“They said it was like having a teacher in their pocket,” she said. The tools could help students work through a particular problem, brainstorm ideas, research for projects and provide feedback, she said.

 "Help" and "work through" are doing some heavy lifting here. "Provide feedback" remains one of the popular items in the AI arsenal. I remain unconvinced. Feedback that does not understand or include student intent-- what they thought they were doing, what they meant to do-- is just correction. "Do this instead of that." If you don't know why the student did "that" in the first place, you can't provide much in the way of useful correction, and since AI does not "know" anything, all it can do is edit the student's work for them. What do students learn from this? This is the pedagogical equivalent of an adult who shoulders the student aside and fixes their work while the student watches.

But the proud example of an AI project, shared by the superintendent in a board meeting, is even worse. 

Students in a middle school social studies class used AI to create and question “digital peers” and “characters” from the Middle Ages while the teacher guided them in evaluating responses for accuracy and evidence.

Many teachers (including me) would recognize this assignment immediately, only Back In The Day, we would have the students create and role play the characters themselves. In Mrs. O'Keefe's eighth grade English class (back in 1971), we had to research a historical person and then portray them as a guest on a talk show (my friends Andy and Stewart drew Van Gogh, and in the middle of his interview he became over-emotional and cut off his own ear, complete with fake blood).  My sister-in-teaching Merrill annually had her students put Milton's Paradise Lost on trial, with students role playing characters from the work.

This is a variation on that same assignment except AI does the role playing and students are transformed from actors into spectators.

Almost any version of this assignment would be better. Let students role play. Let them craft faux social media accounts for their characters. Anything that had them actively creating the character based on their own research, rather than feeding some stuff into an AI and sitting back to observe and judge the result. What does the teacher even assess in such an assignment? How is this any better than just watching a video about the topic?

If you're considering incorporating AI in your lesson and wondering how to decide what to have it do, here's a hint-- do not have it turn students from active participants into spectators who simply watch what the bot does for them. Students should be main characters in their own education, and not observers, sidelined so that the plagiarism machine can shine. 

Installing new ed tech? Implementing new policies or procedures? I wish with all my heart that the People In Charge would ask a simple set of questions.

Who is helped by this? Which job does this make easier?  

This has always been an issue, because it is easy to sit in an administration office and come up with procedures and paperwork that would make your life easier. And that's a perfectly human impulse-- to look at the work you're slogging through and think, "Man, this would be so much easier if I had my subordinates do X." 

In education, it's often something data related. "I would love to have data on how many left-handed students bring their own pencils," muses some admin. "I wonder who could collect that data for me?" (Spoiler alert: it will be the teachers). 

You don't have to look any further than the Big Standardized Test, which is the result of a whole bunch of policymakers saying, "Well, we could impose some of our favorite policies if only we had some data to excuse them."

The astonishing thing about applying the "Whose job does this make easier" lens to education is how truly rare it is that the answer is "teachers." 

It's not always huge stuff. When my old school switched from a paper attendance system run out of the main office over to a computerized system run by teachers, it created one more nuisance. Now every period had to have a built in moment within the first five minutes of class that allowed me to go to my desktop computer and record attendance, rather than doing it on paper to be checked later against the master attendance list. 

Was this a massive inconvenience? Of course not. But what generally grinds classroom teachers down is not the massive weight of large policy ideas, but death by a thousand small paper cuts. 

And this was a case where the central office was very proud of how this saved labor and made their job easier. But many labor-saving programs are actually labor-moving programs, and in school, the labor is most commonly moved to teachers. A thousand paper cuts.

Imagine a district where the administration said, "Yes, this would make my job easier, but it would put more burden on the teachers, so let's not do it." If you don't have to imagine that district, God bless you.

I am not arguing that the goal should be to make teaching the easiest walk-in-the-park job ever envisioned; that is neither possible nor desirable. But the basic function of a school administration is to make it possible for every teacher in the building to do the best job they can, and every administrative decision should be examined through that lens. Every decision should be centered on the question, "Will this support teaching in classrooms?"

