Anne Lutz Fernandez
LightNews LightNews
banner
lutzfernandez.bsky.social
Anne Lutz Fernandez
@lutzfernandez.bsky.social
9.8K followers 2.1K following 11K 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/
Posts Replies Media Videos
lutzfernandez.bsky.social
Mr. Sacks has offered astonishing White House access to his tech industry compatriots and pushed to eliminate government obstacles facing A.I. companies. That has set up giants like Nvidia to reap an estimate of as much as $200 billion in new sales. Mr. Sacks has recommended A.I. policies that have sometimes run counter to national security recommendations, alarming some of his White House colleagues and raising questions about his priorities. Mr. Sacks has positioned himself to personally benefit. He has 708 tech investments, including at least 449 stakes in companies with ties to artificial intelligence that could be aided directly or indirectly by his policies, according to a New York Times analysis of his financial disclosures. His public filings designate 438 of his tech investments as software or hardware companies, even though the firms promote themselves as A.I. enterprises, offer A.I. services or have A.I. in their names, The Times found.
November 30, 2025 at 12:09 PM
lutzfernandez.bsky.social
It's been ten years since we traveled the US to meet teachers for our book Schooled.

They shared many challenges, some of which have worsened. And this was before the pandemic, device proliferation, rising authoritarianism, K-12 censorship wave, AI...

www.brownalumnimagazine.com/articles/201...
What challenges do teachers report facing? Broad social and economic changes are making teaching harder: widespread child poverty, widening income inequality, growing cultural and linguistic diversity, rising numbers of children with disabilities, frequent school violence, limited job opportunities and ballooning college costs, contracting public budgets, and persistent racism and segregation. Which of these are having the greatest effect? Basic economics. Astoundingly, roughly half of America’s public school children are growing up in low-income households. A deep body of research has consistently shown that poverty, especially extreme and persistent poverty, has a tremendous and complex impact on children’s physical, social, and emotional health, cognitive ability, and resulting academic achievement.
November 29, 2025 at 4:13 PM
lutzfernandez.bsky.social
www.businessinsider.com/inside-sales...
Soon after unveiling Agentforce, the Salesforce CEO wrote an essay in Time Magazine, which he owns, declaring that agents would unleash "a revolution that will fundamentally redefine how humans work, live, and connect with one another from this point forward." And he would lead this revolution, he boasted.
November 29, 2025 at 3:38 PM
lutzfernandez.bsky.social
Decorating commenced at 10:08 AM and completed at 10:09 AM.

Follow for more holiday tips.
Photograph of a rustic front doorway. Photograph of a rustic front doorway with a holiday wreath placed upon it.
November 29, 2025 at 3:14 PM
lutzfernandez.bsky.social
Providence, Boston, Mystic, LA, Portland, SF, DC:
Natan Last tour dates: Providence 12/9 at RiffRaff Books, Boston 12/20 at Harvard Book Store, Mystic 12/11 at Bank Square Books Natan Last book tour: LA 1/20 at Vroman's, SF: 1/22 at BookShop West Portal, Portland 1/23 at Powell's, DC 1/28 at Hill Center DC
November 27, 2025 at 11:33 AM
lutzfernandez.bsky.social
Ready to tackle the day.

