Anne Lutz Fernandez
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lutzfernandez.bsky.social
Anne Lutz Fernandez
@lutzfernandez.bsky.social
9.6K followers 2.1K following 10K posts
Ex-banker, marketer, & English teacher: pick your ad hominem. Co-author of nonfiction books Carjacked & Schooled. Cranky in the AM.
Newsletter: https://nobody-wants-this.ghost.io/
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lutzfernandez.bsky.social
posting today for no particular reason

costsofwar.watson.brown.edu/costs/human
An estimated over 940,000 people were killed by direct post-9/11 war violence in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and Pakistan between 2001-2023. Of these, more than 432,000 were civilians. The number of people wounded or ill as a result of the conflicts is far higher, as is the number of civilians who died “indirectly,” as a result of wars’ destruction of economies, healthcare systems, infrastructure and the environment. An estimated 3.6-3.8 million people died indirectly in post-9/11 war zones, bringing the total death toll to at least 4.5-4.7 million and counting.
November 4, 2025 at 2:56 PM
lutzfernandez.bsky.social
From the WaPo piece: "I may not like what Trump is doing, but I'm White."
Another way to look at this challenge for Democrats is through the lens of White Americans. The poll finds that Trump’s approval among White Americans was 49 percent positive and 51 percent negative, with 40 percent strongly disapproving. But on the question of which party they would support in next year’s midterm elections, 40 percent of White registered voters say they would vote for the Democrat while 53 percent say they support the Republican.
November 2, 2025 at 12:04 PM
lutzfernandez.bsky.social
the saddest lol

www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtua...
Rise and Decline of the "Patriots" NCJ Number 191374 Journal Intelligence Report Issue: 102 Dated: Summer 2001 Pages: 6-8 Editor(s) Mark Potok Date Published 2001 Length 3 pages
November 2, 2025 at 11:51 AM
lutzfernandez.bsky.social
A tabby cat snuggled up in a tanblanket on a couch
November 1, 2025 at 2:06 PM
lutzfernandez.bsky.social
LOL the closing line on this piece:

"Meta reported Q3 earnings on Wednesday, with its stock declining 9% in after-hours trading following the call."
Meta's CTO shared advice on how to manage your "emotional economy." Andrew Bosworth said in a blog post to think of your relationships like investments. "Manage your emotional economy like any other portfolio," he said.
October 31, 2025 at 12:43 PM
lutzfernandez.bsky.social
This language is very helpful: "AI's extractive nature."

AI takes.

drb.ie/move-over-fo...
The evidence for AI’s extractive nature is overwhelming. Not only have LLMs exploited content stolen from writers, artists, journalists and scholars. The industry’s reliance on massive data sets also requires content moderation that exposes poorly paid workers to the worst content online. Journalists have documented the impact on workers’ mental health, personal relationships and communities. Taking an ecological perspective is no less comforting. Data centres powering AI have a massive demand for energy and threaten decarbonisation efforts. They also use lots of water – often where water is increasingly scarce. It could be said, of course, that most technologies, digital or other, embody injustice and extractivism. But this doesn’t make ethical and ecological concerns about AI as the new default any less valid. In a world on fire, how can we concede so much power to an exploitative technology that produces questionable results, operates in opaque ways, deepens social precarity and fuels the planetary emergency?
October 30, 2025 at 3:33 PM
lutzfernandez.bsky.social
www.msnbc.com/top-stories/...
The TPUSA partnership is a continuation of DeSantis-backed policies, such as the effort to whitewash the history of slavery in schools and the state’s educational partnership with far-right media platform PragerU, which seem intent on turning Florida schools into a breeding ground for conservative ideology.
October 30, 2025 at 10:51 AM
lutzfernandez.bsky.social
www.msnbc.com/top-stories/...
Meanwhile, there’s no evidence to suggest that students looking to launch TPUSA chapters have faced “discrimination” or “impediments” at any Florida school. In fact, the groups with the more credible claim to facing impediments and potential bans in Florida schools are the identity-based student groups that are the target of MAGA’s war on diversity, which DeSantis has helped fuel.
October 30, 2025 at 10:47 AM
lutzfernandez.bsky.social
No, the kids are not way ahead. This is the "digital native" myth we've been living with for a while and that has helped push a lot of useless ed tech on schools.

Then there's the fantasy that we can train teachers and kids away from kids taking the easiest path.
To get the most out of AI, Scarice said both teachers and students need training. “Kids are already way ahead of us with AI,” said Scarice, but they’re basically using it as a glorified search engine or a content generator. “That’s the lowest possible level of AI’s potential,” Scarice said. He wants to teach students how to think with it.
October 29, 2025 at 2:57 PM
lutzfernandez.bsky.social
Here's a lesson that can be done without AI and without memorization, with more student creativity, and without students having to fact-check their sources AFTER THE FACT.

