What Became of the Stones

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A preserved section of the camp road at Majdanek

The Germans needed four kilometers of road at Majdanek, so they sent Jewish prisoners into the Jewish cemeteries of Lublin to break up the gravestones.

A piece of that road is still there. It sits a few steps off the main path through the concentration camp beneath a protective glass covering, and it is easy to miss. Mixed in among ordinary rocks you can see chunks of headstones, some of them with Hebrew writing, some with images such as candlesticks.

I went on the North Carolina Teachers Holocaust Trip to Poland with about forty other teachers. I knew some things about what had happened, but I went because I wanted to understand how. We spent a lot of that week in Jewish cemeteries, learning how Jews bury and remember their dead and how thoroughly those customs were destroyed.

The Jewish cemetery on Okopowa Street, Warsaw. Photo by Amy Thompson.

The Jewish cemetery on Okopowa Street in Warsaw holds more than two hundred thousand graves. We followed Rabbi Guttman up a path into the oldest section, past trees that have grown up between the stones. That part of the cemetery looked ancient, moss over everything and stones leaning in every direction, some of them half sunk into the ground. He stopped us there and taught us how to read the carvings at the top of the stones. For example, a book means the person was a scholar, candlesticks usually mean a woman, and a crown means someone respected for their good character. Even without the Hebrew, the images told me something about who these people had been. We split into small groups to do grave rubbings, and I chose a stone with a hand dropping a coin into a box, a symbol for someone who gave to people in need.

Making a rubbing at Okopowa. Photo by Selena Nederhoff.

When we finished we kept walking, deeper into the cemetery. You can see the boulders from a long way off. It is an enormous field of them, pale gray, and I couldn’t understand what they were doing in the middle of a crowded cemetery.

We walked over and stood next to them and the rabbi told us it was a mass grave.

Tens of thousands of people who died in the Warsaw ghetto are buried under those boulders. For decades after the war the mass grave was unmarked. The monument that stands there now was finished in 2022, two fields of broken stone laid over the exact footprint of the burial pits, whose boundaries had only been determined the year before.

Broken stone laid over the burial pits at the Okopowa Street Jewish Cemetery, Warsaw.

Rabbi Guttman told us how Jewish traditions govern burials and how few of those ceremonies were possible in the ghetto, where people were dying faster than the living could bury them. Chaim Kaplan, a Hebrew school principal who kept a diary through the occupation, noted in October 1941 that the building where bodies were washed held more dead than it could take. Cloth shrouds had given way to paper ones because cloth cost too much, and even the paper had run short.

As we stood by the mass grave monument it started to rain. Rabbi Guttman and Cantor Clissold said Kaddish, the prayer Jews say for the dead.

Łopuchowo Forest. Three mass graves are here.

There is a beautiful forest outside a town called Tykocin. Tall pines, soft ground that swallows your footsteps. You’d never know what happened there.

In August of 1941 the Germans called the Jews of Tykocin to the market square and told them they were being resettled. Over the next two days about two thousand people were brought to Łopuchowo Forest, to three pits that local boys had been forced to dig. All of them were shot.

The three graves are marked with green metal railings. Bolted along them are boxes of memorial candles with Hebrew lettering, and people have left small white stones on the top rail. Inside the enclosures the ground is rough and overgrown, with weeds and wildflowers waist-high. Rabbi Guttman spoke briefly and we had time to reflect alone in the forest.

When we walked back out to the road there were hard boiled eggs waiting at the bus. The rabbi explained that eggs are what Jews eat after a burial. An egg is a circle with no beginning and no end, the way life keeps going even after someone has died. We paired up and tore them in half with our fingers and stood there in the forest eating them.

Rollers used to level the camp roads at Majdanek.

As you walk through the sprawling concentration camp at Majdanek you come upon two concrete cylinders. The rollers are enormous, so big it’s hard to believe a person could move one. But prisoners pulled them to level the roads in the camp, among the most exhausting work there was.

The Germans built more than four kilometers of road through Majdanek using gravestones from the Jewish cemeteries of nearby Lublin, where over fifty thousand people were buried. The historian Krzysztof Bielawski writes that the breaking of headstones was done by Jewish prisoners of war. Brick and rubble from demolished houses in the Lublin ghetto went into the roads too.

I stood a while at the glass, looking at the remnants of lives still visible on those chunks of gravestones. I wondered whether a prisoner who was building that road ever looked down at a fragment and saw a name he knew.