A whole family of ed tech products are based on the proposition "If teachers put their work into these tech platforms, it will be easier for administration to monitor them." Digital lesson plans don't make it any easier for teachers to plan, and in fact can add time to the whole process, but they do make it easier for admins to monitor those plans (and in extreme cases, admins may have visions of an entire digitized program, so that the teacher can be more easily replaced).

The newest tech wave of AI products should face the same question. What job does this AI-powered whizbang actually make easier? Is it, for instance, easier to have an AI extrude lesson plans which the teacher must then edit and check for errors? Who does this actually help? Does it help a teacher to automate the brainwork of teaching (hint: does it help athletes to have a robot lift weights for them). 

Teachers aren't the only stakeholders who need to be considered. Yes, it may make communication easier for the school, but does it really help parents and students to have to download one more app in order to get important information from the school?

Even worse is the tech that is adopted simply because it's cool, with no idea that it will help anyone at all. It's just cool, you know, and we've heard other schools are getting it. Surely you'll figure out some use for it. 

The thing is, every new tech a teacher adopts (willingly or not) is either helping or hurting. Even if it's not actively making the job harder, a non-helping piece of tech represents opportunity cost, money that could have been spent on something that was actually useful. 

So administrations, I beg you-- before you adopt, ask yourself who would be helped by this new technowidget, and if the answer is not "The people who do the actual work of teaching students," maybe ask yourself if it's really worth purchasing.

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Let’s be perfectly clear: Our latest military adventure in South America will end in disaster. We will not establish a functioning democracy free of corruption. We will not purge the drug cartels. We will not end crime or migration. At best, we will leave things more or less as they are and spend billions trying to steal Venezuela’s oil before finally giving up.

At worst, we throw the entire country into violent chaos and destabilize the entire region. This will lead to increased poverty, crime, and even MORE migration as people flee the violence and deprivation we caused. This is the most likely scenario or something close to it for reasons I’ll discuss in a minute.

It’s important we be clear about this: When this plot to steal the oil fails, and it will, there will be a huge, disastrous mess left behind with the giant bootprint of the United States all over it. America went in guns ablazin’, taking names and kickin’ ass, oorah!, but then failed to achieve anything of substance yet again.

The humiliation will be monumental, and every drop of shame and blame will be dumped on the Republican Party. We must make sure that happens because god fucking dammit, the first thing the press and the GOP and the people who don’t pay attention are going to do is try to blame “both sides.”

Because when everyone is guilty, no one is guilty. And then no one is held accountable.

Fuuuuuck that. We all know who did this, and there is no fucking way I am letting those pieces of shit dump their garbage on our laps again so the fucking collaborators in the press can whitewash their neo-con warmongering. Keep those fucking receipts and be prepared to shove them down the throats of scumbags like Dana Bash in three years:

Today, it’s a great idea. Tomorrow, no one will be responsible. Just you fucking watch.

Here’s the reason we know the regime’s brilliant idea to seize Venezuela’s oil will fail: Since the end of WWII, we have toppled numerous dictators. Several of them in Latin America. Not once have we succeeded in doing anything but making the situation worse. We, the mighty United States, have not once, not one fucking time!, left behind a country with a vibrant democracy, a thriving economy, a happy populace. Our legacy has uniformly been one of death, destruction, and arrogant ignorance. This last part being central to why we keep fucking it up.

Despite having access to any number of experts and natives, in our own government, willing to explain the ins and outs of the cultures and governments we blindly seek to remake in our own image, ‘Murika! has a habit of shooting first, asking questions never. Then we’re shocked SHOCKED when things fall apart again and again and again. Who could have foreseen that not understanding the people we’re trying to rule would lead to friction and compounding complications? Truly a mystery for the fucking ages we may never solve…

Now, add to this equation an American regime run by white nationalists who view Latinos as subhuman. Add to this the fact that these particular white nationalists are, even for their ilk, uniquely stupid and historically incompetent. The cherry on top of this coming clusterfuck cake is their utter lawlessness. By that I mean their only motivation, really, is personal greed. They’re not even in Venezuela to steal the oil for America. The Trump regime is there to loot the country for themselves and their own personal bank accounts in the Cayman Islands.

