PISSING INTO THE DIGITAL WIND
WHY PUBLIC EDUCATION NEEDS A PUBLIC OPTION FOR AI
How the Same Gang That Gave You Common Core Is Now Selling You a Chatbot and Calling It a Classroom
The Wind Is Blowing Again (And You Know What That Means)
There's an old Oklahoma expression — one that doesn't require a glossary for anyone who grew up where the wind comes sweeping down the plain — that perfectly describes what public education advocates are doing right now about Artificial Intelligence in schools. They're pissing in the wind. And friends, urine stains.
We've been here before. Cast your memory back to the glorious era of Common Core State Standards — that shining gift from the billionaire class, wrapped in the language of "rigor" and "international competitiveness" and delivered with all the democratic consent of a tollbooth on a road you had no choice but to drive. Bill Gates and his philanthropic cavalry rode in, checkbook blazing, distributing over $200 million to think tanks, state departments of education, teachers' unions, and anyone else willing to nod enthusiastically. The National Governors Association got a check. The Council of Chief State School Officers got a check. Even the AFT and NEA — the unions, people — got checks. It was less a grassroots movement and more a very well-watered Astroturf installation.
And what did the public education community do? We bitched. We complained. We wrote blog posts. We held rallies. We opted out of tests. We formed coalitions. We were magnificent in our outrage.
And we got Common Core anyway. Plus more testing. Plus more charter schools. Plus vouchers. The standards got rebranded in states where the politics got too hot — Florida called theirs B.E.S.T., Arizona called theirs "College and Career Ready" — but strip away the new paint job and the studs in the wall are the same 2010 lumber. The oligarchy didn't lose. They won, changed their shirt, and asked if you wanted fries with that.
So here we are in 2026, and the windmill has a new name. It's called AI.
Meet the New Boss (Suspiciously Similar to the Old Boss)
The same constellation of billionaire techbro overlords who blessed us with Common Core have now discovered something even more scalable, even more profitable, and even more resistant to democratic accountability than a set of national curriculum standards. They've discovered that you don't need to influence education. You can just replace it.
The vision — and they're not exactly hiding it — is elegant in its ruthlessness: education as a subscription-based app. Every child. Every classroom. Every country. One platform. One interface. One monthly fee.
Oh, but don't worry — there will be two versions.
Version One: A chatbot, a proctor, a desk, a screen, and a WiFi connection. This is the public school model. Your kid sits in what used to be called a classroom, now more accurately described as a supervised device-charging station, and learns from an AI that has been optimized for engagement metrics and data harvesting. The teacher's job, in this vision, is essentially to make sure nobody sets anything on fire.
Version Two: Human teachers. Actual humans, with degrees and experience and the ability to notice when a child is struggling emotionally. This version lives in the private schools — the voucher schools, the ones that can quietly "counsel out" students who are poor, disabled, or otherwise inconvenient to their performance metrics. The ones your tax dollars are increasingly funding while your neighborhood public school gets a Chromebook cart and a prayer.
This is not a conspiracy theory. This is a business plan. And it's being executed with the same playbook that gave us Common Core: philanthropic money, federal incentives, friendly media coverage, and a chorus of politicians on both sides of the aisle who've been generously reminded of the importance of "innovation."
A Brief History of Getting Rolled (For Those Who Forgot)
Let's do a quick refresher on how this works, because the pattern is instructive.
Step 1 — Frame it as a crisis. American students are falling behind! The Chinese are out-educating us! Our standards are "uneven!" (Translation: some states have standards we can't monetize yet.)
Step 2 — Provide the solution. Conveniently, a small group of very wealthy people have already developed the answer. It just needs to be adopted. Nationally. Quickly. Before anyone asks too many questions.
Step 3 — Buy the consensus. Distribute grants to the organizations that would normally push back. When the teachers' unions take the money, you can say the teachers support it. When the governors sign on because federal dollars are dangled like a piñata, you can say it's state-led. Call it "grassroots." Say it with a straight face.
Step 4 — Use the federal lever. Arne Duncan's Race to the Top program was a masterclass in this. $4.35 billion in grants, with Common Core adoption as the price of admission. It wasn't a mandate — technically. It was just a very strong suggestion backed by several billion dollars. The distinction matters legally. It doesn't matter practically.
Step 5 — Ride out the backlash. Let the parents scream. Let the Tea Party call it "Obamacore." Let the progressive opt-out movement fill auditoriums. Change the name in a few states. Wait. The money has already been spent. The infrastructure is already built. The textbooks are already printed. You've won.
Now run the same play. But this time, instead of standards, it's algorithms. Instead of testing companies, it's AI vendors. And instead of Race to the Top, it's the quiet, relentless integration of AI tools into every federally-funded classroom in America before anyone has agreed on what the rules should be.
The oligarchy doesn't need your permission. It needs your inaction. And historically, we have been very generous with our inaction.
So What Do We Do? (Here's Where It Gets Interesting)
Now, here's the part where this old Education Ape is going to say something that might surprise you. I'm not here to just catalog the disaster. I've been posting links and writing about billionaire oligarchy and the privatization of public education for over 20 years. I know what pure complaint looks like. I've done pure complaint. Pure complaint, as previously established, produces urine stains and not much else.
So instead of asking what are we against, let's ask what are we for?
Here's a thought — and I'll admit upfront this is spitballing from an Education Ape, not a policy blueprint from a think tank — but bear with me:
A Public Option for AI.