What is left of the Jewish cemetery in Gniewoszów.

Gniewoszów is a rural village of about seven hundred people and the subject of Among Neighbors, a 2024 documentary about its Jewish past. Our bus parked in the central square, and we walked a quarter mile or so, winding between fenced homes and then past a barn housing tractors and hay. A few people watched us from their yards, but nobody spoke to us. We came out on a wide grassy field with nothing in it that looks like a cemetery. That’s the Jewish cemetery.

The gate and wall at the Gniewoszów Jewish cemetery. Photo by Kim Jones.

Most of the people in Gniewoszów used to be Jewish. Almost all of them were deported to Treblinka in the fall of 1942 and killed in the gas chambers. Once they were gone, the townspeople broke up the cemetery’s gravestones and put them to use. Building with them. Grinding grain on them. Sharpening tools against them. Portions of gravestones are mortared into a low wall along one edge of the field. I found a broken chunk of one lying on the ground next to a pile of cow manure.

7 Planty Street, Kielce. Photo by Shanedra Nowell.

The building at 7 Planty Street in Kielce is where it happened. In the summer of 1946 it was home to about a hundred and fifty Jews who had nowhere else to go.

A boy went missing for two days and came home claiming Jews had held him captive. He had made the whole thing up. The police went to the building anyway to look for the kidnappers, and a crowd gathered outside while they searched. When soldiers and more police arrived they went in and opened fire on the people inside. Some were thrown off the balcony and killed by the crowd underneath. That day 42 people died, more than a year after the war ended. Every one of them had survived the Holocaust.

We sat in a room in that building with a man named Bogdan Białek, a Catholic Pole who moved to Kielce in 1970 and found that nobody would talk about any of it. He has spent more than thirty years pushing the city to acknowledge what local people had done to their Jewish neighbors, organizing annual events to remember the victims and working to ensure their names are known.

The monument Białek’s organization erected in 2010. All 42 names are engraved in the concrete beside it.

The 42 pogrom victims were buried in the Jewish cemetery on the edge of the city, initially with a small plain monument that did not name any of them. In 2010 Białek’s organization succeeded in erecting a second monument just past it, designed by Marek Cecuła, an artist born in Kielce. The new monument is a long slab of polished black granite, split in two, with a broken Star of David in the gap. For the first time, all 42 names appear at the grave, engraved in the concrete next to the slab.

Farther into the same cemetery is another grave. On May 23, 1943, German police brought 45 Jewish children into this cemetery and shot them. Aged fifteen months to fifteen years, they were the children left behind when the adults were sent to labor camps.

The children’s mass grave is covered in toys, many of them ceramic: blocks, a ladybug, a scooter, a teddy bear. Every year since 2009, Cecuła has worked with a group of local children to make the objects in his studio. When they are fired and glazed, the kids carry them to the cemetery and fix them permanently to the grave.

We stood around the grave and Cantor Clissold sang Oyfn Pripetshik, a Yiddish song about a teacher teaching small children their letters.

Cantor Clissold sings at the children’s grave in Kielce. Photo by Nicole Ellison.

There are more toys on that grave than there were children. People have left hundreds of white stones too, to remember them. Almost every one has something written on it by hand.

I just returned from an intensive week in Poland traveling alongside a group of North Carolina educators to study Holocaust history firsthand, made possible through the generous sponsorship of the North Carolina Center for the Advancement of Teaching (NCCAT). I am deeply grateful to NCCAT for their support.

This post is part of an ongoing series exploring what we witnessed on the ground, paired with further independent research, as we carry these hard truths back to our classrooms and communities.

Justin Parmenter
Charlotte, NC

This is part of an ongoing series. See more at Holocaust Education: Reflections from Poland.

The Treasure in the Milk Can

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At the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw there is a narrow passage lined in broken stone, floor, walls, and ceiling. It reminds me of the memorial stones at Treblinka, the nearby death camp. [Read about that visit here.]

At the end of the corridor, light shining on it in a glass case, is a milk can.

The corridor at the Jewish Historical Institute, leading to the milk can. Photo by Jessica Brooks.

The metal is pitted and rough with rust. It’s an ordinary can, one of many that were used to carry milk before the war. Only this one is lit the way you would light a treasure.

