What I have been reading this weekend

• This is from earlier in the month, but Wired covered how AI slop is now facing a backlash.
  

  The backlash’s “why” is simple at its core. Many Americans feel like they never consented to any of this. I had no idea that my online interactions would one day be scraped en masse for AI model training. I didn’t ask for Instagram to enable deepfakes on my account. I didn’t want Google to push AI-generated answers at the top of search results. I woke up one day, and generative AI features were stuffed into every corner of all the software I rely on without my consent.

  
  
  
• The one group that is acutely aware of how much public education spends is the industries concentrating on selling schools things, and technology is one of the two big pushes on that front right now. The New York Times has a piece on exactly that sales relationship. It is an excerpt from Coding Kids: Big Tech’s Battle to Remake Public Schools by Natasha Singer, which is coming out in September.
  
  
• The other industry clamoring for education money is the security industry, and Slate has a bleak look at that, which makes this very good point: 
  

  When Gaggle quarantines a draft, when Securly assigns a kid a rolling “wellness level,” when a detection system decides the shape in a student’s hand is a gun, the software is filing a report about a young person’s intentions. And it arrives first. It shows up carrying the authority of a system that cost the district millions and speaks in the grammar of objectivity, and it lands in front of an administrator or a school cop before the kid has said a word. The student’s account comes second, when it’s generally too late.

  Hard to "believe kids" when they're always the ones responding to something that has already been invested, literally, which such authority.
  
  

•  Florida's voucher program and so-called parents' rights push has just run headlong into 2000 years of hierarchy, with the Florida Attorney General receiving, upon his push to force Catholic schools that are receiving vouchers to allow students to attend even if they are not vaccinated, a tour de force letter from the Roman Catholic bishops of Florida, which I really recommend you read.
  

  Respectfully, any insinuation that a government official can dictate to the Catholic Church (or any religion) how to apply her tenets and dogma, violates well-established constitutional religious freedom rights. It is beyond cavil that the bishops, not the state, decide how to interpret and apply Catholic principles and theology.   

  I'll note that the letter does a nice job of laying out why one might required universal vaccination, by the way, something which I'd appreciate more of our Massachusetts politicians reading.  

• Steve Revilak has been posting highlights from the Arlington, MA archives via his Bluesky account, and I very much appreciated, as a child of the 70's, this one from 1971 about the latest menace on the street of Arlington: BIG WHEELS!
  

  

  
  
  

If you haven't read about vouchers in Ohio

 ...do be sure and read the lengthy ProPublica piece published this week. 

What happened in Ohio was a stark illustration of a development that has often gone unnoticed, perhaps because it is largely taking place away from blue state media hubs. In the past few years, school vouchers have become universal in a dozen states, including Florida, Arizona and North Carolina. Proponents are pushing to add Texas, Pennsylvania, Tennessee and others — and, with Donald Trump returning to the White House, they will likely have federal support.

How sex ed in Worcester really died

A tour de force of a public documents request via Bill Shaner walks through what went on via email that killed comprehensive sex ed in Worcester, at least for this year.
Keep in mind that most of the messages are among a small group of people who have known each other for decades--good point by Lance Harris this morning--

Light evening reading.@TracyNovick and I were discussing string deliberations yesterday...If there are 5,000 pages of emails on a topic that was referred to a three-person subcommittee, those folks deserve an award if they avoided an OML violation.

— Lance Harris (@CMassPolitics) April 4, 2019

--and that it is still the case in Worcester that there are those who believe (in some cases correctly) that some emails or calls to the right places will get things done. Thus that piece doesn't entirely surprise me.

I am very concerned, however, about this exchange, and the perspective it offers on Worcester's longest serving member, Brian O'Connell:

On Jan. 24, Mullaney connected the fight to national issues.

“The world is a stupid, stupid place,” she said. “Look at what happened in the NY Senate yesterday re: abortion. Covington Catholic. Brett Kavanaugh – all these things go back to abortion and the infiltration by the left of the American nuclear family.”
O’Connell agreed.
“Like you, I worry more with each passing year about truly frightening developments like the proposed New York legislation, Covington Catholic and so much of the deliberation surrounding the confirmation of Justice Kavanaugh,” he said. “Catholic anti-defamation initiatives truly need to highlight implicit or explicit anti-Catholic bias when it occurs, calling it what it is.”

That would be frequently-incorrectly-characterized New York change in the abortion laws (no, it does not legalize infanticide), the students of Covington High School harassing a Native American man at the anti-abortion march on Washington, and the Justice Kavanaugh deliberation which turned on a question of sexual assault, none of which, of course, were "Catholic anti-defamation initiatives."
But it is telling if you think it is.

Vouchers aren't the answer

Last week, the Pioneer Institute hosted a forum and released a report, touting vouchers as something Massachusetts should chase down. The proposal, specifically, is:

school vouchers, worth $6,000 per year for grades K-8 and $8,000 for high school, be offered to 10,000 students with household incomes below 200 percent of federal poverty guidelines.

Note that, per the Private School Review:

The average private school tuition in Massachusetts is $11,847 for elementary schools and $29,049 for high schools

..leaving families that are below 200 percent of the poverty rate to somehow come up with nearly $6000 per elementary student and $21,000 per high school student. Private schools, particularly, the parochial schools Pioneer seems to be targeting, aren't going to be able to scale up their financial aid systems to that level for additional kids.

Additionally, voucher systems are coming under wide criticism across the country, as they aren't doing what they were touted as doing: they don't improve student performance, they don't create "better" schools...they just don't do what they're said to*.

And while harkening back to the "Know Nothing" laws is clever ("we wouldn't want to be perceived as anti-Catholic, now, would we?"), I suspect that the Catholic schools don't really want the degree of state regulation and oversight--and testing--that the public schools now have.
We wouldn't, after all, want to give up "accountability," now, would we?

 *this last link is from 2008, demonstrating that the failure has been going on for some time. And these links are only a few of the plethora from which one can choose with a quick look at voucher research.