The people of Phoenix got a gift this spring. In late March, when temperatures started to approach triple digits, it seemed like summer might be hitting early. But then, at the end of April, the weather turned cooler rather than hotter. In early May, we enjoyed a string of overcast days in the mid-70s, which was about 20 degrees lower than average. Obviously, the summer heat is inevitable. But as someone who enjoys the art of procrastination, it was a welcome delay.
As a teacher, I am looking forward to summer break. I didn’t design the school system to revolve around an extended summer vacation. I just work there, and I appreciate the time to decompress.
Last summer I spent a lot of time studying Spanish, and I plan to do the same this year. My progress with the language has been uneven over the years, but I enjoy the challenge of trying to mentally adapt.
One of the Spanish-language publications that I read regularly is a Substack called Mind Tricks. The author, Hugo Sáez, writes about the digital world, marketing, and human behavior. Every Friday, he links to five interesting stories and provides a recap of each.
I am borrowing the Mind Tricks format for this post. Here are five stories worth highlighting from the world of education.
1. The mix and match
Two years ago I wrote about the unbundled frontier. A traditional school is “bundled” in the sense that all educational needs are intended to be fulfilled within the walls of the school — English, math, sports, music, etc. But some families would prefer to pick independent vendors and pay for them separately (with the help of educational savings accounts). In my post, I wrote about the pros and cons of unbundling.
A new wrinkle to the unbundled frontier is a bill proposal in Arizona that would allow private school students to try out for sports programs at public schools. If this bill were to pass, a student would be able to attend a small private school for classes but try out for a big public school football team.
The mix and match approach — attending one school but playing sports at another — could theoretically be applied to other programs as well. You could imagine magnet programs in all sorts of different subjects: writing, music, theater, journalism, math. A good teacher or coach could build a fiefdom for themselves, becoming essentially an independent contractor housed in a school, rather than an employee of a school.
It’s a completely different way to think about schooling. I don’t hate the concept, though it’s difficult to picture how it would work, practically, if the concept were allowed to flourish beyond the boundaries of this particular bill.
The main criticism of the bill, according to the Capitol Times piece linked above, is that it would be unfair for the students in a school to have to compete with outside students for a spot on a team. Schools are bundled, and you get the bundle you pick. Another criticism is that it would be difficult for public schools to enforce passing grade expectations for athletes who attended a different school.
2. The wedge issue
In 2022, Arizona voters approved Prop 308, which allowed Dreamers to pay the same in-state college tuition as other students who live here. Previously, Dreamers in Arizona had to pay the higher tuition of students from other states. The term “Dreamers” refers to people who were brought to the U.S. unlawfully as children and grew up here knowing no other country as home.
Karrin Taylor Robson endorsed the Prop 308 campaign in 2022, filming a television advertisement where she said,
As a business leader and a Republican, I will be voting yes on Prop 308. It will improve Arizona’s economy by keeping skilled workers in Arizona, kids we’ve already invested in for years. For zero tax increases. Vote yes on Prop 308.
This honorable stance is now an obstacle for Robson as she seeks the Republican nomination for governor in 2026. Prop 308 passed with 51% of the vote, but it would have failed if the only people who voted were Republican primary voters.
Robson is running in a competitive primary against far-right Congressman Andy Biggs. Donald Trump has endorsed both campaigns. But a recent executive order puts the spotlight on Prop 308 in a way that favors Biggs.
“Arizona law and the Trump administration are now at odds with each other,” is how Sarah Robinson reported it for AZFamily.
The executive action “orders the Justice Department to crack down on states that offer in-state tuition to non-citizens, including Dreamers who were brought to the US as children.”
Biggs responded to the executive order by saying: “President Trump is right - US citizens shouldn’t pay more for college tuition than illegal aliens.”
3. Human resources
The Washington Post published a heart-wrenching story by Karina Elwood about a teacher in Virginia. Jesús Rodríguez fled violence in Venezuela, came to the United States through legal means, and found a job teaching music. By the accounts of students and staff, he was a great teacher and positive role model.
Rodríguez is moving to Spain because he is afraid of what might happen to him here:
Rodríguez, a Venezuelan national, was legally living and working in this D.C. suburb under a humanitarian parole program that the Trump administration announced would end early. Without a clear path to stay legally, he decided to leave the United States, worried he could end up inside a Salvadoran prison — separated from his wife and 6-year-old daughter — if he didn’t.
The departure of a beloved teacher at a Loudoun County school surrounded by cul-de-sac neighborhoods is just one example of how the policy changes and torrent of immigration arrests surging through the country are affecting people beyond those who face deportation, and reverberating in the communities where they have become an integral presence.