In February 1943, a teacher named Israel Lichtensztajn buried the can in the basement of a school at 68 Nowolipki, inside the Warsaw Ghetto. It held a portion of an archive that had been divided into three batches. He and two of his students had already hidden the first part in that same basement six months earlier, in ten metal boxes.

The building that now holds the milk can was built in 1936 as the Main Judaic Library, next to the Great Synagogue, then the largest Jewish house of worship in the world. The archivists worked out of the same library. They ran a Jewish charity that operated openly under German rule, so their real work drew no suspicion.

In April 1943, Jews still trapped in the ghetto rose up in armed resistance, the first uprising against the Germans in any occupied city. Four days into the fighting, with his troops taking losses he hadn’t expected, the German commander Jürgen Stroop made a decision. He would destroy the entire quarter, “setting every block on fire”. He wrote those words in his own report to his superiors.

German forces spent weeks crushing the uprising, marching residents out of burning buildings toward the Umschlagplatz, the collection point where they were loaded onto trains bound for Treblinka.

Jews being marched to the Umschlagplatz during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, May 1943. The original German caption reads “To the Umschlagplatz.” Photo from US Holocaust Memorial Museum.

On the evening of May 16, Stroop declared the uprising over by personally blowing up the Great Synagogue, shouting “Heil Hitler” as he pressed the detonator. The explosion set the library next door on fire.

The synagogue is gone, but the library survived. Its floor still carries the burn marks, and we walked across them and climbed the stairs to the archive.

Burn marks still visible on the floor of the Jewish Historical Institute, from the destruction of the Great Synagogue, May 1943.

A Secret Group

The archivists called their group Oneg Shabbat, Hebrew for “the joy of the Sabbath,” because they met in secret on Saturdays, when such gatherings could pass as religious observance.

A historian named Emanuel Ringelblum started the group in 1940. That November, German authorities forced every Jew in Warsaw—about 400,000 people—into a walled district, confining them to a tiny section of the city. Ringelblum had already spent a year writing down what he saw, and once the ghetto was sealed he began recruiting others to help him. He told them to collect as much as possible and that historians could sort it out after the war. The group grew to several dozen people: teachers, writers, rabbis, students.

Behind the relief work, Oneg Shabbat was assembling an archive. They collected ration cards, tram tickets, theater posters, deportation notices, even candy wrappers. Nothing was too small. Ringelblum was a historian, and he understood that if the Jews of Warsaw did not write down what was happening to them, the only surviving account of the ghetto would be the one written by the Germans. What they compiled instead is the largest account of the Holocaust written by the people it was happening to, while it was happening.

In January 1942, a man escaped from a place called Chełmno and made it to Warsaw. His name was Szlama Ber Winer, and what he’d escaped was a death camp, one of the first the Germans built. He told Oneg Shabbat everything he’d seen. They wrote it down and gave it a false name to protect him, in case it fell into the wrong hands: the Grojanowski Report.

The report went out of the ghetto through the Polish underground. By June it had reached London. On June 26, 1942, the BBC broadcast what it said, and used Oneg Shabbat’s own number, saying 700,000 Polish Jews had already been murdered.

A month later, the mass deportations to Treblinka began.

The Teacher Who Buried It

Lichtensztajn ran that school before the war, and he kept teaching there in secret after the Germans banned Jewish schools. When the deportations began, Oneg Shabbat told him to bury the archive. “It was I who hid the materials,” he wrote. “No one else knows the exact spot.”

Three days before the first batch went into the ground, Lichtensztajn wrote his testament and put it in with the boxes. He asked that his wife Gela be remembered, a painter who never got to show her work. He asked the same for his daughter Margalit, not yet two years old. He wrote that he wanted no gratitude, no monument, no praise: “I want only a remembrance.”

A page from Israel Lichtensztajn’s notes, part of the Ringelblum Archive, on display at the Jewish Historical Institute.

Students Who Hid the Archive

Dawid Graber and Nachum Grzywacz were teenaged students who worked in the school’s kitchen when Lichtensztajn recruited them. On August 3, 1942, they helped him bury the first cache, and each wrote his own testament to put in with it. Graber called the archive a treasure, and said he was proud to be the one saving it. Grzywacz wrote that police had sealed off the street where his parents lived, and that he didn’t know if they were safe. He never found out. He left his final wish: “Remember, my name is Nachum Grzywacz.”

A third cache went into the ground that April, days before the uprising began. Lichtensztajn, Gela, and Margalit did not survive what came after. Neither did Graber or Grzywacz. Of the several dozen people in Oneg Shabbat, only three lived to see the war end.

