Alright, so after many many drafts, my NEPC education “policy review” covering Year I of Trump II is out.
A “Not great, Bob!” gif might have served as well. I end up arguing that doing the life-giving work of good education requires intensely local effort in a newly obvious kind of way.
“One of the assumptions about AI tutors is that once we replace the human with an AI agent, everyone will keep interacting with the AI as if they were still dealing with the human.
That’s a silly assumption, particularly in a school setting. Students do not even treat humans like other humans.”
Historians! The History of Ed Society has extended our proposal deadline for one more week.
Join us in Portland (OR) in November to talk about your work.
Esp you west-coasters who write all about ed but might not think of yourselves as “education” historians.
Send a proposal--get involved!
This makes me so angry! Also everyone should listen to the wild Have You Heard podcast about the conservative Texans mad about school vouchers. cc: @jenniferberkshire.bsky.social @jackschneider.bsky.social
So excited to share my first solo-authored article! I find that FB presents an accessible tool for special interest actors to disrupt public education. Viral algorithms give Comment Cathy more power than ever to shape knowledge about local public schools: www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...
We asked teachers what they think about reforms meant to save them time. Their verdict? Most of the "fixes" might actually create more work. Here's what they told us:
kappanonline.org/time-well-sp...
@jackschneider.bsky.social
It's baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaack!
Calling all graduate students doing research on K-12 or higher education...
Google Gemini output: Educational policy is one of the best areas for "historical debugging" because we’ve been trying to solve the same problem for centuries: How do we prepare the next generation for a world that doesn't exist yet? By looking at the past, we can see which "revolutionary" ideas actually worked and which were just expensive trends. Here are three major ways history informs modern schooling: 1. The "Factory Model" vs. The Future Most modern schools are still based on the Prussian Model of the 18th and 19th centuries. It was designed to create obedient citizens and disciplined factory workers who could follow a bell schedule. The Lesson: If our goal today is to foster creativity and tech-literacy, history shows us that using a system designed for the Industrial Revolution is like trying to run modern software on a steam engine. We can look at the Montessori or Progressive Education movements of the early 20th century to see how they tried to break this mold.
This is a really good example of how an LLM is only as good as its training data. Also, this is going to make @jennbinis.bsky.social stabby.
So you’re saying history isn’t over yet?
Just because AI *can* do it doesn't mean AI *should* do it.
This seems obviously true. I am not making a particularly insightful observation here.
And yet the AI grift depends almost entirely on us forgetting this fact.
As always, the issue has several great book reviews. This time, by Janine Giordano Drake, @adamlaats.bsky.social, @judithkafka.bsky.social, and Lilia Valdez.
This issue of HEQ also includes a forum on gender in the history of education. Six (great) short essays, including...
The last feature article is Snejana Slantcheva-Durst's piece on mid-nineteenth-century coeducation at a medical college traditionally reserved for men.
The third feature article is Jon Hale's piece about the governors who laid the foundation for school choice.
The second feature article is @cwoyshner.bsky.social's piece on Black civic voluntary organizations.
Our first feature article is Scott Gelber's piece on the first federal need-based financial aid program (and it isn't the GI Bill).
The latest issue of History of Education Quarterly is out. Here's a thread with open-access links to all of the articles...
