Links and Commentary 11/7/25

The new federal tax credit scholarship program, passed as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, allows taxpayers to claim a dollar-for-dollar federal tax credit for donations to scholarship-granting organizations, or SGOs. These SGOs can fund a range of services already embraced by blue-state leaders, such as tutoring, transportation, special-education services and learning technology. For both current and incoming governors, it’s a chance to show voters that they’re willing to do what it takes to deliver for students and families, no matter where the ideas originate.

Schooling of course is for many, many things, but here I want to focus on just two: education and socialization. Plainly, one fundamental purpose of school is to educate. Teachers present information to students with the intention of having them learn it. We hope that what teachers teach is what we generally consider “true,” and prepares our students to navigate their lives with the knowledge they need to make sense of the world. Loosely speaking, this goal of schooling aligns with our aim of cultivating a future citizenry that is relatively inoculated against disinformation and propaganda. “Knowledge is power” has become a cliché, but there’s real force to the general idea it represents. You’ll also note that this aligns to the first prong of our discussion of Farrell’s thesis above.

But another, equally important goal of schooling is socialization. I’ve said before and will say again: It is no coincidence that over the past several centuries, democracy and public education arose globally in tandem.² Our public schools exist not only to transmit the knowledge that we hope students learn, but also to reflect our collective beliefs about how they should learn, and with whom. Public education is premised on the belief that students are best educated to be democratic citizens through dialogue and interactions with their teachers and their fellow students who (roughly) reflect the diversity they will encounter throughout their lives. We learn what it means to be part of a broader community, and what it means to be an American (or whatever the relevant body politic may be), through the little social microcosms of democracy that we call public schools.

The seeds of collective human intelligence take root in the classroom.

Now let’s bring generative AI back into the picture and ask, what role is this technology playing in shaping how students perceive what sort of interactions and dialogues should comprise their education? Forget for the moment the danger of cognitive automation and offloading. Please ponder instead the distress that so many adults felt when ChatGPT5 was released and these users discovered it was less sycophantic than prior models—and how quickly OpenAI backtracked to ensure users could still get the fawning version they’d previously had access to. Please think about students using chatbots to “augment” their learning and thereby becoming conditioned to expect that their interactions with their educators, whether human or digital, should start from a foundation of obsequiousness. And please consider that even if such students are a minority of generative AI users, they may nonetheless shape the ways in which these tools are developed and marketed, in the same way that people with taboo sexual interests shape the ways in which pornography is developed and marketed.

This is why, even if we could completely solve the problem of AI hallucinations (which I doubt), and even if we could ensure AI models serving as “tutors” could properly develop a theory of mind as to what’s happening with their students when they misunderstand something (which I doubt even more), I would still maintain that we must resist the intrusion of AI into the process of educating of our children. Just look around, democracy is teetering—how could we possibly want to amplify the influence of technology in society by pushing AI into the formative experience of schooling? The algorithms that Big Tech employs to fuel AI and social media are grotesquely warping the very ways in which understand ourselves. This is by design.

According to The New York Times, which first reported on the school’s existence, it was called “Bicken Ben School” and shared a name with one of the Zuckerbergs’ chickens. The listing for Bicken Ben School, or BBS for short, in a California Department of Education directory claims the school opened on October 5, 2022. This, however, is the year after neighbors claim to have first seen it operating. It’s also two and a half years after Sara Berge—the school’s point of contact, per documents WIRED obtained from the state via public record request—claims to have started her role as “head of school” for a “Montessori pod” at a “private family office” according to her LinkedIn profile, which WIRED viewed in September and October. Berge did not respond to a request to comment.

The documents reveal that the school may have been operating as early as 2021 without a permit to operate in the city of Palo Alto. As many as 30 students might have enrolled, according to observations from neighbors. These documents also reveal a wider problem: For almost a decade, the Zuckerbergs’ neighbors have been complaining to the city about noisy construction work, the intrusive presence of private security, and the hordes of staffers and business associates causing traffic and taking up street parking.

Over time, neighbors became fed up with what they argued was the city’s lack of action, particularly with respect to the school. Some believed that the delay was because of preferential treatment to the Zuckerbergs. “We find it quite remarkable that you are working so hard to meet the needs of a single billionaire family while keeping the rest of the neighborhood in the dark,” reads one email sent to the city’s Planning and Development Services Department in February. “Just as you have not earned our trust, this property owner has broken many promises over the years, and any solution which depends on good faith behavioral changes from them is a failure from the beginning.”