GPT Paranoia
READ: A teacher took to the pages of the Washington Post to share a story about falsely believing a student may have written something using GPT-4:
Two things eventually hit me: First, I realized I was being a complete jackass. I wrote to the student, and I told him that the poem he wrote was amazing, and I asked him gently if he had used AI to write it. He wrote back saying that the poem was all his.
And it was then that I realized something else: This invention had made me paranoid. I had misjudged this student simply because of the way that he presents himself. He doesn’t come off as particularly "sensitive" or "artistic." My fishing expedition had exposed only a prejudice within myself. I had to consider the possibility that, because of who I perceived him to be, I had overlooked his talent. ChatGPT made me realize this — and this is not the kind of teacher I ever wanted to be.
Front Yard Politics
READ/LISTEN: Derek Thompson is out with a provocative essay in The Atlantic about what he dubs Front Yard politics:
The same neighborhoods saying yes to refugees in their front yard are supporting policies in their backyard that say no to refugees. This dynamic—front-yard proclamations contradicted by backyard policies—extends well beyond refugee policy, and helps explain American 21st-century dysfunction. The front yard is the realm of language. It is the space for messaging and talking to be seen. Social media and the internet are a kind of global front lawn, where we get to know a thousand strangers by their signage, even when we don’t know a thing about their private lives and virtues. The backyard is the seat of private behavior. This is where the real action lives, where the values of the family—and by extension, the nation—make contact with the real world.
The whole piece is worth a read, but a passage on the San Francisco School Board stuck out to me:
San Francisco public schools offer another lesson in how an obsession with language can cloud a rightful focus on material outcomes. In 2021, the city’s board of education voted to rename more than 40 schools to scrub out racism. Their dragnet caught such not-quite-famous racists as Abraham Lincoln and Senator Dianne Feinstein. (Paul Revere was added to the list, because one committee member misread a History.com article about his role in the Revolutionary War.) At the same time that the district was putting together its list of names, its schools suffered declines in enrollment, attendance, and learning. Math scores fell sharply and, by 2022, only 9 percent of the district’s Black students met or exceeded math standards.
The renaming committee was obviously not exclusively responsible for pandemic-era learning loss. Learning loss was a national trend, and San Francisco didn’t even experience the worst of it. But if, like the San Francisco Unified School District, you’re a school district with a big math-proficiency problem and your policies include discouraging eighth-grade algebra and holding meetings about nomenclature, you might end up with failing students in well-named schools.
I continue to be perplexed by defenders of the former SF school board, who claim the recall effort was some kind of neoliberal conspiracy. We did an extensive narrative episode on that recall effort, and it was hard to find anyone who could say a positive thing about that board. We even spoke to one of the recalled members herself, and she didn’t make much of a case for herself.
GPT-4 Isn’t Ready to Teach But Will Be Soon
READ: Paul von Hippel took to the pages of Education Next to point out the flaws in GPT-4’s geometry instruction, but he points to a significant innovation coming our way that could make all the difference:
GPT4 started out all right, but within a few minutes it was suggesting that Pythagoras’ theorem wasn’t limited to right triangles. And by the end it was painted into a corner where it couldn’t give a straight answer about whether a triangle had a right angle or which side of a triangle was the longest.
But by the time I finished writing this article, there was a new announcement that could improve performance a lot. GPT will soon be able to connect to Wolfram Alpha, another program that’s much better at math.
Choice Economics
READ: Jess Gartner invited a few school choice advocates to her blog to discuss the thorny questions around choice budgeting, such as special education funding, inflexible unit economics, and transparency. This one is for the true wonks and is too technical to summarize in an excerpt, but this point from Derrell Bradford stuck out to me:
Whether or not there are any options outside of district-lead public schools there will be fewer kids in schools in coming years so the issue must be addressed. Given this reality, schools probably should close. Teacher head count probably should decrease. But these will be political questions instead of practical ones so who knows what will happen? If New York City has anything to tell us we’ll keep everyone in place, despite hemorrhaging students, and hope no one notices.
