Educator’s Notebook #483 (April 27, 2025)
INTRODUCTION
Articles, AI developments, education Executive Orders, and more
An extraordinary week, requiring three introductions.
1) The articles
2) Important developments in AI
3) This week’s seven Executive Orders related to education
1. Articles
An excellent week.
In the features, find a LinkedIn post that echoes William Deresiewicz’s book Excellent Sheep. Also, see the results of a survey of over 2,000 people about what they remember from high school. It is both an affirming and humbling reminder for us as educators.
Also this week: the celebration of Gatsby turning 100 continues, AJ Juliani explores boredom, REAL Discussion makes the case for the importance of discussion skills, close reading shows why it has sustained such longevity, several writers reflect on math pedagogy, and more.
But I have two reflections first — one lengthy. If the weekly articles are your main interest, skip to the posts below!
These and more, enjoy!
Peter
2. Important developments in AI
Microsoft’s 2025 Work Trend Index (featured in the AI Update) is an unmissable read on how the workplace is evolving. It paints a remarkable picture of changes in org charts, the skills workers will need, and more. I dive into these a little bit in the AI Update, below. But I think it’s of such importance for schools that here in the main introduction, I want to touch on two key points: 1) Advancements in AI are significantly changing how people work in most workplaces, but they aren’t as significantly changing how people work in schools and other relational workplaces. This is important for grounding our work. However, 2) the changes in how people work in most workplaces do require that we change what we are teaching in schools, even though how we teach may change less significantly. See the AI update, below, for more on these two points.
3. Executive Orders related to education
Also, this week’s Executive Orders prompt important reflections on the purpose of education and how we ground our discourse around it in schools. This past Wednesday, the White House released a whopping seven executive orders focused on or related to education, all at once. Links are in the section on government.
Interpreting and evaluating these orders isn’t easy. One order calls for promoting the “appropriate integration of artificial intelligence into education” — which is excellent. I especially appreciate the word “appropriate” as acknowledging the need for nuance. But the order doesn’t note that the administration dissolved the entire Office of Education Technology, jettisoning experts who had previously provided schools guidance on AI implementation and were experienced in connecting federal policies to ground level experiences. Another order calls for promoting “excellence and innovation” in HBCUs, which is also a wonderful goal. But the Order’s most substantive change from the string of executive orders on HBCUs from each president since Carter is that it removes measurable objectives from the administration’s responsibilities.
I share these details not for political points one way or the other, but because they are part and parcel of a particular frame of reference that has implications on what we do — and how we talk with stakeholders about what we do — as teachers and leaders in schools.
Most relevant, I believe, is one phrase from the orders that speaks to the heart of one of today’s major tensions. It is from the executive order entitled “Restoring Equality of Opportunity and Meritocracy.” Of the seven EOs released on Wednesday, this is the only one that does not explicitly address the education sector, but releasing it in the middle of six other Executive Orders on education is telling. The first two sentences of the EO — in section on “Purpose” — are these: “A bedrock principle of the United States is that all citizens are treated equally under the law. This principle guarantees equality of opportunity, not equal outcomes.” This is an enormous philosophical statement that may be accurate in the business and employment world, but it fundamentally misunderstands the obligations teachers and leaders have in the education world. In the workplace, the statement may be legally true and characteristic of how employment and competitive organizations work. But in schools, we have an obligation to achieve equal foundational outcomes. This is especially true in public schools, but a version of it also applies to all education institutions.
The outcome we are obligated to provide — per national, state, and judicial history — is adequate preparation for work, for participation in society, and for pursuit of a fulfilling life. If schools are not succeeding in the outcomes of every student being competent in the skills necessary to perform at work, to participate in a functioning democracy, and to live a fulfilling life, then schools are called failing. It’s not enough for schools to provide the opportunity for students to succeed, they must ensure the outcome that every student succeeds. Some students may excel, and there should be equality of opportunity to do so, even if not all students do excel, but all students should have the outcome of competence. If it was only about the opportunity, then schools wouldn’t be held accountable when students fail. The basic outcome of foundational preparation for society and life is the point of the education system and has been written into legislation with titles that couldn’t be any clearer, like the “No Child Left Behind Act” and the “Every Student Succeeds Act.” A foundational level of competency, equally supported for all students, is both a moral and a professional obligation.