If a competent American government went all in on regime change with an eye to “bringing democracy” to South America while ensuring US power and privilege were protected, it would still be a tall order. But the fucking clown show we have in charge now? There is no possibility at all and let’s be honest, they haven’t planned for anything past the “Drop bombs and brag on TV” stage. If it’s not written down in Project 2025, they have no idea what the fuck they’re doing. And even when it IS written down in Project 2025, the second the real world deviates from what they thought was going to happen, which it has repeatedly, the morons in the regime spiral out of control, completely unprepared and clueless.

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So, yes, this will all blow up in their dumbfuck faces. It’s been two goddamn days and we STILL do not know which imbecile from the regime will be in charge of “running” Venezuela. Will it be Marco “I have 20 jobs” Rubio? Maybe! Oh, wait. Now we’re hearing it might be Stephen “Kill All The Brown People” Miller:

The White House is weighing giving Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy White House chief of staff and homeland security adviser, a more elevated role in overseeing post-Maduro operations in Venezuela, the Washington Post reports.

Miller was behind the campaign to blow up the boats in the Caribbean because he’s a murderer who gets off on having people he hates killed. He’s been telling Trump for months that Venezuela “stole our oil” when they nationalized their oil industry back in the 70s. I promise you, Miller has visions of personal wealth and a lot of dead Venezuelans dancing through his creepy bulbous Nazi head.

Regardless, it’s clear no planning whatsoever was done for what happens next. Kind of important to know what to do when the dog catches the car, no? But Trump is at the helm, a dying pedophile desperate for a win, something to make people stop talking about Jeffery Epstein (not gonna happen, you kiddie fucking degenerate), and immediate gratification. Whatever plans we DO form will change from day to day, sometimes from hour to hour (minute to minute?) as Trump tweets out whatever deranged stupidity leaks into his diaper next. I’m sure that won’t push Venezuela into a more defiant stance or tip it into anarchy. What could possibly go fucking wrong with such a strategic genius at the helm of the United States?

And in three years, when the regime, ours that is, is ousted, the Venezuelan adventure will have metastasized into another foreign quagmire, draining our resources. Or turned into a free-for-all in South America, fueling instability and migration at our border.

When we have to clean up the Republican mess, it is absolutely vital we do not allow the press and the GOP to clutch their pearls and cry their big sobby tears and wail to the sky, “HOW DID THIS HAPPEN?! WHY DIDN’T DEMOCRATS STOP THIS?!”

If you think that won't happen, I really need you to read this tweet:

Kat Rosenfield is not a central figure in journalism, but her attitude is very much how the legacy press treats Trump and the entire GOP. They never do anything. Nothing is their fault. It just…happens. Republicans have no agency because of COURSE they act the way they act. They can’t help themselves so what is there to do about it?

This is why I say constantly, Republicans are not held to a lower standard; they’re held to no standard at all.

I promise you, they will 100% try to do the same here. Trump has been fed delusions of empire by the fools around him as well as his puppetmaster, Putin. Putin, who has delusions of his own of re-establishing a vast Russian empire with dominion over all of Europe. He can’t even conquer Ukraine. But he expects to conquer all of Europe with its much larger and vastly more powerful military? Sure. Good luck with that, Vladimir.

The assumption for Republicans, though, as always, is that nothing matters because there will be no consequences. Who went to prison for lying us into Iraq? No one. Who went to prison for lying us into Vietnam? No one. Consequences are for the little people.

This will all fall apart, and everyone involved will immediately seek to blame “both sides.” In the best case scenario (for Republicans), it will be used as a cudgel against the next Democratic president. The press used the withdrawal from Afghanistan to maul Joe Biden. I promise you, a lot of “journalists” and even more Republicans laughed themselves silly that they got away with pinning it all on Biden and erasing Trump’s culpability entirely.

It’s up to us to take their cudgel and shove it down their collective throat when they try again. We may have to clean up their fucking mess because we’re the adults in the room, but I’ll be goddamned if we’re going to keep taking the fucking blame for it.