Hersz Wasser was one of those three survivors, and he also happened to be the only person alive who remembered exactly where to dig. In September 1946, he led a crew to the ten metal boxes, still under the rubble of the school. Four years later, construction workers building new housing in the area struck two milk cans while digging. Thirty-five thousand pages came out of the ground—a detailed record of a community that no longer existed.

The third cache is still down there, and is believed to be under what is now the grounds of the Chinese embassy.

On our last day, we stood where Jews were marched onto trains for Treblinka. A wall nearby carries hundreds of just first names, common ones, because there wasn’t space to carve the full names of all the people who were driven from the Warsaw Ghetto to death camps. Nachum is one of them.

Our teacher Avi Ben-Hur reading at the Umschlagplatz memorial in Warsaw.

The wall can’t tell you which Nachum. But the archive can. It has his own words, his own name, the fear he felt for his parents. And because of the work he did, it holds the same for thousands of other people too.

I just returned from an intensive week in Poland traveling alongside a group of North Carolina educators to study Holocaust history firsthand, made possible through the generous sponsorship of the North Carolina Center for the Advancement of Teaching (NCCAT). I am deeply grateful to NCCAT for their support.

This post is part of an ongoing series exploring what we witnessed on the ground, paired with further independent research, as we carry these hard truths back to our classrooms and communities.

Justin Parmenter
Charlotte, NC

This is part of an ongoing series. See more at Holocaust Education: Reflections from Poland.

Nothing to See at Treblinka

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I expected Treblinka to be an empty grassy field. That’s its reputation, nothing to see there the way there is at Auschwitz or Majdanek.

It was raining when we pulled up, so we stayed on the bus and listened to Rabbi Guttman tell us about Treblinka while we ate lunch. By the time we were done eating the rain had stopped, and we had some time alone to walk the grounds and reflect.

The site is a huge open space, and I headed for the back right corner because I wanted to be by myself. From a distance it looked like there was nothing there, but as I got closer I saw a pink granite stone sitting in the grass. Then I noticed others like it, weathered the same way and set in a rough rectangle. Someone had placed them there deliberately years ago, and I wondered why. I looked at a map of the site and realized I was standing at the original gas chamber. The Nazis had gone to a great deal of trouble to make sure nobody would ever know it was there.

One of the stones marking the corners of the original gas chamber, placed after the 2010 survey.

They tore this camp down so there would be nothing left to see. Three months after prisoners staged an uprising in August 1943, the Germans dismantled every building, plowed the ground, and planted it over with lupine, a purple wildflower. They built a farmhouse on the site using bricks salvaged from the demolished gas chambers and put a Ukrainian guard family there to pretend it was just an ordinary farm.

About 900,000 people were murdered here, nearly all of them Polish Jews, over the course of a year and a half. That makes it the second deadliest site of the Holocaust after Auschwitz.

Most people haven’t heard of Treblinka the way they’ve heard of Auschwitz. Auschwitz operated for years as a hybrid complex holding enormous numbers of forced laborers, many of whom lived to tell their stories. But Treblinka was built strictly as a death camp, and most people who got off the train there were dead within two hours. The few people known to have survived it were nearly all escapees from the 1943 uprising. There was almost no one left to tell anyone what had happened there.

For nearly seventy years the cover-up held. Early postwar visitors found only an empty, quiet field with no visible ruins left behind, and Holocaust deniers used that emptiness to argue that nothing had ever happened there.

The breakthrough came around 2010, when a British archaeologist named Caroline Sturdy Colls became the first person granted permission to survey the site. Jewish law forbids disturbing graves, so she worked with ground-penetrating radar instead of shovels. The scans found buried brick foundations right where survivors had said the gas chambers were. A later dig turned up floor tiles from a factory in Opoczno, stamped with the maker’s star. The team placed that pink granite stone to mark the corner where the gas chamber once stood.

I mentioned the uprising already, in passing. Here’s what happened.

In the spring of 1943, a secret prisoner-led resistance network began planning the revolt. When a lock on the German armory broke, a Jewish locksmith named Eugeniusz Turowski was sent to fix it, and he made a wax impression and cut a copy of the key. On the afternoon of the revolt, two crates of grenades were smuggled out of the warehouse in the waste cart of an eleven-year-old boy. Thirty-seven rifles went out with the prisoner who hauled clay. There were not enough weapons to go around.

