It’s that time of year when the days get shorter. The air turns crisp. The shadows stretch longer. And school starts.

It’s also that time when yet another pompous business CEO or ed-tech executive with zero classroom experience trots out a puerile essay declaring what’s wrong with education and how to fix it. Their miracle cure? Some shiny, overpriced gadget or a market-driven ideology dressed up as innovation. School boards and college administrators eat it up—not because it actually improves learning—but because it promises to cut costs by swapping out teachers for tech.

Let’s be clear: American education has real problems. On PISA tests, the U.S. lags behind other advanced nations. (PISA—the Programme for International Student Assessment—is the triennial global exam run by the OECD that measures 15-year-olds in reading, math, and science.) At home, racial disparities across and within districts are massive. Funding gaps create gross inequities in opportunity and outcomes. At the college level, quality varies wildly while costs spiral out of reach for working- and middle-class families. The elite schools? They price themselves like gated communities while clinging to legacy admissions that lock in privilege and perpetuate class stratification.

But here’s the kicker—we’re not listening to the people who actually know what’s going on. Teachers. Professors. The ones in the trenches.

I’ve been teaching for more than forty years. I know what lands in my classroom, and I see firsthand what’s missing. I won’t pretend to have the silver bullet for fixing K-12, but I can tell you that at the college level we’re drowning in goal displacement. Buzzwords like “high-impact” and “experiential learning” get tossed around to mask structural problems. And higher ed isn’t innocent here—it has learned to mimic corporate boardrooms. We sprinkle our strategic plans and mission statements with the same hollow jargon you’d hear at a business retreat: synergy, think outside the box, low-hanging fruit, being proactive, game changer, shift the paradigm. These phrases don’t solve anything. They dress up mediocrity in a glossy suit and distract from the hard, unglamorous work of actually teaching and mentoring students.

Meanwhile, the voices dominating the debate aren’t educators—they’re business executives and ed-tech salespeople peddling miracle cures. Every fall, my inbox fills with vendor emails promising that their platform or gadget will “transform learning.” My LinkedIn feed is littered with ads and think-pieces from self-anointed experts—business leaders who wouldn’t last five minutes in a classroom—proclaiming that their product is the future of education. And the slogans they peddle? They sound like late-night infomercials for the desperate. “Learn Smart, Learn Fast.” “Education Elevated.” “Tech Up Your Learning Experience.” “Innovate Learning, Empower Minds.” “Connect, Create, Educate.” “The Future of Learning is Now.” These aren’t solutions. They’re bright shiny objects meant to dazzle administrators into signing contracts.

Let’s be honest—it’s snake oil. The modern-day Elmer Gantrys of education reform. They push vouchers as a universal cure, even though research shows no consistent evidence that school choice outperforms public education. They sell ed-tech as the savior of teaching, though study after study shows technology alone doesn’t improve learning—and in many cases (cell phones in the classroom) it flat-out distracts and hurts test scores.

What ties all these so-called reforms together is their not-so-hidden agenda: automating education to cut labor costs. Replace teachers with apps. Replace professors with MOOCs. Replace physical schools with online platforms. To administrators under constant budget pressure, it looks tempting. Short-term savings. Efficiency. But in the long run? It guts education.

AI is the next frontier of this scam. Yes, it can be a useful tool, but let’s not kid ourselves. It’s being marketed as the new engine of mass-produced education, the digital equivalent of Henry Ford’s assembly line. At the college level, pair AI with MOOCs and you’ve got a model that can churn out degree-shaped products at scale—cheap, impersonal, and stripped of what makes education transformative. At the K-12 level, AI threatens to replace teachers altogether, turning classrooms into automated learning factories.

For administrators staring down budget deficits, this shift seems logical. But for students? For teachers? For learning itself? It’s a disaster. Education is not, and never will be, about gadgets or buzzwords. It’s about human relationships, critical thinking, mentorship, and the messy, unpredictable process of learning. You can’t automate that. And you sure as hell can’t buy it from the latest ed-tech vendor making the rounds on LinkedIn.

So, as the days grow shorter and the school year begins, let’s tune out the noise from CEOs and ed-tech hucksters. Let’s put the microphone back in the hands of the people who actually know education—teachers and professors. Because the future of learning won’t be saved by snake oil or shiny gadgets. It will be saved by those who live it every single day.

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