The monkeys with the guns pulled the trigger. They can take all the credit for the fucking disasters they caused. The subtext for 2028, the one thing underlying every other message about affordability and democracy and equality, must be accountability. Without it, Republicans get away with their crimes and they’ll just do it again. That cannot be allowed.

They have to pay for what they’ve done. All of them.

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There are 301 days until the most important midterm election in American history. The regime is afraid, and they should be. We are legion, and they are weak. Stay strong. You are never alone.

Every time an American president wakes up in the morning and decides this would be a good day to dispatch the American military to a foreign land for reasons of alleged national security masking plunder, it is traditional for the media, not to mention the Congress, to have a say about the matter. Neither the Congress nor our print media has distinguished itself.

Both of our major newspapers, the New York Times and the Washington Post, took positions in favor of the Tonkin Gulf Resolution in 1964 which justified and authorized U.S. military involvement in Vietnam without a formal declaration of war. Both papers supported the disastrous Bush administration decision to invade Iraq in 2003 that was Congressionally approved by the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution. The New York Times ended up being sufficiently embarrassed by its coverage of and support for the Iraq war that the paper issued what amounted to an editorial apology in May of 2004.

Yesterday’s New York Times editorial on Trump’s kidnapping of Nicolas Maduro and his wife in Venezuela can be summed up by its headline: “Trump’s Attack on Venezuela is Illegal and Unwise.” The editorial hits all the right notes. It points out the hypocrisy of kidnapping Maduro to charge him with drug trafficking soon after pardoning the former president of Honduras who was convicted in a U.S. court of the same offense, and looks askance, to put it mildly, at the prospect of the U.S. “running” Venezuela while we avail ourselves of the country’s oil resources.

You may be wondering what the Washington Post has to say about yet another foreign adventure this time around? The Post’s editorial headline says it all:

“Justice in Venezuela.”

You really have to read the whole thing to get the full flavor of the complete and utter capitulation by the Jeff Bezos editorial board to Donald Trump’s dreams of profitable hegemony in this hemisphere, but the first few paragraphs give you enough sense of the thing to leave a taste in your mouth that you will not quickly rid yourself of:

“Millions of people around the world, most of all in Venezuela, are celebrating the downfall of the dictator Nicolás Maduro. President Donald Trump’s decision to capture him on Saturday was one of the boldest moves a president has made in years, and the operation was an unquestionable tactical success. The next step is ensuring that this triumph sets Venezuela up for stability and prosperity rather than more of the same, or worse.”

“What happened in Caracas was a clear reminder that America’s military, intelligence and cyber capabilities are second to none. More than 150 aircraft supported the Army’s Delta force in capturing Maduro and his wife. The couple are being extradited to the U.S., where they will face narco-terrorism, weapons and drug charges in Manhattan. There were no American deaths, although some U.S. service members were injured.”

“Maduro’s removal sends an important message to tin-pot dictators in Latin America and the world: Trump follows through. President Joe Biden offered sanctions relief to Venezuela, and Maduro responded to that show of weakness by stealing an election.”

“Trump had telegraphed for months that Maduro could not remain in power, yet Venezuela’s illegitimate leader clung on. What are Iranian leaders thinking now as they consider how to respond to widespread anti-government protests? Are the communists in Cuba sleeping well after Secretary of State Marco Rubio put them on notice Saturday?”

You knew that they wouldn’t be able to resist taking that dig at Biden. It’s as if Trump dictated the editorial from Palm Beach, and all they did was have someone on staff put it into complete sentences and remove his randomly capitalized words.

As if the Post’s over-the-hill-and-up-the-holler-lip-smack on Trump’s ass wasn’t loud enough to be heard in Mar a Lago, not to mention Moscow, they threw in this kicker about their hope for Maduro’s fate: “Now he should spend the rest of his life in a humane American prison.”

I wonder if before they ventured to write such a sentence they thought to inquire of anyone behind bars in a U.S. prison how “humane” the place is. Hmmmm…not.