With plans in place to move to Spain, Rodríguez still had a job to do on his very last day of class. So, on came “Fly Me to the Moon” for the chorus, an American classic about the euphoria of being in love.
4. A love-hate relationship
This is an excellent article by Dana Goldstein of the New York Times about how teachers are approaching artificial intelligence:
As artificial intelligence makes its way into schools, a paradox is emerging.
Many educators, concerned about cheating and shortcuts, are trying to limit student use of A.I.
At the same time, teachers are increasingly using A.I. tools themselves, both to save time on rote tasks and to outsource some of their most meaningful work, like grading essays and tutoring struggling students.
That tension has prompted some difficult ethical questions. For example, is it fair to use A.I. to grade student essays, if you’ve prohibited students from using A.I. to write them?
Personally, I used ChatGPT this year to help me create resources for a class that I had never taught before, and for which I had no curriculum. My method was to find readings that I wanted to use in class, give the readings to ChatGPT, and tell the robot to write open-ended reading comprehension questions. I would modify the questions to make them fit how I wanted to use them in class. At the end of each unit, I wrote a unit study guide on my own. I would then give ChatGPT the study guide, and tell the robot to write a bunch of test questions. I would use the robot-generated questions as a draft to help me write the unit tests.
One thing I have never done, and don’t plan on doing, is using A.I. to grade student writing. If I am going to ask students to write something with their own minds, I think they deserve for their writing to be evaluated by a human being.
Furthermore, I disagree with using robots to grade student writing for statewide assessments. If robots are used to grade the tests, then students will be trained to write in a way that will earn points based on A.I. grading tendencies. In other words, they will be trained to write poorly.
I understand the argument that A.I. grading offers consistency and speed. I don’t disagree that ChatGPT can detect obvious errors and sometimes provide good feedback.
But imagine giving a Kurt Vonnegut novel to ChatGPT and asking it to provide feedback and edits. The robot would ruin the book. There are elements of human writing and language that artificial intelligence simply doesn’t understand.
The job of a human writing teacher entails persuading students of the importance of human writing. I don't know how you do that without providing human feedback to the writing that students do in school.
5. Church, state, and charter schools
The Supreme Court is hearing a case about whether a private religious school can become a public charter school. George Will, conservative columnist at the Washington Post, wrote an interesting piece titled “This Supreme Court case could stall the charter school movement.”
To start out with, I think most people are fuzzy on how charter schools work. George Will has a good definition:
Charter schools are public in that they receive state funds and are open to all children. Like private schools, however, they can be created by private initiative and enjoy wide exemption from public school districts’ policies regarding curriculum, admissions, hiring and operations.
School-choice advocates naturally see any expansion as beneficial, but George Will seems to recognize that the “charter school movement” might have its own set of priorities.
If the St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School in Oklahoma is allowed to become a charter school, then you open a whole can of worms about whether the school can be religiously selective in hiring teachers and admitting students.
George Will is worried about how a favorable ruling for this Catholic school would impact the growth of charter schools into blue states. Democrats might be persuaded to support charter schools, but not with these strings attached:
A Supreme Court victory for St. Isidore would enable opponents of charters and other forms of school choice to warn that government entanglement with religion inevitably brings intense disputes about religious demands for exemptions from generally applicable laws pertaining to, for example, nondiscrimination in hiring.
More than a million pupils nationwide are in private schools with financial assistance from states’ school choice programs. Nearly 4 million pupils attend 8,000 charters. Nina Rees, writing for Education Next, says that during the coronavirus pandemic’s school closures, regular private schools lost 1.4 million students, while charters attracted almost 450,000 new families.
School choice — the great civil rights issue of our day — has advanced dramatically in red states. But expanding in blue states, where teachers unions are powerful and implacably opposed, would become even more difficult in the wake of a St. Isidore victory.
Quote of the Month
“We got so pure that we started kicking people out of the tent. It turns out we didn’t have enough people in the tent to win elections.” – Ruben Gallego on the Democratic Party
Arizona in Photos
Arizona Highways Magazine published a gallery of awesome photographs that have been featured in their magazine over the past one hundred years. Edited by Jeff Kida and Lisa Altomare.
Compared to the Grand Canyon, we’re not very old. But like the natural wonder, our makeup has been shaped by gradual shifts over many years. Nowhere is that more evident than in our photography. From the impeccable compositions of Hubert A. Lowman to the counterintuitive use of light by Joel Grimes, the idiosyncrasies of so many great photographers have played a key role in the evolution of our portfolio. Here are some of them.
Link: One Hundred Years: Photography