callie lowenstein

“If [wealthy, powerful people] can get us to accept that the future’s already settled, AI is already here, the end is already here, then we will create that for them. My most daring idea is to refuse.” — @tressiemcphd.bsky.social

Emily Hanford did an episode about it (APMreports link in the post below) and Karen Vaites has written lots about it (Karen is an advocate and unabashedly very team-HQIM but doesn't pull punches about where the problems are)

"I think that it needs to be known that the youth cares about this," said Maya,who walked out of her AP U.S. History class. "We don't think that any of this is okay, and we do not give our consent to have this kind of government.:

Sometimes walking out of your history class is the best way to demonstrate that you learned something in your history class.
wapo.st/4aF0iqG

there have been a bunch of examples of this with other great, thoughtful, useful curric getting dinged by edreports or by other review entities. (most famously, bookworms, which has actual peer reviewed research behind it, didn't get all green... can't remember why)

the reviewers are teachers w fairly limited training (i can't remember if 8 or 16 or 24 hours)... but i think it's really driven by imperfect rubric design. all the curric review processes are ultimately so limited by trying to have a fair/neutral process that anything outside the box doesn't work.

so there's now a whole complicated flawed layer of curric adoption processes that forces this cookie cutter approach to design on even the best intentions of curric developers.

i did recently hear that one of my fav curric, fishtank learning, got dinged by edreports because its lovely slim lesson plans weren't scripted. (the original lessons, as i recall, were just a core of questions for each lesson)..

but i think there are huge design q's about how to build something w space/ breathing room for teacher enactment, interpretation, adaptation, voice, etc.

& huge leadership/implementation questions about creating environment for implementation w integrity / understanding, not 'fidelity to a script'.

AND the quality of what was happening across classrooms was wildly uneven, a huge equity issue - & in the elementary grades, deeply unsustainable w so much content to plan for. we were burning teachers out left and right.

so i view curric as basic infrastructure.

yeah i think the venn diagram of our ideas about curric and instruction is probably a very weird one!! :)

i was a founding teacher at an expeditionary learning school before they wrote/published 'HQIM' and i loved crafting our own curric (so much that i'm starting a curric nonprofit lol)

i don't think of steiner as advocating for excerpts... coleman maybe.

steiner's whole thing imo is in a lot of ways pushing back against the way testing/measurement has cannibalized literacy instruction. but the knowledge piece i see falling in favor of real books and meaning-making.

Abolish ICE is merely the starting position. This below is the correct one.

Reminder that now, when you use ChatGPT, you’ll be directly contributing to the deaths of anyone the US military kills not just those being poisoned by their data centers

anyway obvs there are major flaws w anything like this -- the edreports reviews are deeply imperfect etc etc but i know you are passionate about kids reading great books @annieabrams.bsky.social and the good HQIM are doing a much better job of that than the status quo, i think!

the counterfactual that steiner is responding to is very real.

go onto any teacher facebook group & you will see people posting truly mind numbing "reading comprehension practice passages".

based on the idea that skills are so transferrable that the text content unit context don't matter.

the idea is then in fourth grade, i have content literacy unit about erosion, and all that knowledge from 2nd is setting me up to go deeper, add new vocab, and read more complex text.

the text i can access is much juicier and more substantive bc of coherent background knowledge i've built.

in a content-rich literacy model, the idea is that i'm making inferences in texts that are connected & intentionally sequenced across grade levels.

in a second grade unit on rocks & soil, i read about sedimentary on monday, igneous on tues, etc, do some hands on; next week we read & explore soil.

getting opportunity to dig into _any_ substantive content.

skills based literacy model: my unit is on "making inferences". monday, text about thomas edison. tues, text about sharks. wed, text about history of ice cream. (this is a real example.)

disagree on this! there's a ton of cognitive research showing that the way we navigate new information is heavily dependent on our prior knowledge.

the important point that steiner makes here (and elsewhere) is that overemphasis on transferable skills means kids don't end up...

i'm surprised... i think you and steiner agree about a lot!

