Good day, CharterFolk.
It’s fun to roll out Brian’s Voice awards this spring to celebrate and thank those who have offered Contributor Columns over the past year. There were so many great ones. Please take a minute to vote for your favorites.
I admit it. Maybe I over-index on Klein.
Then again, the Dems are making whole new caucuses based upon Klein nomenclature.
And, like Klein and Thompson’s book, the article doesn’t even mention education.
Perhaps recognizing the oversight, Klein comes out this morning with a conversation about the future of education.
It’s all about AI. What it’s going to do to education and how challenging it is going to be for parents and schools to make smart adjustments. What he doesn’t mention – oddly, given his focus on abundance – is how sclerotic our schools have become.
That which we need to be most agile is in fact most hidebound.
Across the country, those seeking abundance in all areas but education keep launching their attacks at charter schools. The Nevada governor has had to threaten a veto to get lawmakers to include charter schools in a funding increase extended to all other schools.
It’s understandable that policy makers would be attempting to earmark money for teacher salaries given that historic increases in per pupil funding this century have not translated into teacher salary increases.
It begs the question:
Where’s all the money going?
In the private sector, we can see where the money is going – or not going – in education.
The week started off with Chegg – which was identified to be the most valuable ed tech company in the United States in 2021 – announcing the layoff off a fifth of its workforce.
That follows up word from November that the company’s stock had lost 99% of its value …
… as students flock to ChatGPT and other AI tools for help with their work.
Meanwhile, in public education, we’ve seen a historic decline in the number of public schools that are closing.
The world world changes. The public education world does everything but change.
Last week, Tyler Cowen released a conversation with Jack Clark, one of the founders of Anthropic.
In it, Cowen asked what would be the worst age to be right now given the impending changes that will happen due to the emergence of AI. I thought Clark’s answer fascinating.
I also think that there’s some chance that the worst age to be is maybe 10 or so, because you are now computer literate, you’re sophisticated. You’re going into an education system that is needing to react to this technology. You will be using the technology in a way completely different to your education system, and it might just feel violently confusing. I see that being a really difficult time.
It speaks to the new great disconnect that is opening up in public education:
The massive chasm between the world our kids are growing up in and the one our schools are desperately clinging on to.