Werd I/O

"When Courtney Gore ran for a seat on her local school board in 2021, she warned about a movement to indoctrinate children with “leftist” ideology. After 2 1/2 years on the board, Gore said she believes a much different scheme is unfolding: an effort by wealthy conservative donors to undermine public education in Texas and install a voucher system in which public money flows to private and religious schools."

An interesting ProPublica story about the motivation behind some of the money that's funded these bizarre right-wing school board elections. It's not so much about the ideology as it is about undermining trust in public education itself, so that it can be replaced with a voucher system that would benefit the underwriters.

This quote says it all:

“It’s all about destroying the trust with the citizens to the point where they would tolerate something like doing away with public schools.” #Education

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"Five dictionaries as well as eight encyclopedias and other reference materials including “The Guinness Book of World Records” and “Ripley’s Believe it or Not” are among over 1,600 books that Escambia County Public Schools removed from its library shelves in December and flagged for review."

Alongside Anne Frank and a biography of Oprah Winfrey. I wish I could say it was baffling, but it's not: the mindset and set of values that lead to this is obvious and abhorrent. #Education

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"The tools that likely brought down Harvard president Claudine Gay are improperly used on students all the time. [...] The technology of text mining can be used to destroy the career of any scholar at any time."

Tools like Turnitin are rife with false positives, and can be weaponized to target students for any reason. It's bad software. But even more importantly, it's bad educational policy to deploy it, and its design encourages bad grading decisions. The result is an entire generation of students who are badly served. #Education

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