Jeffrey Austin

This is true of virtually every institution, from schools to the government.

Event flyer with profile picture of Audrey Waters and the text: The Education Now Lab Presents Creatively Critical Tech: Research + Design + Practice November 12, 2025 @ 6:30 pm CT AI Grief Observed: On the Death of Education with Audrey Watters Sign up at https://tinyurl.com/CreativelyCritical Hosted by Dr. Anna Smith & the Education Now Lab An Initiative of the Advancing Research and Creative Scholarship from the Office of Research at Illinois State University

Next in our Creatively Critical Tech virtual speaker series is Audrey Watters @audreywatters.bsky.social on "AI Grief Observed: On the Death of Education."

Don't miss it on November 12, 2025, @ 6:30 pm CT!
Register today at tinyurl.com/CreativelyCr...

If Karen Vaites is outflanking you on reading books + raising questions about the limits of reading-as-decoding practice, this should make you question many things about yourself if you're a Democrat.

Replay: Students read few—or no—books in top ELA programs, survey finds Elementary students get little practice reading whole books in some of the country's most popular elementary reading curricula, shedding new light on national reading crisis

Watching right wingers stand up for books, call out corporate publishers + think about education beyond job training while Democrats do little-to-nothing to offer an ambitious, progressive plan for public education is one of many disappointments right now.

hollykorbey.substack.com/p/replay-stu...

Sorry, this a phonics-only space. All decoding all the time.

I will give you $1 for every whole language district that you can find in Michigan.

The implication that districts aren’t teaching phonics + phonemic awareness is not the reality. If anything, they’ve prioritized phonics over everything, including other literacy skills, science + social studies.

teaching kids about reading and writing is too important to outsource to corporations

Putting words in dead people's mouths is one of the most disgusting uses of Generative AI, to me.

One of the LinkedIn AI evangelists posted today that those raising concerns about energy costs + environmental harms of AI data centers were using it as a front to prevent educational innovation because only the harm-inducing machines will save teaching + learning.

One of the issues here is that if you position education mostly about economic gain, then there's no leg to stand on when it comes to arguing for a more humanizing + socially democratic education. This makes it difficult for teachers, schools + kids who want something more than career readiness.

I remain convinced that any educational paradigm that stakes it’s legitimacy on “catching cheaters” has already fundamentally lost the plot on how to do education.

Uniform Policy | Jennifer C. Berkshire Democrats must come up with a defense of public schools that goes beyond bloodless workforce preparation

Relatedly…

thebaffler.com/outbursts/un...

You mean you didn’t get your PhD in annotation or finding the main idea or reading a passage and answering some questions about it or filling out an evidence log?

But if you think English is just a “contentless content area,” than any AI slop will do! We’re not doing anything anyway per the “contentless content area” crew!

Annie, I’m telling you that every day of my professional life I have to remind people that English is not a “contentless content area” and that Literature is indeed “content.”

Unfortunately, education was the canary in the coal mine here yet again.

Government officials have long pressed their corporate friends, especially those over at the College Board, who control curriculum + testing, to block, erase + manipulate content + ideas they find objectionable.

This is why our corporate overlords + their friends love AI: it can churn out endless depoliticized “neutral” content that can be delivered through virtual platforms that require no human contact, further teacherproofing the system. It doesn’t matter if it’s slop, it’s keeping everyone docile.

Right. Not much is these days, really.

What's kind of funny is that "literate across content areas" is something most people can get behind! It's literally an SAT rallying cry, so even the biggest test-pilled person you know probably agrees with it. As an on-the-record SAT hater, I think disciplinary literacy is a very worthy goal!

Based on an interaction I had with a famous literacy journalist recently, I'll say that they do not.

We are producing a generation unable and (somewhat) unwilling to think, read and write without relying on tech controlled by some of the most evil people on the planet to tell them what to think, read and write and they don’t seem to see the dangers of this dependency even if we point it out

The thing can't tell someone how to make a basic sauce but a bunch of people, including a bunch of educators, think we should let kids talk to the avatar of Anne Frank that it generates in history class.

I agree! I was lambasted by some teachers for suggesting this a while ago, but I think this is an existential threat to robust, equitable public education + requires our attention.

Creating permission structures for AI refusal is an urgent, collective need, especially as its use becomes increasingly mandated by leaders + districts who staked economic, social + political capital on AI "working."

Distracted boyfriend meme: The boyfriend (New York Times) is holding the hands of a woman ("Lucy Calkins is the Devil)" while looking at another woman ("AI Schools will save American education")

Live look at the @nytimes.com right now.

By dunking on public ed, you can manufacture consent to dismantle it, sell it off for parts + privatize the rest, which is what the NYT's neoliberal publishers, writers + readers have wanted for decades. It's a corporate, for-profit, technofascist fever dream. MacKenzie Price is the poster child.

The NYT has relentlessly attacked American schools + teachers for creating a crisis of rigor for not following "the science of learning."

Platforming this vapid, uncritical, no-citation BS reveals the NYT never really cared about "the science" as much as they cared about dunking on public ed.

TIL that Moms for America, Moms for Liberty, and Parents Defending Education have signed the White House's pledge to America's youth to invest in AI education, which further clarifies how this AI education initiative is a political project and whose vision of education is being prioritized.