP reading results, however, seems to focus on learning loss and post-Covid consequences—not that reading achievement on NAEP was flat during the balanced literacy era and now has dropped steadily during the SOR era:”

Peter Johnston and Deborah Scanlon of the University at Albany debunked the Science of Reading (SoR) in this report.

Maren Aukerman is currently a Werklund Research Professor at the University of Calgary who focuses on literacy education and formerly served on the faculties at Stanford University and the University of Pennsylvania. She warns of journalists using logical fallacies to promote science of reading (SoR). For example, not reporting research showing students taught to read without systematic phonics “read more fluently.”

In 2023, a major study of teaching reading in the United Kingdom was released. The UK embraced a phonic first reading paradigm similar SoR in 2012. The researchers conclude an over-emphasis on phonics instruction caused reading test scores to go down. This matches what we have seen with this year’s National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) testing.

2024 NAEP Reading Results

Both nationally and internationally, many education researchers are openly opposed to SoR. Its support comes almost exclusively from billionaire sponsored researchers and publications.

Lawyers versus Educators

Two scholars, Robert J. Tierney, Dean Emeritus of the Faculty of Education at University of British Columbia, and Paul David Pearson, Evelyn Lois Corey Emeritus Professor of Instructional Science in the Berkeley School of Education at the University of California Berkeley, published the free to download “Fact-Checking the Science of Reading.”  

Lawyer Benjamin Elga said he listened to the Sold a Story podcast and it motivated his law suit. The education professionals wrote:

“Undoubtedly, for both of us, the precipitating event was Emily Hanford’s (2022) release of the six-part podcast, Sold a Story, broadcast by American Public Media beginning in late 2022. Hanford’s series motivated us to accelerate our response for many reasons—two of which were most pressing to us:

  1. A consistent misinterpretation of the relevant research findings; and
  2. A mean-spirited tone in her rhetoric, which bordered on personal attacks directed against the folks Hanford considered to be key players in what she called the Balanced Literacy approach to teaching early reading.” (Pages xiii and xiv)

Paragraph 39 of the law suit states, “Cueing methods have been roundly criticized for teaching children to guess rather than read.”

This above is a diagram of what they mean by cueing. Orthography uses phonics type approaches to sound out unknown words. Does it look right? With the second cue, syntactic, a student tries to understand what is written. Does it sound right? What would make it conform to grammar rules? Semantics is the last of the three cues. Does it make sense?

Cueing methods like all widely used reading curriculums embrace phonics as a tool but not as part of a daily structure.

Tierney and Pearson observed,

“It seems overly limiting to discredit the use of cueing systems based on what some might consider a restrictive assumption—that reading is entirely the accurate naming of words, rather than an act of meaning making that involves hypothesizing. To dismiss the use of context as an over-reliance on ‘guessing’ or ‘predicting’ ignores important evidence.” (Page 65)

Who Are These People?

With five lawyers listed on the class action law-suit, Kaplan & Grady is a firm in Chicago specializing in commercial and civil rights cases. Justice Catalyst Law (JCL) is a non-profit law firm from New York with two lawyers listed on the case. Both firms are fairly new, Kaplan & Grady was founded in 2022 and JCL was formed in 2018 per their tax filings (TIN 83-0932015).

Not much is known about the private company but in 2022, the non-profit took in $2,185,000 in contributions and Partner Benjamin Elga has connections to big Silicon Valley money. He is a Senior Fellow at American Economic Liberties Project to which The Irish Times reports that eBay founder Pierre Omidyar is a large contributor.

New court filings are due in March and the lawyers are demanding a jury trial.

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