(and probably was done before but AI made it seem more fun to the adults...tho kids get bored with new tech pretty quickly)
Scarice said he was in one sixth-grade social studies class a few months ago where AI was used to teach a topic on the Middle Ages. Instead of poster boards and memorization, students created digital characters – monks, blacksmiths and nobles – that they trained using artificial intelligence. The students then interviewed and debated their characters. Scarice said it was as if the students were looking through windows rather than computer screens. When some of the answers they got from their characters didn’t sound right, it led to discussion, research and fact-checking. The teacher, Scarice added, floated between groups, asking questions.
October 29, 2025 at 2:54 PM
lutzfernandez.bsky.social
One of my old districts. Note language of panic/mania: "wildly," "urgent," "driven." Lip service to ethics & guardrails, but the inevitability argument dominates, dipped in enthusiasm. What students are being prepared for? Dunno, but big changes are needed ASAP.

westportjournal.com/education/we...
Schools Superintendent Thomas Scarice, who recommended nearly a year ago that the district change up its strategic plan, switching out collaborative problem solving for AI, is working to win over the skeptics. “With the right ethics, the right guardrails, and the right leadership, I am not just hopeful, I am wildly optimistic when I think about where we are headed,” Scarice said. Except for safety and security, Scarice said there is no topic right now more urgent for the district to wrestle with than how it uses AI and prepares students for a world that will be driven by it.
October 29, 2025 at 2:48 PM
lutzfernandez.bsky.social
The absolute detachment from humanity as these tech bros treat AI like their fun thought experiment.

www.the-express.com/tech/tech-ne...
"It's kind of profound because it solves all of these specific problems, like we don't have enough doctors or mental health professionals, but it brings with it so much change," the billionaire told Fallon. "What will jobs be like? Should we just work 2 or 3 days per week? So I love the way it'll drive innovation forward, but I think it's a little bit unknown [whether] we will be able to shape it.
October 29, 2025 at 10:54 AM
lutzfernandez.bsky.social
Here's a classic example--an excerpt from the AI policy of a Rhode Island school district--that essentially pretends that teachers have the capability of keeping kids safe from AI's hazards and and ensuring students are using AI "responsibly."

This is asking teachers to do the impossible.
Safety and Privacy: Students and teachers alike should never share personal information with AI tools, including input of both student-level, class-level or school-level data. Teachers should stay informed on AI technologies used in education, help to educate students on which of these technologies are reliable and appropriate for use, and encourage students to report any AI interactions that appear to compromise safety and privacy, as well as academic integrity. Students should be instructed to fact check AI content, use multiple sources to verify important information and be vigilant for examples of AI errors or “hallucinations.” Subject-specific guidelines for AI are an important way to encourage responsible use. The Assistant Superintendent for Teaching and Learning and the Director of Technology shall review uses of AI annually to ensure data security and to provide teachers and staff with relevant guidance on how to protect students from potential risks and harms. Ethical Considerations: Teachers should provide students with guidelines for avoiding bias and discrimination in AI prompts and outputs. AI is a tool that has appropriate uses, but the student should feel agency over the 2 process of learning and understand that any academic discipline requires not just knowledge but also asking the right questions and understanding context. Additional support in understanding the limitations of AI is encouraged through tech skills courses for students and ongoing knowledge sharing among teachers.
October 27, 2025 at 8:09 PM
lutzfernandez.bsky.social
If you haven't yet, you have to read the whole article for the full horror. Gift link here:

bsky.app/profile/prop...