This matters, because success at achieving the outcome of a foundational level of competency for all students requires understanding student backgrounds and needs, and it requires designing learning experiences that are responsive to student needs. This is the work of diversity, equity, and inclusion. Diversity is difference in a community, and inclusion is what we do with the difference, but it is equity — the most polarizing term of the three — that speaks to our educational obligation towards outcomes. Equity means recognizing that different people have different circumstances and that we must provide different supports to help them all achieve equal foundational outcomes. In this way, equity is a foundational principle of the entire education sector. In contrast to equity, the ideal of meritocracy — in which the winners win and the losers lose — may work in the business world, where the best companies win and the others dissolve and fall away, but education has a fundamentally different charge. We can (and do) create opportunities for people to excel, but we are explicitly charged with ensuring that every student reaches a baseline. If weaker students fail, then educators and schools are said to be failing. Equity — equality of outcome — is at the center of what schools are charged to do. Dismantling DEI tears down the infrastructure that enables teachers and schools to succeed at what we are charged to do. This is a breakdown in how we collectively talk about the work of education. Closing the gap between an understanding of school as providing equality of opportunity and equality of outcome — equity — is an essential step in closing the divide around DEI. Until this divide is closed, the culture wars will continue.
What about selective schools? What obligations do they have to groups that are underrepresented in the socio-economic elite? Selective schools aren’t focused on achieving baseline competency; they seek to provide advanced opportunity. So, do they have similar obligations to equitable outcomes — or even equality of opportunity? Asked more precisely: If, because of historical disadvantages, some communities have had less access to and therefore less success in the kinds of systems that accelerate social, educational, and economic advancement, and if the broader public school and system is charged with bringing everyone up to baseline, then do selective schools have any obligation towards those underrepresented communities? The technical answer is no. But to stop there is both a moral and strategic failure. To bring it back to the Executive Orders: if selective schools claim to be about “excellence and innovation” then it may be a helpful reminder that the literature is clear on the essential role of diversity in fostering excellence and innovation, and the literature is clear, too, on not just the mistake — but in fact the “tyranny” — of idealizing meritocracy. If selective schools are serious about their commitments to excellence and innovation, then they will be leading the charge not only on the discourse on, but also in the practice of, diversity and inclusion.
What do *you* remember from high school? See more in the feature below.
Browse and search over 14,000 curated articles from past issues online:
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FEATURED
“Are We Graduating Dependent Learners?”
“Not long ago, I posed a thought experiment: What if we designed a school with the explicit goal of producing dependent learners? …In this hypothetical school: Autonomy is minimized. Students follow rigid schedules and adult-created rules. Learning is passive. Direct instruction dominates while curiosity and risk-taking are discouraged. Assessments reward single correct answers, not divergent thinking. Planning and decision-making are opaque, with adults retaining control of most systems. Students are rarely asked to make real decisions that affect their lives. Sound familiar? It should. This is the structure of many traditional schools in the United States today.”
What Do 2,000+ People Most Remember About High School?
“Americans share many common high school experiences, especially four that each are shared by more than three-quarters. These are having a crush on someone, having a group of friends, taking a class they loved, and taking one they hated.”
ARTS
ASSESSMENT
CHARACTER
CREATIVITY
On Living A Creative Life
“You have to love making the thing, the act of making the thing more than you love the feeling at the end where you look back and say, “oh, I made that thing.” You have to enjoy the process more than you enjoy patting yourself on the back about having a product that you created. I mean, the most fun is the making of the thing. Once the book is done for me, I’m so ready to send it off and just start something else. Because I want that feeling again.”
CURRICULUM
“College For All” And “CTE For All” Might Not Be Mutually Exclusive
“This “CTE for all” model has grown in popularity as support for the idea of “college for all” has eroded amid high tuition costs and low completion rates. The “CTE for all” model has support from employers interested in meeting local and regional workforce needs. And some experts argue that combining workforce and academic learning makes students more engaged and helps them build professional networks.”
DIVERSITY/INCLUSION
EARLY CHILDHOOD
GOVERNMENT
Three Federal Judges Block The DEI Crackdown
What's Going On With The Accreditation Executive Order?
Executive Order On “Reforming Accreditation”
Executive Order On HBCUs
Executive Order On Career And Technical Education
Executive Order On School Disciplinary Policies (Via DEI)
Executive Order On “Equality Of Opportunity And Meritocracy”
Executive Order On AI In K-12 Schools
HIGHER ED
HUMANITIES
Letter Fragment Found? Did Shakespeare And Anne Hathaway Actually Live Together?
“Will There Ever Be Another Great Gatsby?”
Could Gatsby Be Black? The Surprising Case
“I couldn’t, and still can’t, endorse the confident assertion that Jay Gatsby is Black. What I do claim is that Jay Gatsby is unraced.”
LEADERSHIP
“When Leaders Express Positivity Early On, Employees Perform Better”
“5 Questions For Debriefing A Big Project Or Event”
“How To Supercharge Your Crisis Training”
“Current training approaches don’t prepare leaders for the unpredictability of today’s crises. Learn 10 ways to improve your organization’s simulations — and leaders’ ability to adapt.”