IMO he is the opposite of focusing on test prep.

he has written/spoken a lot about how misuse of/overanchoring on standards has distorted literacy instruction to focus on allegedly measurable skills instead of unpacking meaning of text.

and somehow i fell asleep/was nursing/potty mess/something?? and then she was just in the dark cold rain waiting w the dog for 10 min when she got back and i wasn't picking up my phone and she just took my dog back to her house and i didn't realize for like an hour lol.

early days are tough!

oooh yes great rec.

also you got this!!!

those super tough moments happen to everyone. one time a new friend offered to walk the dog so my partner would have time to go out and get groceries when baby was in first month..

How Kansas Republicans weaponized the law to target 300 trans driver's license holders SB 244 was put into effect virtually overnight, causing chaos, panic and fear in the trans community.

New — I spoke to eight trans people in Kansas about the new state law that invalidated their driver’s licenses overnight, what’s it’s like to live there right now, plus details of two DMV emails exclusively obtained by The Handbasket that shed light on the law’s chaotic and cruel rollout:

County government in New Jersey is relatively obscure, but county government in New Jersey is powerful, flush with cash, and loaded with no-show jobs and rigged contracts—Hudson runs a $715M budget with a surplus, and my friend David is running to audit everything and use the savings for the people.

The political effects of X's feed algorithm https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-10098-2 Received: 16 December 2024 Accepted: 4 January 2026 Published online: 18 February 2026 Open access • Check for updates Germain Gauthier,5, Roland Hodler?5, Philine Widmer35 & Ekaterina Zhuravskaya3,4,5 m Feed algorithms are widely suspected to influence political attitudes. However, previous evidence from switching off the algorithm on Meta platforms found no political effects'. Here we present results from a 2023 field experiment on Elon Musk's platform X shedding light on this puzzle. We assigned active US-based users randomly to either an algorithmic or a chronological feed for 7 weeks, measuring political attitudes and online behaviour. Switching from a chronological to an algorithmic feed increased engagement and shifted political opinion towards more conservative positions, particularly regarding policy priorities, perceptions of criminal investigations into Donald Trump and views on the war in Ukraine. In contrast, switching from the algorithmic to the chronological feed had no comparable effects. Neither switching the algorithm on nor switching it off significantly affected affective polarization or self-reported partisanship. To investigate the mechanism, we analysed users' feed content and behaviour. We found that the algorithm promotes conservative content and demotes posts by traditional media. Exposure to algorithmic content leads users to follow conservative political activist accounts, which they continue to follow even after switching off the algorithm, helping explain the asymmetry in effects. These results suggest that initial exposure to X's algorithm has persistent effects on users' current political attitudes and account-following behaviour, even in the absence of a detectable effect on partisanship.

A new paper shows that less than 2 months of exposure to Twitter’s algorithmic feed significantly shifts people’s political views to the right.

Moving from chronological feed to the algorithmic feed also increases engagement.

This is one of the most concerning papers I’ve read in awhile.

Schools: Drop ICE Mass Call · AFT We will cut off ICE’s corporate enablers — starting on our campuses. ICE isn’t invincible. Donald Trump’s deportation machine depends on private corporations for technology to track, places to sleep,...

🚫🧊 HEY STUDENTS‼️

www.mobilize.us/aft/event/89...

David Brooks Sucks. This is Who Should Replace Him David Brooks is heading to a sinecure at Yale. Thank goodness.

I have some suggestions on who should replace David Brooks, but only after reminding everyone how terrible he is at his supposed job. biblioracle.substack.com/p/david-broo...

“History shows that wars can be lost [quickly] if defenders surrender strategic terrain without a struggle. For universities, that terrain is the ultimate high ground: human intelligence itself. If we do not fight for it now, those who come after us will face an even more unequal struggle.”

OpenAI’s President Gave Millions to Trump. He Says It’s for Humanity In an interview with WIRED, Greg Brockman says his political donations support OpenAI's mission—even if some employees at the company disagree.

Why do people hate ai? It’s a mystery for the ages.

AI is so inherently popular that companies are paying influencers up to $600,000 to tell people how awesome it is:

aftermath.site/ai-influencer-...