But I have to highlight these examples how Alpha surveills students and violates their privacy, something public schools fail to understand is a feature, not a bug of school AI:
At Alpha, the guides’ support and oversight is meant to supplement the technology—and not just the personalized learning system the school has dubbed an AI tutor. Alpha can also use an array of management surveillance tools, which it calls “basic and extended capabilities,” to flag “incorrect usage” of the learning apps. These “anti-patterns” can “help detect engagement and focus issues.” The school may record students’ screen activity and their mouse and keyboard usage. Alpha may employ eye-tracking programs. Using what it calls a “pro sports analogy,” Alpha compares these tools to “game film.” While parents are asked to consent to these surveillance programs, the school’s handbook says that there is “no expectation of privacy” on campus. If parents want to restrict recordings of their children outside of the school, they have to manually opt out of the “anywhere” option—as Jessica Lopez learned midway through her older daughter’s second year at Alpha. The girl says she remembers sitting on her bed one night working on schoolwork when she received a notification that she’d been flagged for an anti-pattern. She says Alpha’s system sent a video of her in her pajamas, taken from the computer’s webcam, that showed her talking to her younger sister. There are hints of a corporate coworking space—like the soundproofed phone booths that serve as test-taking cubicles—and clear signs of the school’s tech-evangelist, entrepreneurial ethos. In the room for 5- to 7-year-olds, a large TV on one wall displays circle charts that update every minute with completion rates and other metrics from each student’s personalized learning software.
October 27, 2025 at 1:02 PM
lutzfernandez.bsky.social
These powerful people want this to become the model not just for private schools but for public schools. The push toward AI in K-12 has to be understood as the desire to dehumanize education in every sense of the word and to turn children into grunts ready to sacrifice themselves in the workplace.
The school is in the midst of a national expansion, including roughly a dozen new campuses in Arizona, California, Florida, New York, North Carolina, and Virginia to add to the five already open in Texas. An “affiliate” charter school called Unbound Academy is enrolling students in Arizona. Although Unbound is independent from Alpha, its leadership team includes Price and her husband, Andrew, and some of the other initial members of its board either work at or have connections to Alpha. Unbound’s application to open in Arizona cited Alpha School Brownsville, saying that it “demonstrated how the 2hr Learning Model can effectively address educational disparities” and make “high-quality education accessible to all students.”
October 27, 2025 at 12:39 PM
lutzfernandez.bsky.social
This isn't any fly-by-night school. It can't be seen as a one-off, run by a few bad eggs. It's driven by RW tech bros and MAGA pols eager to rid schools of those pesky human teachers.
As the nation confronts a teacher shortage crisis, Alpha’s audacious promise has propelled it from a small Texas private school into a budding educational empire. It’s a darling of the Trump administration and the very wealthy. Joe Liemandt, a Stanford dropout turned tech founder whose billions come from selling automation software, is the school’s “principal.” This past summer, hedge fund manager Bill Ackman promoted the school on X and hosted a panel about it in the Hamptons. Reid Hoffman, the cofounder of LinkedIn, has had Price on his podcast and has said on X that the “best news” is that Alpha’s AI tutor approach “can be a reality for every student, anywhere.” In September, US secretary of education Linda McMahon visited the original Austin campus and said the models presented there were “the most exciting thing I’ve seen in education in a long time.”
October 27, 2025 at 12:35 PM
lutzfernandez.bsky.social
It sounds like employees at this school became inhuman robots in service of the inhuman robot, which demanded results regardless of the cost.

The child was supposed to meet metrics or not get food. MEET METRICS.
When Barrios’ husband brought their daughter to a previously scheduled checkup soon after, her doctor noted with concern that she had lost a significant amount of weight in a short time. Her dad then brought her to school with a note from the pediatrician, Barrios says, instructing her to eat snacks in between regular meals and saw her walk into school with it in her hand. She told her parents she delivered it to staff. Even though Alpha had asked parents in its handbook to “refrain” from sending in “midday snacks,” Barrios and her husband wanted to follow the pediatrician's recommendation, she says. For the first few days, Barrios says, her daughter ate her snacks. Then one afternoon she returned with them still in her backpack, uneaten. Barrios, alarmed, asked if Alpha was providing different food instead. No, the 9-year-old answered. She told her mom that staff at the school said she didn’t earn her snacks and wouldn’t get them until she met her learning metrics.
October 27, 2025 at 12:32 PM
lutzfernandez.bsky.social
Is abusive a strong word? A tech company selling the product this school foisted upon the child in this piece wanted to make sure they didn't get sued for health damage wrought.
Within a couple weeks, Barrios says, the school reported to her and her husband that their daughter wasn’t eating lunches. According to Barrios, Alpha said it was “because she would rather stay in and work.” The girl later explained to her parents that she was spending lunchtimes catching up on IXL. (In a statement to WIRED, IXL representatives wrote that Alpha School’s account was deactivated this past July and claims that it is “no longer an IXL customer due to violating our terms of service,” adding that IXL “is not intended—and we do not recommend its use—as a replacement” for “trained, caring teachers.”)
October 27, 2025 at 12:30 PM
lutzfernandez.bsky.social
And the "personalized learning" that AI-in-schools boosters tout can become an abusive push to perfectionism as it treats children like adult employees with "targeted goals."
Over the next weekend, Barrios says, she and her husband sat with their daughter for hours each day until she finished the multiplication lesson, even as she broke down and sobbed that she’d rather die than keep going. Ultimately, Barrios says she double-checked all the answers on a calculator before the 9-year-old entered them. But when the girl returned to school with the lesson completed, her mom says, she came back reporting crushing news: In the time she had spent stuck, she had fallen even farther behind her targeted goals.
October 27, 2025 at 12:27 PM
lutzfernandez.bsky.social
Then there is the particular model here, which replaces human teachers with computers and "human guides." But as @cathylutz.bsky.social and I wrote in Life by Algorithms, roboeducation can turn educators into robots & children into workers as algorithms rule.