Art by @mikemitchell.bsky.social.
A slice of pumpkin pie with a dollop of whipped cream but with arms and legs and huge round eyes and a smile is advancing forward holding two weapons. The dollop also has eyes and a smile. A potato with arms and legs and huge round eyes and a smile is advancing forward holding a spear. It is smoking a joint. Not baked yet A roast turkey with arms and legs and huge round eyes and a toothy smile is running forward holding a spear.
November 27, 2025 at 10:25 AM
lutzfernandez.bsky.social
nobody-wants-this.ghost.io/ai-is-alread...
Journalist Allison Morrow nailed it, calling it “a modern spin on a strategy as old as time: Keep workers working by making them afraid of losing their jobs.” Media coverage generally is contributing to the panic. Doom-and-gloom headlines and catastrophic language abound: “For Some Recent Graduates, The AI Apocalypse May Already Be Here” - NYTimes “92 Million Jobs Gone: Who Will AI Erase First?” - Forbes “Behind the Curtain: A white-collar bloodbath” - Axios “41% of companies worldwide plan to reduce workforces by 2030 due to AI” - CNN “...CEO warns AI may cause a recession…” - Business Insider
November 26, 2025 at 10:57 AM
lutzfernandez.bsky.social
The first and last sentence of the closing para belong to the article I wish had been written.
By turning childhood into a thing that can be measured, adults have managed to impose their greatest fears of failure onto the youngest among us. Each child who strays from our standards becomes a potential medical mystery to be solved, with more tests to take, more metrics to assess. The only thing that seems to consistently evade the detectives is the world around that child — the one made by the grown-ups.
November 24, 2025 at 3:39 PM
lutzfernandez.bsky.social
Closes by blaming the Democrats and teachers unions for Republican extremism and school defunding.

Gee, I remember teachers and unions being bashed when many opposed NCLB (GOP), RTTT (Dems), and the testing regime they wrought.
This discontent helps empower the conservative effort to defund the public school system and let parents pick their own schools, with taxpayers covering the tuition. Each child who no longer seems to fit into the country’s education system — and more often than not they are boys — potentially expands the constituency for these ideas. And trust erodes further in the progressive project of a democracy built on giving everyone a free and equal education. The chief defender of that project, the Democratic Party, is ill-suited to addressing this crisis. Not only must it navigate teachers unions who may be skeptical of still more grandiose ideas on how to fix schools. The party has also become the political home of the meritocratic elite, the people perhaps least likely to see flaws in the system that crowned them as winners.
November 24, 2025 at 3:30 PM
lutzfernandez.bsky.social
A focus on what the system demands from teachers, students, and parents would have been great. Instead we the suggestion that students don't need a diagnosis, just to get out of public schools.
Rather than wait for changes to come, many parents are giving up on the system altogether. A poll in 2023 found that about one in three home-schooling parents were unhappy with how their schools had educated their children with special needs, prompting them to leave. Parents are also increasingly turning to microschools, essentially learning pods with small numbers of children who can receive more individual attention. Some of these parents identify as being part of an “unschooling” movement, in which they believe that school has done more harm than good for their children. They may be onto something. A 2016 paper showed that many young adults with childhood diagnoses of A.D.H.D. saw their symptoms improve once they left school and began working in a field that interested them.
November 24, 2025 at 3:30 PM
lutzfernandez.bsky.social
Hard agree.
School districts are trying to address the mental health crisis by teaching children how to better manage their emotions. Funding has poured into counseling services. But these approaches do not lift a larger mirror to school itself as a major source of stress and anxiety. Meanwhile, the teachers of America also report overwhelming levels of burnout.
November 24, 2025 at 3:30 PM
lutzfernandez.bsky.social
Meanwhile, what we should probably really be worrying and writing about at this very minute
Meanwhile, the Trump administration has threatened to gut the Department of Education’s civil rights division, which enforces the federal law guaranteeing that children with disabilities receive a free public education.
November 24, 2025 at 3:17 PM
lutzfernandez.bsky.social
Agree. Everyone is trying to make a bad, underfunded system work. But we're not going to talk about funding here, just bad
Some of the support being requested — for instance, being allowed to move more, rather than sitting so long — would likely benefit all children. Instead, school districts try to mash individual needs into a system antithetical to them. The sheer cost and logistics of this are unsustainable. Many students who are legally entitled to support do not receive them.
November 24, 2025 at 3:17 PM
lutzfernandez.bsky.social
Yes, many schools demand conformity and top-down policy-making helps ensure this.