The uprising broke out on August 2, 1943. There were about 840 prisoners in the camp that day, and hundreds joined the fight, storming the arsenal and setting fire to the buildings. A Polish railway worker named Franciszek Ząbecki photographed the thick smoke rising from a distance.

Treblinka burning during the uprising, August 2, 1943. Photo by Franciszek Ząbecki. Collection of the Jewish Historical Institute.

It was the first major armed revolt in an Operation Reinhard camp. About 400 prisoners made it out the gate, and fewer than a hundred of them were still alive at the end of the war. They are most of the reason anyone knows what this place was.

Walking back through the field of stones, two of them stopped me. There are 17,000 of them set into the field, standing in as headstones because there was no cemetery here and no bodies to bury. Only 216 carry a name. All but one of those is the name of a town.

The stone for Kielce, one of 216 that carry a town’s name. Photo by Shanedra Nowell.

I found the Kielce stone, one of those 216. It marks one of the largest single deportations that fed the camp. Kielce lies in central Poland, where the Germans forced about 27,000 Jews into a ghetto in 1941 and then emptied it over five days that August. Around 21,000 people were put on trains straight to Treblinka. Others were shot in the streets and the Jewish cemetery.

The single exception to all those town names is a rock with three lines cut into it: JANUSZ KORCZAK, then HENRYK GOLDSZMIT in parentheses underneath, followed by I DZIECI. Goldszmit was the name he was born with and Korczak was the name he wrote under. When I looked up the translation of “I dzieci,” I saw that it means “and the children.”

Janusz Korczak was a Polish-Jewish pediatrician and educator who ran a Jewish orphanage in Warsaw. Long before the war, he built a self-governing system for his orphans based on deep respect for children’s dignity, with a children’s parliament, a peer court with its own code written by the children themselves, and a children’s newspaper. When his orphans were ordered to Treblinka on August 5, 1942, Korczak was offered safe passage out of the ghetto for himself alone. He refused and marched with his children to the transport instead, and stayed with them to the end.

Janusz Korczak’s stone, the only one at Treblinka with a person’s name on it. Photo by Shanedra Nowell.

Someone had been at Korczak’s memorial rock recently. Flowers sat in a stone urn, a small Israeli flag was pushed into the gravel, and stones had been carefully piled on top of the memorial. Rabbi Guttman had told us that Jews leave stones on graves because, unlike flowers, they are permanent.

From there a path led into the woods. I followed it, and it came out at a grove of young trees. Las Korczakowski. The Korczak Forest, launched in 2020 by the Treblinka Museum and the Polish Janusz Korczak Association, with schools and community groups from across Poland and abroad still planting memorial trees.

Tree 20 in the Korczak Forest, planted by a school named for him.

There are display boards at the clearing, a whole exhibition about Korczak put together by the museum. That’s where I learned that decades before any of this, Korczak had worked at summer camps in this region, tutoring poor children from Warsaw. One of the tree plaques carries a line of his. Nie ma dzieci, są ludzie. There are no children, there are people. It was the argument of his whole life, that a child’s dignity should weigh the same as everyone else’s.

Memorial lamps in the grass at Treblinka, with the burn pit at left and the field of stones behind.

When I came back out of the trees, it was almost time to leave, and the group had gathered around the burn pit memorial, marked now by black pyramid caps low in the grass, each one hiding a memorial lamp. Cantor Gabrielle Clissold sang, and then four of the Jewish leaders traveling with us said the Mourner’s Kaddish, the prayer for the dead. We all stood there and cried.

I just returned from an intensive week in Poland traveling alongside a group of North Carolina educators to study Holocaust history firsthand, made possible through the generous sponsorship of the North Carolina Center for the Advancement of Teaching (NCCAT). I am deeply grateful to NCCAT for their support.

This post is part of an ongoing series exploring what we witnessed on the ground, paired with further independent research, as we carry these hard truths back to our classrooms and communities.

Justin Parmenter
Charlotte, NC

This is part of an ongoing series. See more at Holocaust Education: Reflections from Poland.

How NC Lawmakers Cut Out Educators to Push Classroom AI

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North Carolina legislators are pushing an AI chatbot into public school classrooms — and they want it there by August. As New York Times reporter Natasha Singer noted yesterday on The Daily podcast, teachers and students at the center of this national debate have been largely left out of the discussion. In North Carolina, lawmakers are moving to make that decision for them, brushing aside both state education guidelines and a growing body of research warning against exactly this kind of rushed rollout.