press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/bo...
At Alpha School, the private microschool the girl and her younger brother attended in Brownsville, Texas, she had been working a grade level ahead of her age in math, Barrios says. She could do three-digit multiplication correctly most of the time. But whenever she made an error in IXL, the software would determine she needed more practice and assign her more questions. She told her mom that she had asked her “guide,” the adult who supervised her classroom in lieu of a teacher, to make an exception and let her move on. She said the guide’s reply was that she needed to get it done, that it was expected of her.
October 27, 2025 at 12:23 PM
lutzfernandez.bsky.social
Schools like this, which can take public monies through vouchers and ESAs, have great marketing pressures and do not have the same transparency requirements as public schools. This creates conditions ripe for exaggerated claims, even fraud.
With 2 Hour Learning, which is in use not only at Alpha but also a host of its private “sister schools,” students are meant to spend just two hours per day on “learning sessions.” Personalized learning software—or what the 2 Hour Learning homepage began referring to last year as an “AI tutor”—does the teaching. MacKenzie Price, one of the founders of Alpha and 2 Hour Learning, told WIRED: “ Our students are learning twice as much, our classes are top 1 percent across grades and subjects, and we're doing it all in a much, much shorter amount of time.” (Price’s claim is based in part on comparisons of standardized test data. While Price initially said that Alpha would share its data with WIRED, it has not done so.)
October 27, 2025 at 12:09 PM
lutzfernandez.bsky.social
But I'll start with a key problem with "school choice," which is that it will create competition between schools, leading to improvement in all schools. But business and education don't mix. Schools like this one focus on marketing their "innovations" rather than on applying tested pedagogy...
Barrios and her husband joined a growing group of families who had chosen to leave the school’s Brownsville campus. About two dozen kids were in the inaugural class in 2022, according to Paige Fults, the current head of Alpha School Brownsville. At least five families (including some with more than one child) have departed. That hasn’t stopped Alpha’s leaders from pointing to Brownsville as an example, in at least one white paper and in applications to open new charter schools, of how the proprietary model Alpha uses, 2 Hour Learning, can succeed in communities with “low SES" (meaning socioeconomic status).
October 27, 2025 at 12:06 PM
lutzfernandez.bsky.social
Reading this paragraph--written by the editors of Wired, the most well-known tech publication--at BOE meetings in districts rushing AI seems like a good idea.

Ask why they are treating children like guinea pigs while pretending they can predict a future those most knowledgable about tech cannot.
Hundreds of millions of people use it. Trillions of dollars fuel it. In 2025, the conversation around AI turned from what it could be to what it is: Large language models are now everywhere, in our schools and our homes, on therapist couches and government computers. We feed it our data, and tell it our secrets. The world is collectively engaged in a live experiment, with few controls and almost no regulation; the best-case and the worst-case scenarios all seem to end with our planet being forever transformed.
October 27, 2025 at 10:31 AM
lutzfernandez.bsky.social
The book bans and education gag orders that started in red states and districts spread beyond. So even if this admin or future MAGA admins aren't able to impose this "civics" program, everyone needs to be alert to how MAGA politicians might try to introduce it in the states.

pen.org/report/ameri...
Map from PEN America showing how education gag order bills spread from red states to purple and blue.
October 26, 2025 at 9:45 PM
lutzfernandez.bsky.social
The DOE's "partners":
America 250 Civics Education Coalition Partners 1776 Project Foundation Alabama Policy Institute Alliance Defending Freedom Alumni Free Speech Alliance America First Legal American Center for Law & Justice American Cornerstone Institute American Legislative Exchange Council American Moment American Principles Project Catholic Vote Center for Education Reform Center for Renewing America Center for Urban Renewal Claremont Institute Commonwealth Foundation Concerned Women for America Conservative Partnership Institute Constituting America Council for National Policy Eagle Forum Faith and Freedom Coalition First Liberty Counsel First Liberty Institute Goldwater Institute Heritage Foundation Hillsdale College Intercollegiate Studies Institute for Education Reform James Madison Institute Job Creators Network Leadership Institute Moms for America Moms for Liberty National Association of Scholars PragerU Priests for Life Religious Freedom Institute Texas Public Policy Foundation The Fund for American Studies Turning Point USA Woodson Center
October 26, 2025 at 11:32 AM