It's not either/or. We should understood students as individuals as both patient and teacher.
November 24, 2025 at 3:17 PM
lutzfernandez.bsky.social
Unfortunately, it's because the agenda is to blame schools for a mental health crisis and the response to it. Oh yeah, and blame parents for overtreating their children in pursuit of academic success. Nice
“Overall, students see school as a place where they experience negative emotions,” explained Marc Brackett, a co-author of the report when it was released. The Children Who Don’t Fit In the face of an unyielding education system, more parents are discovering that their children simply don’t fit, a terrifying possibility when achievement in school can determine achievement in life. At that point, the best thing to do is to prove that your child has a mental disorder. With a doctor’s diagnosis, at least, adaptations are possible.
November 24, 2025 at 3:02 PM
lutzfernandez.bsky.social
Hard agree with most of this large chunk--why isn't this what the article is about, I plead.
“We’re not aligning the developmental needs of kids with the policies and practices that go on daily with schools,” said Denise Pope, senior lecturer at Stanford University and co-founder of Challenge Success, a nonprofit group that works with schools to improve student well-being. The pressure to learn more led to a restructuring of the school day itself. Before the 1980s, American children usually had recess breaks throughout the day. By 2016, only eight states required daily recess in elementary schools. And when researchers studied what had become of lunchtime, they learned that children often had just 20 minutes to not only eat but stop to use the bathroom after class, walk to the cafeteria and wait in line for food. Pope pointed to the bizarrely packed schedules for middle and high schoolers. “You’ve got seven different homework assignments that you’ve got to remember each night. Think of the cognitive load of a sixth-grade boy,” she said. “I challenge many adults to do this.” “We’re not aligning the developmental needs of kids with the policies and practices that go on daily with schools,” said Denise Pope, senior lecturer at Stanford University and co-founder of Challenge Success, a nonprofit group that works with schools to improve student well-being. The pressure to learn more led to a restructuring of the school day itself. Before the 1980s, American children usually had recess breaks throughout the day. By 2016, only eight states required daily recess in elementary schools. And when researchers studied what had become of lunchtime, they learned that children often had just 20 minutes to not only eat but stop to use the bathroom after class, walk to the cafeteria and wait in line for food. Pope pointed to the bizarrely packed schedules for middle and high schoolers. “You’ve got seven different homework assignments that you’ve got to remember each night. Think of the cognitive load of a sixth-grade boy,” she said. “I challenge many adults to do this.”
November 24, 2025 at 3:00 PM
lutzfernandez.bsky.social
Mostly yes here--except for the fact that Common Core was not focused on rote learning. Again, belongs in that other imagined article.
The demands on performance in higher grades trickled down into younger and younger ages. In 2009, the Obama administration offered greater funding to schools that adopted new national learning standards called the Common Core. These included an emphasis on reading by the end of kindergarten, even though many early childhood experts believe that not all children are developmentally ready to read at that age. With each new wave of reforms, the tenor of kindergarten changed. Rote lessons in math and reading crept into classrooms, even though experts say young children learn best through play. Researchers discovered that in the span of about a decade, kindergarten had suddenly become more like first grade. Preschool was not far behind, as even toddlers were expected to stay still for longer stretches of time to imbibe academic lessons. This again defied the consensus among early childhood experts. Children, parents and teachers struggle through this mismatch daily. In 2005, a study showed that preschoolers were frequently being expelled for misbehavior, and at rates more than three times that of school-age children.
November 24, 2025 at 2:57 PM
lutzfernandez.bsky.social
"Either way" when the way would seem to matter quite a bit. Last sentence belongs in a different article with the parts I cheered earlier. But that article would have to admit that the testing structure and culture of NCLB lives on.
The added metrics may well have compelled more children to receive the support they needed. Either way, educational policymaking yielded a change in diagnoses. In states that added new accountability standards, researchers found a clear rise in A.D.H.D. According to one analysis, the rate of A.D.H.D. diagnoses among children ages 8 to 13 in low-income homes went from 10 percent to 15 percent after the arrival of No Child Left Behind. The impact of the law on autism diagnoses has been less documented. But there is a great deal of overlap among these disorders. Anywhere from 30 to 80 percent of children diagnosed with autism also have A.D.H.D. Experts have also pointed out that the rise in autism has largely taken place on the more subtle end of the spectrum, where psychiatrists expanded the diagnosis. Students with this profile often need educators who can be eminently flexible in their approach, a tough task when an entire classroom has to focus on narrowly mastering certain testable skills.
November 24, 2025 at 2:52 PM
lutzfernandez.bsky.social
This insidious sentence suggests a conspiracy between school counselors, teachers, and administrators to boost test scores by getting kids diagnosed when they shouldn't have been.