What if, instead of surrendering the entire field of artificial intelligence to the same Silicon Valley boardrooms that brought you the subscription-economy vision of public education, we built something that belongs to everyone?
Think about it this way. We already have the model. It's called a Public Library. The government funds it. Independent professionals run it. It serves everyone — rich, poor, old, young, employed, retired, housed, unhoused. Nobody asks for your credit card at the door of the Sacramento Public Library. Nobody sells your reading history to a data broker. The mission is not engagement metrics. The mission is an informed citizenry.
Now apply that model to AI.
What would a Public Option AI look like?
Public Compute: Government-funded server infrastructure — think of it as the interstate highway system, but for artificial intelligence — that schools, researchers, non-profits, and individual citizens can access without paying a Silicon Valley toll.
Public Models: AI systems trained on public interest data — the Library of Congress, the National Archives, peer-reviewed scientific research, public school curriculum — rather than whatever got scraped off the internet to make a chatbot that confidently hallucinates court cases.
Transparent Governance: The rules, the values, the guardrails of the AI are debated in public hearings, not decided in a boardroom by people whose primary accountability is to their shareholders.
Educational Mandate: A public AI for schools would have a "Check Sources" button, not a "Buy Now" button. It would be designed to foster critical thinking, not to maximize time-on-platform.
The closest thing we currently have to this in the United States is the National AI Research Resource (NAIRR) — a pilot program through the National Science Foundation designed to give researchers and educators access to the kind of high-end computing power that currently only big tech companies can afford. It's a start. It's a small start. But it's proof that the concept is not crazy.
The Department of Public Intelligence
Here's the satirical part — except it's not entirely satirical.
Imagine a Department of Public Intelligence. Federal. State. Local. A three-tiered public infrastructure for AI that mirrors the structure of public education itself.
Mission Statement: "Ensuring that the ability to think, learn, and access accurate information is not a luxury good."
Motto: "Because thinking shouldn't require a monthly subscription."
Key Feature: Unlike its corporate competitors, the Public Option AI does not have a "Premium Tier." It does not have a "Basic Plan" that throttles your access to accurate information after 10 queries. It does not sell your child's learning data to a marketing firm. It does not have a Terms of Service that requires a law degree to understand.
Warning Label: "This AI may cause accidental critical thinking, an inconvenient desire to verify sources, and a sudden urge to fund public parks."
And here's the practical kicker that the Education Ape in me finds genuinely delicious: at the rate that tech companies are building out data centers, there is going to be significant excess capacity in the not-too-distant future. Data centers are being built at a pace that outstrips current demand. Some of that infrastructure could be acquired — for a song, relatively speaking — and repurposed for public use. The hardware exists. The question is whether the political will exists to treat it as a public good rather than a private profit center.
The Honest Reckoning
Now, the skeptic in the room — and there should always be a skeptic in the room — will raise the obvious objection: if the government controls the AI, doesn't it become a propaganda machine for whoever is currently in power?
It's a fair point. It's actually the most important point. And the answer is that the Public Option model only works if it's insulated from direct political control — managed by independent bodies with professional mandates, the way the Smithsonian Institution or the Library of Congress operates. Funded by the public. Accountable to the public. But not run by whatever administration happens to be in office.
The Public Library model has held up reasonably well for over a century, despite many attempts to politicize it. The Public Broadcasting model — NPR, PBS — has its critics on both sides, which is arguably evidence that it's doing something right. These aren't perfect institutions. But they are ours. They belong to the public square in a way that Google's search algorithm emphatically does not.
The Bottom Line (From the Ape)
Here's what 20+ years of watching the billionaire oligarchy work the levers of public education policy has taught this particular primate:
They win when we only play defense. Every time we've organized around stopping something — stopping Common Core, stopping high-stakes testing, stopping vouchers — we've ended up with a modified version of the thing we were trying to stop, wearing a different name tag at the party.
They lose when we build something they can't buy. The Public Library was not defeated by the private book industry. Public Broadcasting was not eliminated by commercial television. Public schools, for all their struggles, still educate the overwhelming majority of American children — not because the oligarchy didn't try to replace them, but because the public built something worth defending.
AI is not going away. It is in your schools right now. The same people who gave you Common Core are already deciding what it looks like, who profits from it, and whose children get the human teacher and whose children get the chatbot.
The question is not whether AI will transform public education. That ship has sailed, and it was built in a data center in Northern Virginia.
The question is whether we the people will have any say in what it becomes — or whether we'll spend the next decade writing very passionate blog posts about it while the subscription model quietly becomes the only model.
A Public Option for AI is not a crazy idea. It is, in fact, the same idea that built every great public institution this country has ever produced: that some things are too important to be left entirely to the market, and that an informed citizenry is one of them.
So yes. This is spitballing. This will require smarter people than an Education Ape to actually build. It will require political will that is currently in short supply. It will require the kind of coalition — educators, unions, parents, civil society, the people who still believe in the public square — that hasn't fully assembled yet.
But the alternative is to keep tilting at windmills while the wind is at someone else's back.
And as any Okie will tell you: urine stains.
The Big Education Ape has been documenting the billionaire oligarchy's long game on public education for 20+ years. He is not a policy expert, a technologist, or a particularly graceful primate. He is, however, paying attention — and he suggests you do the same.
"Department of Public Intelligence: Federal. State. Local. Because the public square doesn't have a paywall."