"This is going on your permanent record."

Turns out the permanent record is real! It's just scattered across a dozen platforms, half of them owned by vendors, and the student it describes is the last person who gets to see it. In this episode, I trace what happens when schools collect more data about students than any previous generation of schools in history, with less coherent policy about that data than the generation that kept everything in a filing cabinet. The examination covers five layers: academic and behavioral data hoarded across systems nobody inventories, third-party classroom tools teachers adopt without administrative oversight, social media accounts that build public digital profiles of minors, vendor lock-in and AI platforms generating behavioral data at unprecedented scale, and the cybersecurity exposure that comes with all of it. The PowerSchool breach exposed sixty million student records. The Naviance lawsuit revealed a platform quietly sharing student activity with analytics firms while students used it for school-assigned work. Phishing attempts targeting school administrators happen weekly. And through all of it, the student whose data is being collected, stored, marketed, and occasionally stolen is the one person with the least say in what happens to it.

The School Doctor -- Episode 2: "Tilling the Soil"

Your school has probably launched at least three tools in the last five years that were supposed to change everything. Most of them didn't survive two academic cycles, and the ones that did probably succeeded for reasons nobody on the leadership team planned for. This episode traces the pattern from enthusiastic August unveil to quiet March fade and asks why it keeps repeating. The answer turns out to have very little to do with the technology itself and almost everything to do with conditions: whether teachers believe a tool serves their students, whether they feel confident enough to experiment with it, and whether anyone made time for them to try. Along the way, we dig into Horace Mann's 19th-century Normal Schools and the one-size-fits-all training instinct we inherited from them, a principal who launched an iPad program without knowing what wifi was, and the research on what actually predicts whether teachers adopt new technology. The prescription is a gardening metaphor taken seriously: prepare the soil before you plant, and measure growth by confidence rather than login rates.

Topics Covered

The recurring cycle of technology adoption and abandonment in schools

Why training and adoption are fundamentally different events

Horace Mann, Normal Schools, and the origins of one-size-fits-all professional development

Three conditions that distinguish schools where tools take root: utility, self-efficacy, and time

Institutional credibility deficits and how failed rollouts teach faculty to wait things out

Andragogy, differentiated PD, and measuring confidence instead of compliance

Mentioned in This Episode

Horace Mann and the Normal School movement (1838)

The speaker's doctoral research on teacher technology adoption during COVID-era emergency remote teaching

Episode 1: "Who Wrote This?" (self-efficacy and perceived usefulness findings)

Arthur C. Clarke's Third Law (referenced from The Pulse newsletter)

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Consulting: Educational Vitality Partners at edvitality.org

If ChatGPT can write an essay that gets an A in your class, what exactly was that paper assessing?

That’s the question nobody in education wants to sit with. Schools are spending thousands on AI detection software, rewriting honor codes, and reverting to handwritten exams. Universities are dusting off blue books like it’s 1987. And none of it is treating the actual problem.

In this first episode of The School Doctor podcast, I diagnose what’s really behind the AI cheating panic: decades of assessment theater, eroded trust infrastructure, and an institutional reflex to police students rather than redesign the work we ask them to do.

Along the way: why “assessment kabuki” is the perfect metaphor for what we’ve been performing, what cognitive debt actually costs students who outsource their thinking, and why the question was never “who wrote this?” It was always “have we built a school worth doing honest work in?”

Episode 1 runs 20-some minutes. No jargon or vendor pitches. Just an honest exam from someone who’s been making rounds in K-12 schools for a long time.

The Pulse newsletter isn’t going anywhere. The podcast is an addition, not a replacement. Same diagnostic lens, new format.

Hit play. The doctor is in.