Instead of soliciting feedback from local communities, our state’s legislators are negotiating North Carolina’s educational direction as regards AI in private. As I detailed earlier this week in my post, “NC legislators want to put an unproven AI bot in your child’s classroom in August,” lawmakers are fast-tracking a mandate to deploy an under-construction version of Khan Academy’s paid “Khanmigo” platform. This top-down vendor push is moving quickly through the General Assembly, tucked into a sweeping education reform package called the K-12 Innovation and Transformation Act, known as Senate Bill 1006.

Why did meetings between lawmakers and Khan Academy’s CEO carry more weight than the experiences of North Carolina teachers, students, and families? If legislators are prepared to earmark more than $10 million in recurring taxpayer dollars for a specific AI vendor, the public deserves a transparent explanation of how that decision was made. Even if you are enthusiastic about the potential of AI in the classroom, selecting a specific vendor through legislation and deploying it at scale without robust stakeholder input is a completely irresponsible way to govern.

Bypassing normal procurement and evaluation procedures to favor a single vendor means lawmakers are ignoring the actual operational reality of these tools which North Carolina’s students and educators will have to deal with next school year. In fact, Khan Academy founder Sal Khan has acknowledged that early classroom adoption fell short of expectations. When a tool’s own creator admits that integration is difficult and student engagement is uneven, it is a clear sign that a state should pause. A human-centered education system must vet software through standard transparent processes rather than bypassing checks and balances through legislative mandates.

This lack of clarity about what students and teachers will actually be using is precisely why child development experts are urging caution. Researchers continue to debate the long-term impact of AI dialogue systems on young learners, and there is no settled scientific consensus. A recent Brookings Institution report examining AI in education across 50 countries found that at this point, the risks of using generative AI in children’s education overshadow its benefits. Khanmigo is built around the Socratic method, asking guiding questions rather than giving direct answers. But a struggling child often doesn’t know what to ask next. A human teacher reads the room and adapts to what they already know about that child. A chatbot does not.

This exact need for developmental certainty and classroom readiness is why the state’s own education agency originally urged a cautious, phased approach. When the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction (DPI) released its institutional Generative AI Guidebook, it explicitly established that teachers must be given adequate time to master and understand these tools before they are ever introduced to students.

Instead of collaborating with public education experts, the General Assembly is bypassing them through SB 1006. This bill pushes forward a unilateral agenda that ignores the careful guardrails established by our own education agency. Worst of all, it leaves out any real, structural requirement for student, parent, or teacher input before these tools are forced into schools.

We must demand a seat at the table. Our children are not beta testers, and our classrooms are not tech testing grounds.

Act Now: Where the Bill Stands and What’s Next

Senate Bill 1006 is moving fast, and right now is our best window of opportunity to make our voices heard.

Where it is right now: The bill is currently sitting in the Senate Appropriations Committee. This is where things get critical. The primary sponsor of this bill—Senator Michael Lee—actually chairs this specific committee. He is essentially sending his own bill to his own committee to approve more than $10 million in recurring taxpayer dollars for a hand-picked vendor rollout.

What happens next: Once Senator Lee and his committee approve the funding, the bill will head straight to the full Senate floor for a final vote. If it passes there, it officially crosses over to the House.

Why we need to act today: The easiest place to stop a bad deal is in its very first chamber before it builds major momentum. We need to reach every State Senator’s inbox before the committee chairs vote to fund this bill.

How to find your Senator’s email: You can find a complete, all-in-one spreadsheet listing every single State Senator, their district number, and their direct email address on the official NCGA Senate Master Directory. Write your own email or use the template below, and please share this information with anyone who would find it helpful.

***

Subject: Vote NO on SB 1006 AI Mandates: Include Educators and Parents in the Process

Dear Senator [Last Name],

I am writing as a constituent to urge you to oppose the provision in Senate Bill 1006 that mandates deploying a specific AI chatbot in North Carolina classrooms without competitive bidding or public input.

A recent Brookings Institution report found that at this point, the risks of using generative AI in children's education overshadow its benefits. North Carolina's own Department of Public Instruction has called for cautious, phased implementation with adequate teacher training. SB 1006 ignores both.

