J. D. Meyers

This from @tressiemcphd.bsky.social hit me over the head like a mallet of truth. This is the thing. This is what I’ve been trying to warn people about perfectly crystallized. www.nytimes.com/2025/08/12/o...

And the minimum salary for teachers and professors has been $0 for 87 years.

Nobody is concerned about students taking a handful of AP, IB, or community college courses, but in my state many students are going straight from high school to junior year of college . . . with the maturity and academic abilities of freshmen. It's not going well.

Why the Boundary Between High School and College Is Crumbling Pushing students to and through higher ed seemed like a good idea, but it’s had an effect on how they learn.

My sense that neither party supports higher education is driven in part by Democrats' efforts to have students earn more college credit in high school.
I've been yearning for someone to write about the negative effects of these policies on learning. Here's a start:
www.chronicle.com/article/the-...

I have a lot of compassion for people using AI for work (which is basically every professional I know). The pitch for AI is utterly disconnected from how LLMs actually work.
Things that would be easy to do with a little code LLMs totally botch. They have to. It's how they're built.

Latest change:
Washington state eliminated its $170/$250 per week min salary for teachers/profs in 2020, joining 48 other states (I think) where you don't have to pay teachers more than a penny a week

Adjunct profs in WA still routinely make less than those 1970s mins, which were never enforced

We've gone 87 years with no minimum salary for teachers. Exempt from the minimum wage. Exempt from overtime laws. Exempt from the minimum salary. Exempt from respect.

Big news: The Trump administration has essentially proposed shutting down tribal colleges and universities, displacing more than 20,000 students.

My latest for ProPublica:

Judge Rules That Trump Administration Takeover of Institute of Peace Is Illegal

Finally. The takeover of the USIP was one of the most egregious DOGE actions. The refusal of a TRO was baffling, given that it is a nonprofit.
Would not be surprised to see lawsuits or criminal charges over the building seizure & destruction of property.
Gift article: www.nytimes.com/2025/05/19/u...

I'm frequently not paid at all in some pay periods when I work (summer, for instance), but I'm not convinced that's legal.

Yet we can't even get a minimum salary for teachers, who legally can be paid a penny a pay period.

That they can't teach AI how many stars and stripes the American flag has tells you everything you need to know about how AI programs work.

That the DOD doesn't proof its posts (or doesn't care if the flag is wrong) tells you everything you need to know about Hegseth's Pentagon. Also, his finger!

That the mainstream press doesn't routinely refer to the administration as "white supremacist" in every article bogles my mind. They're not exactly subtle.

The authoritarian turn came first for universities, which can't be the bulwarks of democracy they once were unless they re-democratize themselves.

We also don't talk enough about the post-9/11 work to eliminate separation of powers in the military, intelligence, and law enforcement. Getting rival military branches and intelligence and law enforcement agencies to work together better undid important checks and balances (and created DHS and ICE)

I'm reminded of something Costa Ricans sometimes say about why they don't have a standing military: that the purpose of militaries in Latin America is to orchestrate coups and oppress citizens, not fight foreign wars.

The rise of end times fascism The governing ideology of the far right has become a monstrous, supremacist survivalism. Our task is to build a movement strong enough to stop them

The rise of end times fascism. An essay by Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor

Musk and DOGE keep making public claims of fraud without running them past the workers who understand the systems they are examining. I can't tell if they are just really incompetent or purposefully using incompetence as cover for lying to the public.

Curtailing people’s ability to read widely and carefully, to locate, assess, and compare different sources for themselves, and to write in their own voice about what they find and what it means, is arguably more effective than censorship. It is also one of the most obvious effects of generative AI.

The administration's idea of marking people in government databases as deceased, information also distributed to financial institutions, is frankly the most ominous thing they've thought of yet. You can't murder someone who is already legally dead.

This is what genocidal governments do. They treat people as non-human, even classify them as such in paperwork, to justify their crimes.

I'd also bet most Americans also don't know that when we put people of Japanese heritage in concentration camps during WWII, we renditioned them from Latin America as well, including from El Salvador. They were stripped of their passports, declared "illegal aliens," & imprisoned without due process.

Chart showing the letter grade distribution in one of my classes before and after the release of ChatGPT. Before LLMs, 89.4% of my students earned As and Bs. None ever earned a D. After LLMs, 77.9% of my students earned As and Bs. The number of Cs, Ds, and Fs all increased.

Here's a chart showing the final grade distribution in the course I've taught the most before and after the release of ChatGPT.

ChatGPT is singlehandedly taking care of grade inflation.
LLMs inhibit student learning and produce absolute garbage work, at least in the humanities (I can't speak beyond that).
I would love to see a larger data set, but the grade distribution in my classes has entirely changed.

What to do if the Insurrection Act is invoked With the Insurrection Act looming, now is the time to learn how it might unfold and the strategic ways to respond.

Trump has repeatedly said he wants to invoke the Insurrection Act, which allows the military to be used against Americans.
Here's world-class nonviolence theorist Daniel Hunter on what to do if that happens: wagingnonviolence.org/2025/04/what...

My greatest fear: Trump is going to need a war to compensate with his base for crashing the economy. And he'll want one because war powers are basically unlimited.
Worse, it'll need to be a war he can blame on the other party, so more likely China than Canada or Greenland. Nobody wins that war.

A not insignificant portion of the U.S. population, including many of the right-wing militias and Christian Nationalists in Trump's base, have in fact been gunning for a shooting civil war

As we all know, NEH funding was already almost inexpressibly meager. It bears repeating that they’ve targeted NEH and IMLS exactly because they’ve been *incredibly* efficient at spurring new thought, writing, and community-building.

In a democracy, Congress would vote on eliminating federal funding for libraries and museums (and vote no, because knowledge is essential for informed democratic decision making).
Instead, the world's richest man has seized the power of the purse from Congress. We are no longer in a democracy.

As I’m always telling people, my job is 70% giving feedback and thereby engaging students in conversations about their ideas and hopes for their writing. It’s not grading. It’s not correcting. It’s thinking with.