DeSantis v. Newsom
WATCH: I recently wrote about the messaging gap between Democrats and Republicans (prompting a rebuttal from my friend Chris Stewart, which we’ll debate on the Citizen Stewart Show next week). Chris is slightly more bullish on Democratic messaging than I am and sent along this video of Gavin Newsom, who went down to Florida to show a contrast with DeSantis on the topic:
Twitter will no longer let Substack embed tweets, but the full video is here.
Broken Child Welfare System
READ: Kristen Martin wrote a passionate and persuasive article in The Atlantic about how messed up our child welfare system is:
Stories like Kenneally’s and Asgarian’s help show that the government hasn’t provided vulnerable families with the kind of material assistance they need. During the heyday of orphanages, the state ceded this responsibility to private charities; the price paid was, in many instances, the terrible treatment of children. Now families are hurt when they get caught in the dysfunctional web of the foster-care system, and many children are still experiencing mistreatment in government care. Both Kenneally and Asgarian argue that our child-welfare system has never served the best interests of children and families. Fixing it would require a "radical reimagining of what support for parents looks like," as Asgarian writes. But it also demands something she deems even more difficult for many people to let go of: "the urge to judge and blame parents and … punish them for their failures."
SUNY Drops the SAT
READ/LISTEN: The largest public university system in the U.S., the State University of New York, has moved to nix SAT and ACT requirements indefinitely. Via the New York Post:
"It is recommended that the current authorization for campuses to suspend the undergraduate admissions requirement to submit SAT and ACT scores be continued prospectively, with flexibility maintained for campuses (students may still submit standardized test scores if available)," King said in a resolution that was submitted to the governing board.
"Maintaining a test-optional policy is consistent with national trends at peer institutions."
A survey conducted last fall by the National Center for Fair & Open Testing found that more than 80% of US bachelor-degree granting colleges did not require students seeking fall 2023 admission to submit either ACT or SAT standardized exam scores.
I’ve written and podded recently about why I believe these moves are a bad idea.
Religious Charter Rejected in OK
READ/LISTEN: Charter supporters have been closely watching Oklahoma, which seemed poised (after a controversial Attorney General's opinion) to approve a religious charter school. Most urban charter supporters in my circle were concerned this move would undermine the longstanding effort to categorize these schools as fully public. They got a victory this week when OK rejected an application for a religious charter, but this is only the beginning of this debate. Via Patrick Wall and Cara Fitzpatrick in Chalkbeat:
A state board in Oklahoma voted down Tuesday an application for the country’s first religious charter school, highlighting the legal uncertainty around using tax dollars to directly pay for religious education.
In rejecting the school’s initial application, board members acknowledged that the larger issue of whether religious charter schools pass legal muster would likely be settled by the U.S. Supreme Court. The court has already ruled that states cannot exclude religious schools from private school choice programs.
If the court eventually rules in favor of religious charter schools, as some legal experts expect, it could have broad implications for the separation of church and state, as well as lead to more charter schools and less money for traditional public schools.
We’ve previously discussed the Oklahoma Attorney General opinion on Lost Debate here.
A Surge in Young Teachers?
READ: New data suggests an increasing number of young people are entering teacher preparation programs. Via Chad Aldeman in The 74:
According to data that came out late last year, the number of people enrolled in teacher preparation programs has risen more than 30% since the lows of 2016-17. Teacher preparation program completions are more of a lagging indicator, but they’re also up 9% over the last three years.
In raw numbers, public schools employ more teachers than ever. And, because K-12 student enrollment is down, public schools are hitting all-time lows in student-to-teacher ratios.
But before anyone breaks out the champagne, a bit of caution is in order. Schools would like to hire even more teachers than they already employ, and they’re struggling to fill those newly created vacancies.
Here’s what this surge looks like:
A K-12 Political Consensus?
READ: Bruno Manno took to the pages of The 74 to argue that there are a host of issues that the American middle agrees on:
The stubborn fact is that voters’ opinions and governors’ statements show broad agreement on a collection of practical education issues that offers a common-sense K-12 governing agenda, according to three recent analyses.
The two most prominent issues where there is agreement are expanding career and technical education (CTE) and increasing school funding. Others include boosting child care and early learning, raising teacher pay and providing families and students with more education options.
Read more here.