I’ll let you determine for yourself how far the Post has fallen with this gift link: https://wapo.st/44VfGfr

It’s a long, long way from the days of Ben Bradlee and Kay Graham to Jeff Bezos, isn’t it? In his eagerness to protect his government contracts and ensure that he and his wife Lauren Sanchez are invited to the big opening of the big White House ballroom, Bezos has transformed the Post into a cheering section for the Republican Party’s inarticulate, rampaging champion of autocracy, Donald Trump.

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Considering the Option, and Questioning Why It Hasn’t Been

Russia claimed that Ukraine sent drones to bomb Putin’s private house. This was taken as shocking by all sides. Ukraine strongly denied it. Putin presented it as something obviously terrible. Trump took it as a horrible thing for Ukraine to have done (evidence is they didn’t and Trump has since said they have not) and that it might cause him to reevaluate his stance on negotiations (which seems exactly what Putin wanted). Trump later came to agree with the CIA assessment that no such bombing of Putin’s house had occurred.

My question is, why not? Why not bomb Putin’s house? I’ve wondered about this for years, not only about the war on Ukraine but about other attack/conflicts in the past. Since Mr. Putin himself has brought up the topic it seems an appropriate time to ask the question openly. Why not?

This war seems to be driven entirely by Putin. I haven’t seen anything that would indicate that if he retired, was voted out of office, grew into the ill-health of age, or lost interest that any of the other leadership in Russia would be determined to pursue this. It is almost entirely a Putin obsession which he will pursue until he can’t. Either he gets what he wants, or Ukraine, with help from allies, overwhelms the attack, or the people of Russia, or other high leadership in Russia, rebel against what it is doing to them, to their young people, and to their economy.

Or maybe he would stop if it hurt too much to bear personally. What if, when his troops were at the border ready to invade, a coalition of the U.S., Ukraine, and some European countries made it clear that if he attacked there would be immediate attacks on everything to do with Putin. On his homes, his yacht, his equivalent of Air Force One. The heck with the international banking laws, go ahead and threaten to steal all the money he and his closest cronies have in western banks and block them from withdrawing it in the meantime. And if he did attack, then carry out all those threats. If it hurt Putin too much, that might be one way he’d decide it wasn’t worth it. Or if he went ahead anyway, at least he’d be paying all the personal price we could inflict.

I’m not talking about killing anyone. It’s not unusual when attacks on property happen that first anyone present is warned to get out. There are reasons we don’t typically casually assassinate leaders we are in conflict with, in part to discourage them trying the same against our leaders.

I’m not a general. Maybe the Joint Chiefs of Staff would say this is crazy and would just start a nuclear war. Or maybe they’d say there is little of that we could actually accomplish because the defenses are too good. I don’t know, but I do wonder. Imagine if we had done that and it had prevented or quickly stopped the war. It would be a terrible escalation but if it had prevented tens of thousands of Ukrainian deaths, and all of that destruction, that would be such a huge plus side that it would balance out some very big downsides. Keep in mind it’s not just about Ukraine. Many knowledgeable sources, the Council on Foreign Relations for one, think Putin may want to go beyond Ukraine if he can. The nations affected then would be allies and members of NATO. So it is security of the U.S./European world that is being threatened.

Putin is a bully and at some point it’s going to take something similar anyway. It seems to me there are two ways a bully gets stopped. One is you give such a strong response immediately that it makes it clear they’re not going to get anything out of pursuing this. The other is you have a long, drawn-out process of gradually trying to discourage them. You eventually have to escalate anyway to where they see they’d better stop, but in the meantime they’ve gotten some of what they want, and you have suffered a long terrible price in the process. So is escalating up front really such a bad cost/benefit trade-off?

Best case at this point is: all of those deaths and all of that destruction has already occurred, and if a big enough commitment is made by the U.S. and European countries to arm Ukraine so well they could clearly stop the war where it is, and some truce is found, with Russia occupying what it has, in other words having gotten some reward for attacking. That’s if best case is achieved. If that’s how it goes would attacking Putin more directly back at the beginning seem like such a bad idea?

As I’m writing this, news about Trump kidnapping Maduro has just come out. Just to be clear, I would not have been suggesting that. Such a different situation. Maduro was not actively bombing civilians in neighboring countries or threatening war across territories of our allies or friends.