It costs $$ to provide extra services. The only pressure I saw in 20+ years of teaching was to defer or deny.
Getting a child treated, potentially with medication, could help an entire classroom achieve higher scores, especially if the child’s behavior was disruptive to others.
November 24, 2025 at 2:49 PM
lutzfernandez.bsky.social
And now the leap back to over-diagnosing claims--w/o a meaningful, helpful discussion of how treating schools like businesses, teachers like floor supervisors, and students like little workers with narrow, specific "outcomes" to reach no mater what is contributing to the youth mental health crisis.
With school funding now on the line, there were unmistakable incentives for children to be diagnosed. Starting in the 1990s, students with autism or A.D.H.D. become newly eligible for added support in the classroom. Getting a child treated, potentially with medication, could help an entire classroom achieve higher scores, especially if the child’s behavior was disruptive to others. And in some parts of the country, children with disabilities were not counted toward a school’s overall marks, a carve-out that could boost scores.
November 24, 2025 at 2:41 PM
lutzfernandez.bsky.social
A chunk where I'm hard agreeing. Pols brought competition into the schools, decided they should compete with each other, and set teachers and students to the task of cutthroat competition.
During an era of global competition, the country’s leaders also began to see school as a potential venue for national glory, or shame. In 1983, a commission created by Ronald Reagan’s secretary of education, Terrel H. Bell, released a dire report on the state of American schools called “A Nation at Risk.” It warned that “if an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.” Over the next decade, Democratic and Republican governors such as Bill Clinton in Arkansas and Lamar Alexander in Tennessee began molding their states’ schools with new standards of testing and accountability. Schools were treated more like publicly traded companies, with test scores as proxies for profits. Before long, schools had public ratings, so ubiquitous they now appear on real estate listings. The pressure kept rising. By 2001, 30 states had laws that imposed a system of punishments and rewards for schools based on their test scores. The next year, President George W. Bush’s signature education reform law, No Child Left Behind, made the effort national.
November 24, 2025 at 2:33 PM
lutzfernandez.bsky.social
Then we shift to a para on history. Here's a historian:
School was not always so central to American childhood. In 1950, less than half of all children attended kindergarten. Only about 50 percent graduated from high school, and without much professional penalty. A person spent fewer years of their life in school, and fewer hours in the day furiously trying to learn. However bored a child might become sitting behind a desk, freedom awaited after the final bell rang, with hours after school to play without the direction of adults.
November 24, 2025 at 2:30 PM
lutzfernandez.bsky.social
The source of the thesis, it appears:
“What’s happening is, instead of saying, ‘We need to fix the schools,’ the message is, ‘We need to fix the kids,’” said Peter Gray, a research professor at Boston College and the author of “Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life.” “The track has become narrower and narrower, so a greater range of people don’t fit that track anymore,” he said. “And the result is, we want to call it a disorder.”
November 24, 2025 at 2:28 PM
lutzfernandez.bsky.social
WHAT

Beyond both-sidesing, now we're pretending that much of the legacy of NCLB and RTTT does not live on. The last part is the thesis, which is v confusing at this point.
This era of policymaking has largely ebbed, with disappointing results. Math and reading levels are at their lowest in decades. The rules put in place by both political parties were well-meaning, but in trying to make more children successful, they also circumscribed more tightly who could be served by school at all.
November 24, 2025 at 2:23 PM
lutzfernandez.bsky.social
Yes, please, absolutely.
The experience of school has changed rapidly in recent generations. Starting in the 1980s, a metrics-obsessed regime took over American education and profoundly altered the expectations placed on children, up and down the class ladder. In fact, it has altered the experience of childhood itself.
November 24, 2025 at 2:23 PM