Good day, CharterFolk.
We start with a smart op-ed from Ariel Johnson, DC Charter School Alliance CEO and CharterFolk Board Member, on the potential damage that could be done to charter schools should the Supreme Court rule carelessly.
The other hot education topic coming out of DC last week was a trial balloon on education funding changes.
Andy and I dive into these developments on our next WonkyFolk recording coming out Friday.
During our conversation, we touch upon many major urban school districts being in a state of chaos.
What sadder example do we have these days than Chicago?
Just downriver in Missouri we see the implications.
Legislators try to create an open enrollment program, but many – “school choice” Republicans included – balk at throwing kids and families a lifeline.
The prevailing wisdom is their opposition is born of a desire to protect their local school system’s monopoly.
Could be.
Or could it be they’re wanting to protect their school systems from educational refugees coming from cities?
They take on the issue knowing that redlining was the foundation upon which their state’s public education system was built.
As such, a preservation of the status quo is a de facto preservation of that foundation.
Across the land, other communities are finding their moments of recognition that their public schools were also built atop a system of sorting haves from have-nots.
Meanwhile, the pace of change coming from AI only accelerates.
Bill Gates is predicting human teachers will be obsolete within a decade.
I’m not going that far, but last week we saw Israel give every student their own AI tutor.
The UAE is pushing faster adoption as well.
As is, of course, China.
The new capacities the bots are creating are difficult to believe sometimes. Astral Codex Ten confirms that AI geoguessers
… now beat human guessers who are good enough to identify the specific tree a celebrity stands beside.
And we think AI isn’t going to offer parents the ability to know how their individual child is doing academically in ways that most schools simply can’t?
That would seem to me to be missing the forest for the trees.
Meanwhile, we’ve seen the president disavow the image of himself as pope.
So I guess this means the administration won’t have to recuse itself on the St. Isadore case.