Things I am reading this week

•  Not specific to education, but this lengthy piece on "AI mania" in the workplace is a very "the Emperor has no clothes" description, where no one can say the Emperor has no clothes because no one else in business leadership will.
  

  The reality is thus: the people in charge either have no plan, or see no path forwards other than keeping their heads down. Not at banks, not at hospitals, not in our government institutions. The world’s organisations have been captured by people in the throes of frothing excitement, and saner people who now live in a state of constant commingled fear and frustration.

  I again reiterate: for education to put any eggs in this basket is badly thought-out.
  
  
• My main takeaway from Chad Aldeman's look at K-12 education spending hitting a trillion dollars is what a huge difference single payer health care would make: 
  

   In 2023-24, schools spent $197 billion on employee benefits. As another way to look at it, for every $1,000 that a school spent on salaries, it also paid $438 in benefit costs. These trends may help explain why districts with rising personnel costs are not boosting take-home pay for their workers. 

  Imagine if we had all that money to spend on any aspect of education, because employees all already had health care. 
  
  
• It's worth reading Matt Barnum's interview with Ary Amerikaner, who co-founded Brown's Promise (and I say that not only because it echoes some of what I question about the lawsuit). 
  
  
• Not sure if it's because the seniors involved have graduated or just coincidences of timing, but there are good pieces covering two separate episodes of attempted throttling of student reporting that came out this week. Wired covers Redwood High in California, where a student journalist turned up a connection to the Epstein files to his local community. In that case, the decision making was in the hands of the students, though this quote from their advisor deserves mention: 
  

  “With all due respect,” Schneider remembers Bishop replying, “under California’s student press law, being afraid of a lawsuit or backlash is not a valid reason to call for the takedown of content.”

  Colorado Newsline covers Grand Junction High, where the advisor was reassigned apparently due to a single complaint by another staff member over a student editorial on the Gaza conflict most recently; the student paper itself published a piece about student press freedom being under threat from their administration in June. 
  
  
• One would really like to think something like the national civics competition would be outside of meddling from this federal administration. It appears that is not the case.

It is July and so my daisies are in bloom.