Directing more than $10 million in recurring taxpayer dollars toward a specific, hand-picked vendor contract buried in a broader education bill, without public solicitation or competitive bidding, undermines transparency and cuts out the educators, parents, and students who will live with the consequences.

I urge you to oppose this provision and advocate for an open process that puts North Carolina families at the center of the conversation.

Sincerely,

[Your Name]
[Your City/County]
[Your Voting District Number - Optional]

NC Legislators Want to Put an Unproven AI Bot in Your Child’s Classroom in August

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The North Carolina General Assembly is moving a bill that would spend more than $10 million in recurring state money every year to put an AI chatbot in front of students in grades six through twelve. No competitive bidding. No independent review of the evidence. No teachers consulted during drafting. Just a contract written into statute for a single named vendor.

The company is Khan Academy. The tool is called Khanmigo. Senate Bill 1006 — written by Sens. Michael Lee, Kevin Corbin, and Brad Overcash, the same Republicans who chair the committees it must pass through — could put it in your child’s classroom before the school year starts in August.

Before that happens, it’s worth asking what we actually know about this tool. The answer is less reassuring than supporters of the bill have suggested.

At its core, Khanmigo is a chatbot. It runs on GPT-4, the same OpenAI technology that originally powered ChatGPT, though OpenAI has since moved on to newer models. It sits inside Khan Academy’s existing website and tutors students by asking guiding questions rather than providing direct answers. The bill calls it the AI Instructional Support Program, designed to help students with “lesson comprehension.” It also generates lesson plans and assessments for teachers.

What it actually does in classrooms is another matter.

What the Evidence Actually Shows

The actual research on Khanmigo is thin, and what exists is not encouraging. The most directly relevant peer-reviewed study, published in 2025, found no statistically significant differences in learning outcomes between students using Khanmigo and students using Google or traditional paper-based instruction. The researchers concluded that while AI-powered tutoring systems can support learning, their immediate impact on outcomes may be no different from conventional methods. That’s the best independent evidence available.

Khan Academy’s own leadership has been more candid than the legislators pushing this bill. In an April interview with Chalkbeat, Khan himself admitted the tool had failed to reach most of the students who had access to it. “For a lot of students, it was a non-event,” he said. “They just didn’t use it much.” The numbers bear that out: only 15 percent of students with access to Khanmigo use it regularly, despite more than 100 million total interactions since it launched in 2023. Khan Academy’s chief learning officer confirmed that year that efficacy studies were still underway — meaning the data on whether the tool actually improves student outcomes didn’t exist yet when North Carolina was drafting this legislation.

Now, the company is rebuilding Khanmigo from scratch for a summer 2026 release. North Carolina lawmakers are moving to spend $10 million a year on a product that the company’s own founder acknowledged most students rarely used and that Khan Academy is now replacing. Paying recurring state dollars to be someone’s beta tester is not a sound education policy.

There’s also the question of who evaluates whether any of this works. The bill requires an evaluation of Khanmigo’s effectiveness, and it assigns that job to the Office of Learning Research at the NC Collaboratory — a body created by and answerable to the General Assembly. In other words, the legislature that is mandating the contract also controls the organization charged with determining whether the contract was a good idea. The report isn’t due until April 2028, nearly two full school years after districts begin spending public money on a tool whose long-term effectiveness has yet to be established. By the time that report lands, the contract will already have been renewed at least once and the money will already be gone.

The Socratic Flaw in Real Classrooms

Khanmigo’s defining feature is its refusal to give direct answers. The idea is Socratic: guide students to understanding through questions rather than just handing them the solution. In theory that’s sound pedagogy. In practice, with real students in real classrooms, it falls apart in a specific and predictable way.

Teachers who observed students using Khanmigo in a Michigan classroom pilot reported something that should give North Carolina’s legislators pause. Students struggled to use the tool not because it was too hard, but because they didn’t know what question to ask. They didn’t know what they didn’t know.

A skilled teacher navigates that problem constantly. They read the room. They recognize when a student is lost versus when a student is thinking. They shift their approach mid-lesson based on what they’re seeing. A chatbot applies the same method uniformly, to every student, regardless of whether it’s working. The students who most need someone to meet them where they are get a tool that keeps asking them questions they can’t answer.

Khanmigo can be rebuilt from the ground up, but it will still be a chatbot confronting the same problem: a child who doesn’t know what to ask.

There is a growing body of research on what happens to students who rely heavily on AI tools for their learning, and it is not a picture that should make a parent comfortable.

