Things I am reading this week

•  Please add me to those not at all shocked that little kids are finding their way around various kinds of restrictions on school laptops to get up to all sorts of nefariousness. 
  

  Kids have been off task and distracted in school long before Chromebooks or iPads existed. But some parents and experts say devices only make it easier to engage in non-academic, inappropriate and even dangerous content.
  This is especially challenging for young children whose brains, self-regulation skills and self-control are still developing.

  
  
• The storied Financial Times of London is out this week with an article on employers pulling back on their encouragement or even insistence on employee use of AI. In an excellent example of Goodhart's Law, when employers made massive uses of AI something that mattered, employees made maximizing use, rather than doing actual good work, their focus.
  I really hope that educators are watching how quickly things are changing in the workforce on such usage, as that keeps being the argument for why we MUST have students using it in schools. We are very much watching a tech bubble in real time. It's unwise to train kids for the bubble. 
  
  
• And speaking of educators and AI use, please do yourself a favor and review this piece of "meta-meta-analysis" from Patrick E. O’Neil, looking at the major flaws in significant parts of the research propping up AI use in schools. From his introduction: 
  

  The audit found that none of the examined meta-analyses provided a valid basis for the claims they advanced: none had a coherent construct, none sufficiently assessed publication bias, and all had severe heterogeneity. Statistics were misapplied, miscalculated, and misinterpreted. A majority (61%) of the randomly vetted primary studies were problematic, most commonly because the outcome measured didn’t match the meta-analysis.

  I await any of the educational publications I read, all of which have ongoingly significantly boosted this breathless urgency of such use in education, to put this one of their front page. 
  
  
• And speaking of research, I took a look at this research into (essentially) what districts did with their ESSER funding, specifically looking at if such grants were used to offset local property taxes. The piece found it did, which might be what you end up seeing circulating.
  What matters a lot though, is what districts they looked at: in order to have groups to compare, the researchers used the 5% poverty rate used for Title I as their cutoff, looking at districts just to either side of the line.
  What that means is they looked at what wealthy districts did with ESSER that got it.; 5% is a very low rate of poverty in a district; as best as I can find, the national average is closer to 13%, and that would leave out all of the very largest districts in the country.
  That's not really the same thing as saying "here's what happened with ESSER funding" at all.