LEARNING SCIENCE
PEDAGOGY
What Is Boredom, And How Can We Address It?
“Boredom typically comes from two main sources: 1) A mismatch between challenge and ability: Material that's either too easy or too difficult creates what researchers call the "Goldilocks problem"—finding that sweet spot where challenge meets ability is difficult, especially in a classroom of 25 students with 25 different optimal skill levels… 2) A lack of perceived meaning or relevance.
On The Crisis In Discussion Skills [Video]
“Our world is in a conversation crisis, and the stakes are really high. Because conversation — it sounds soft, but it’s actually one of the most critical skills that children learn over the course of their lifetime.”
READING/WRITING
On "The Power Of Graphic Novels For The Classroom”
“A Century Of Close Reading” - A Quote From Every Year Since 1925
“What follows is not an explicit argument so much as a roadmap of distilled claims about the topic, with each successive entry sometimes recalling previous ones, or introducing new turns of the subject – all offering provocations to further thought.”
In Praise Of Deep Reading - Especially As Resistance
“To read slowly, attentively, without agenda or distraction is to resist. Not with noise or spectacle, but with the quiet, deliberate force of contemplation. In an economy built on speed and stimulus, deep reading becomes an act of principled refusal. It defies the algorithm’s logic of efficiency, the newsfeed’s velocity, the platform’s hunger for engagement. It says: I will dwell here, I will think for myself, I will go deep when the world wants me shallow.”
How Some States Are Fighting Non-Research Based Reading Methods
STEM
What Are Our Teacher Mindsets About Improving Math Pedagogy?
What's Going On In the Search For Extra-Terrestrial Life?
On Learning To Teach Math As Sense-Making, Pattern-Finding, And More
“As a fourth-year teacher I was blown away. I’d never considered that math could be explored, discussed, or even fun. However, my students immediately responded to Linda’s approach – raising their hands, showing their thinking on paper (something I had begged them to do for months) and, in general, feeling more positive toward math.”
SUSTAINABILITY
TECH
GENERAL
Are Minimalist Electric Cars The Next Wave Of Automobiles?
“Meet the Slate Truck, a sub-$20,000 (after federal incentives) electric vehicle that enters production next year. It only seats two yet has a bed big enough to hold a sheet of plywood. It only does 150 miles on a charge, only comes in gray, and the only way to listen to music while driving is if you bring along your phone and a Bluetooth speaker. It is the bare minimum of what a modern car can be, and yet it’s taken three years of development to get to this point.”
A.I. Update
A.I. UPDATE
AI Work Trend Index 2025, excellent pedagogical resources, and more
Excellent writing this week on AI.
In the features, find a helpful post on the complexities of how AI relates to the environment. It’s not just that AI data centers use a lot of energy; they also help reduce energy consumption, and they also have grown more energy efficient and have economic incentives to continue growing more efficient. This post explores some of these factors and the more complicated relationship between AI and energy consumption.
Also in the features, find a podcast on a company that argues that the future of AI is “cheating on everything.” The language is (unhelpfully) intentionally provocative, but the concept and implications of always on call information accessibility are important to understand.
Also this week, find a host of posts on the practical implementation of AI into our work as teachers: for writing, for lesson generation, for building custom chatbots for school, and more.
Last, from up in the features, Microsoft’s AI Work Trend Index is out, and it is worth a read. Most centrally, it explores how the workplace is changing with the arrival of AI. It describes a significant shift in the workplace, and it’s important for school leaders to know about it. But there are two key points to keep in mind, as this relates to schools:
1. Schools won’t (can’t) change as dramatically as businesses
Technology improves productivity in most task-oriented workplaces, but it doesn’t change “productivity” in most human-oriented workplaces. Baumol and Bowen pointed this out in an economics paper on the performing arts in 1966, and something related can be seen in the Microsoft report, which highlights how teams in organizations are increasingly built around tasks and business processes. But schools are different. They are built around relationships, which can only scale so far before they lose their meaning and effect. As a result, while the world is undergoing a major shift, as seen in the Microsoft report, schools may not shift in such fundamental ways.
2. But schools will need to evolve *what* is being taught
The report is clear that people in the workplace are managing AI assistants and agents more and more. These assistants are increasingly taking on essential workplace tasks, processes, and workflows. As a result, every employee is now a manager, and this requires new skills. If schools are preparing students for the future workplace, then we must be preparing students with these same skills.
Learn more about both of these points in the Microsoft report in the AI Update below.