As far as bombing Putin’s house I really don’t know what I’m talking about, and among readers of this, every other one who ever read history books about wars and who fancies themselves knowledgeable about such things will, no doubt, be swift to raise a chorus of how ignorant I am. Regardless of all that, I still wonder. I can’t help but wonder.

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The diversity mania that has swept over American education for the last 50 years or so has had a malign effect on the quality of professors. Many of those hired to fill quotas for certain groups are, to be blunt, not especially qualified. Moreover, such hiring violates the law against discrimination.

Thing is, we could dismiss Leef as one right winger with a dumb idea, but it's not just Leef's personal individual dumb idea. Let's trace it. He's referencing a piece by David Randall published at Leef's own shop, "It's time to mandate merit." Randall is the executive director of the Civics Alliance and director of research at the National Association of Scholars, and what he is pushing is their model bill, the Faculty Merit Act. Which is a dumb bill.

Who are these people?

The National Association of Scholars is a long-standing right wing outfit that was culture panicking before it was cool. They were founded in 1987 to preserve the "Western intellectual heritage" and "to confront the rise of campus political correctness," originally called Campus Coalition for Democracy. They get funding from all the usuals-- Alliance Defending Freedom, Bradley, Koch, Scaife, Olin, etc etc etc. Founder and long time president was Stephen Balch, who has made a career out of operating in these Let's Make Colleges Not Liberal circles. Current president Peter Wyatt Wood is a regular columnist for National Review.

Jeanne Kirkpatrick, a Reagan adviser, has been in the group, as has Chester Finn. Go figure.

Leef's opening idea-- that a lefty education ideas like multiculturalism, gender studies and affirmative action are 1960s radical notions that caused institutions like universities to become a threat to Western civilization and general white conservatism-- that's a long-standing belief of NAS, periodically updated to include CRT and DEI. NAS has launched a variety of battles to oppose things like the AP History framework and anything DEI-ish and climate change talk. They often worm their way into state level stuff, like back in 2001 when they tried to commandeer Colorado's teacher training system.

In 2022, NAS decided to launch a whole new initiative under the heading of Civics Alliance, an attempt to ride the wave of culture panic into some new controls that included a variety of pre-fab policies for new board members who wanted to make sure that White kids weren't being discriminated against.

Their mission statement manages to squeeze a whole lot of right wing alarm bells into one paragraph:

We oppose all racism and support traditional American pluralism, e pluribus unum—out of many, one. These beliefs are not those of the radical New Civics activists, which espouse identity politics with overlapping ideologies of critical race theory, multiculturalism, and so-called “antiracism.” Unfortunately, these dogmas would ruin our country by destroying our unity, our liberty, and the national culture that sustains them. They have replaced traditional civics, where historical dates and documents are taught, with a New Civics based on the new tribalism of identity politics. Their favored pedagogy is service-learning, alternately called action civics, civic engagement, civic learning, community engagement, project-based civics, and global civics. These all replace civics literacy with a form of left-wing activism that adapts techniques from Alinsky-style community organizing for use in the classroom.

Well-meaning folks, they warn, might adopt the new wolves in sheep's clothing, but "Well-intentioned reformers must not collaborate with those promoting an ideology that would destroy America."

Civics Alliance drew a real crowd to sign off on their We Want letter-- folks from the Claremont Institute, Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs, Great Hearts Institute for Education, Heartland Institute, 
The Federalist, Eagle Forum. And plenty of familiar names. Jeremy Tate (Classical Learning Test), Sandra Stotsky, Chris Rufo, Nicole Neily (Parents Defending Education), Katharin Gorka, Max Eden, our old friend Rebecca Friedrichs, and  of course George Leef. And that doesn't even scratch the surface.

What does the proposed bill actually say?

CA appears to have set itself out to be a source of model legislation and policy, so the Faculty Merit Act is just one among many others, like the Campus Intellectual Diversity Act and the Human Nature Act (an anti-LGBTQ bill). 