These and more, enjoy!
Peter
What is the actual impact of AI on the environment? It’s hard to know. See more in the feature below.
TECH/AI: FEATURED
AI And The Climate: It’s More Complex Than It Seems
“Teaching students to simply "use less AI" because it uses some energy is like telling them to solve traffic congestion by not driving, without considering public transport, smarter traffic lights, or remote work. It’s a simplistic answer to a complex systems problem, and it doesn't equip them with the critical thinking needed to navigate the real trade-offs.”
Microsoft’s 2025 Work Trend Index Is Out
“As a result, a new organizational blueprint is emerging, one that blends machine intelligence with human judgment, building systems that are AI-operated but human-led. Like the Industrial Revolution and the internet era, this transformation will take decades to reach its full promise and involve broad technological, societal, and economic change. To help leaders understand how knowledge work will evolve, Microsoft analyzed survey data from 31,000 workers across 31 countries, LinkedIn labor market trends, and trillions of Microsoft 365 productivity signals. We also spoke with AI-native startups, academics, economists, scientists, and thought leaders to explore what work could become. The data and insights point to the emergence of an entirely new organization, a Frontier Firm that looks markedly different from those we know today. Structured around on-demand intelligence and powered by “hybrid” teams of humans + agents, these companies scale rapidly, operate with agility, and generate value faster.”
“Is The Future Of AI ‘Cheating On Everything’?”
““Real time, immediate information accessibility is just going to be a part of our lives. It will be incumbent upon society to decide where and in what ways we think that's appropriate. Obviously, it's going to exist on a spectrum.”
TECH/AI: EDUCATION
Six Core Principles For Teaching Writing In A Time Of AI
“In two years of intensive work on generative AI, I have seen nothing to convince me that writing is an obsolete skill no longer worth learning. It is changing, but it still matters, and it’s worth fighting for. That’s where I’ll start.”
Lesson Plan Generators Default To Bad Pedagogy
“They looked at 90 lesson plans from MagicSchool AI, SchoolAI, and straight OpenAI GPT-4. They didn’t set out to embarrass anyone — but the results speak for themselves… Here’s what the researchers found: MagicSchool leaned heavily on quiet, individual work — often defaulting to instructions like “assign a worksheet and ask students to work quietly.” GPT-4 emphasized structured, procedural activity — suggesting things like “group students and give them hypothetical data.” SchoolAI opened strong with discussion prompts, then dropped them. Most plans shifted quickly back into rigid instruction, as if curiosity was something to start with — but not sustain.”
Can AI Improve Predictive Analytics In Higher Ed?
Math Teachers Perceptions On The Impact Of AI On Math
On Building a Custom Chatbot For Your Course
“Ever since OpenAI gave ChatGPT Plus users the ability to create their own customized AI chatbots (called “GPTs” by OpenAI), I’ve seen a slow trickle of higher ed faculty experimenting with custom chatbots in their teaching. Usually the idea is to create an AI learning assistant of some kind for students.”
How Do We Produce AI Literate Graduates?
“That need is likely to become only more urgent. AI is reshaping organizational structures and career paths within industries, as the technology takes over both routine tasks and those requiring technical expertise… The question remains whether a critical number of faculty members will be willing to learn, and teach, about AI, even if they dislike it.”
TECH/AI: ETHICS AND RISK
TECH/AI: GOVERNMENT AND LAW
Innovation And Regulation Are Not Mutually Exclusive
“Beyond Section 230: Principles For AI Governance”
“Section 230’s cautionary tale should be a warning to courts and regulators asleep at the wheel as GAI becomes ubiquitous. Its unique risks and potential harms echo the challenges individuals continue to face in the era of § 230’s lax regulatory regime. And while lawmakers seem more alert this go-around, the lack of comprehensive action is alarming. Truth and democracy are under assault by powerful actors hoping to bend both to their own political ends. Balancing GAI’s risks with a thoughtful approach to free speech values will be challenging, but is something we need to get right. And fast.”
TECH/AI: INDUSTRY DEVELOPMENT
TECH/AI: SOCIAL
“Artificial Intimacy: How AI Exploits Our Social Brains”
“With AI systems designed specifically to foster trust and emotional connection, users lower their natural defenses, creating a perfect storm where the most private aspects of human experience become commodified data points. Unlike previous technologies that merely tracked behaviors, these AI relationships extract emotional patterns, decision-making tendencies, and value systems—precisely the information needed to influence beliefs and behaviors with unprecedented precision. The danger lies not just in the collection of this sensitive data but in how readily we surrender it to systems intentionally crafted to feel like trusted confidants rather than the sophisticated data-gathering tools they ultimately are.”