The introduction of the bill re-asserts that administrator and faculty hiring is rife with political discrimination in hiring, which is itself just a "fig leaf" for discrimination by race and sex. "Faculty merit has declined precipitously as a result." It varies by discipline, of course-- "the average professor of ethnic studies is as acute as the average professor of physics." 

How are we to turn back this tide of affirmative action mediocrity in hiring for college professors? Clearly, the solution is standardized testing. 

Our model Faculty Merit Act promotes academic transparency by requiring all parts of a state university system to publish every higher-education standardized test score (SAT, ACT, CRT, GRE, LSAT, MCAT, etc.) of every faculty member, as well as the standardized test score of every applicant for the faculty member’s position, of every applicant selected for a first interview, and every applicant selected for a final interview. The Act also requires the university to post the average standardized test score of the faculty in every department.

Yes, the best way to judge that 30-year old aspiring political science professor is to look at the scores from the test they took when they were 17. This is such a dumb idea, and the creators of this dumb bill almost admit it. 

A standardized test is only a rough proxy for academic merit—especially as the College Board has weakened its tests. Some professors will have a greater ability to teach and do research than appears on a SAT score. But standardized tests do provide some measure of general intelligence.

Do they? Do they really? Because the SATs offer roughly zero measure of teaching and researching skill. In his article, Randall argues 

a standardized test score isn’t a bad proxy for student merit in undergraduate admissions, and it isn’t a bad proxy for faculty merit in the hiring process. If the public and policymakers can see that a faculty search had 300 applicants, that the standardized test scores dropped during each round of the selection process, and that the person who got the job had a lower SAT score than 290 other applicants, then they can see that something is wrong.

Will they? Because I'm pretty sure that a standardized test score is a terrible proxy for faculty merit. Leef quotes this same section and follows it with "This is a very good idea." No, this is a very dumb idea. But the second part really captures the real intent of the policy, which is to get the public riled up against these slacker liberal professors who, these guys are certain, have terrible test scores. Says the bill language:  

The public also will learn something by comparing the average standardized test score of different departments. If Ethnic Studies professors have standardized test scores two standardized deviations below those of physics professors, then the public will have better means to assess the claims of the professoriate to intellectual capacity that merits public deference.

In other words, we have a list here of departments that we think shouldn't exist, and we feel certain that the professors in these departments tanked their SAT scores back in the day, so if we can publish the proof of their intellectual ineptitude, we could erode the support that would keep us from axing them. Also, and "perhaps most importantly," it would provide statistical information that guys who didn't get that job could use to sue the school. 

The actual list of retired scores included in the bill is the ACT, the Classic Learning Test, the Law School Admissions Test, the Medical College Admissions Test, the Graduate Record Examinations, and the SAT. Also, the school has to swear they coughed up all the applicable scores or they will be subject to charges of perjury. The language of the bill hits all the particulars of the ideas covered above.

The whole exercise takes me back to the early days of the Big Standardized Test, when reformsters were just so certain that they knew about the Trouble With K-12 Education and that test results would provide the biggest lid-blowing digitized Gotcha ever. NAS/CA are already certain that all those damn squishy liberal non-white hires are a pack of inferiors who need to have their inferiority stripped naked to the world so that public opinion can chase them away from the University. 

That's not a particularly admirable goal, but really, the whole proposal is a just a dumb idea. The notion that an SAT score makes a major statement about someone's merit, especially years and years later is just bizarre. "Well, Dr. Wisdompants, we're sure your PhD work is fine and all, and your work as a graduate teaching assistant is swell, along with these letters of recommendation from you last teaching positions-- that's all well and good, but what we really want to see is your SAT scores." 

Or maybe they're picking up on student conversations. "Yes, Professor Bigbrains runs a good class, and I am learning like crazy in there. The professor really knows the field and really knows how to make it understandable to us. But damn-- have you seen their SAT scores??!!"

The Faculty Merit Act is just dumb. It's a dumb idea that wants to turn dumb policy into a dumb law and some National Review editor should feel dumb for giving it any space. If this dumb bill shows its face in your state, do be sure to call out its dumbness and note that whoever attached their name to it is just not a serious person.