A 2024 systematic review found that over-reliance on AI dialogue systems was linked to reduced critical thinking, diminished analytical reasoning, and decreased creativity in students, with researchers warning that when students lean too heavily on AI for answers, they risk losing the capacity for independent thought.

These academic warnings align with what students themselves are seeing: as of December 2025, according to a RAND Corporation survey of more than 1,200 students, 67 percent said they believed that the more students use AI for schoolwork, the more it harms their critical thinking skills, a number that had risen more than 10 percentage points in less than a year. The students being asked to use this tool are more skeptical of it than the lawmakers mandating it.

Learning is a social act. Decades of research on child development are consistent on this point: meaningful interactions with teachers and peers don’t just make school more pleasant. They are how children develop. They are how students learn to navigate disagreement, to persist through confusion, to ask for help, to trust an adult who knows more than they do. None of which stopped the same Republican majority now pushing a $10 million AI instructional support program from cutting nearly 7,000 teaching assistant positions over the past decade and never restoring them. Now, the legislature is proposing to spend $10 million annually on a software-based instructional support system instead.

Nobody knows yet what it means for a child’s development to spend significant instructional time interacting with a machine rather than a person. The research on the long-term effects of AI chatbot use on K-12 students’ relationships, mental health, and social growth simply does not exist. We would be running that experiment on North Carolina’s children, at scale, starting in August. And yet the people best positioned to raise these concerns were never asked. No North Carolina teachers were asked to testify before the education committee about Khanmigo.

Sen. Michael Lee, the bill’s primary sponsor, defended the no-bid contract by saying state officials had spent years evaluating the platform, pointing to meetings between Khan Academy founder Sal Khan and North Carolina officials. He did not specify who was in those meetings, when they took place, or what was discussed. Sen. Sophia Chitlik (D-Durham) wasn’t satisfied. “I’m struggling to find the evidence that shows that this is a better investment than, say, $10 million in instructional assistance,” she said.

When the research base is thin and the evidence is contested, the people closest to students are the ones most likely to ask hard questions. That may be exactly why they weren’t consulted.

North Carolina has seen this movie before. We saw it in 2019 when the state bypassed its own evaluation process to push a controversial, no-bid contract for the Istation reading program—leaving districts locked into a product educators didn’t ask for through the same closed-door maneuverings.

None of this required an elaborate alternative policy agenda. A competitive bidding process, an independent review of the evidence before the contract rather than after, a genuine pilot in a handful of willing districts before any statewide mandate, and educators at the table from the beginning. These are not radical demands. Neither is the question Sen. Chitlik raised in committee and nobody answered: what would $10 million in classroom aides, reading specialists, or one-on-one tutoring do for the students this bill claims to be helping?

They are the minimum that students and taxpayers should expect before $10 million in recurring public money goes to a single vendor, named in statute, for a tool whose effectiveness remains unproven and whose long-term impact is still being studied.

The question before lawmakers is not whether artificial intelligence belongs in education. It is whether North Carolina should commit $10 million a year to a single AI product before independent evidence, educator input, and transparent procurement have occurred. Those are questions that should be answered before August, not after.

Senate Bill 1006 hasn’t passed yet. If you’re a parent, teacher, or taxpayer with concerns about this proposal, now is the time to contact your legislators. Ask them to slow down, bring educators to the table, and answer those questions before committing $10 million in recurring public funds to a statewide AI rollout.

A Decade of Trouble

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Ten years ago this week, I took a deep breath and published my first op-ed about standardized testing in the Charlotte Observer. I vividly remember sitting in my classroom watching my students test that spring, wondering why on earth we keep putting kids through this grueling routine year after year while everyone stays silent about how it actually affects them. So nervous about breaking that silence, I ran the draft by my principal first, genuinely worried I might get into serious trouble for speaking out about such an off-limits topic. Once it ran, the response floored me. Messages poured in from parents and colleagues, thanking me for finally saying out loud what they had been thinking for years. That reaction gave me all the motivation I needed to keep going.

A decade later, the Observer just ran my latest column on the same topic—updated for the specific challenges we are facing in 2026. What a decade it has been. I’ve been fortunate to build relationships with educators all over the state and learn the education policy landscape from the inside. Building that trusted network has given me access to the real stories and insider information that decision-makers try hardest to hide.

Standing up together works, and looking back, that collective effort has led to some meaningful wins:

iStation

The records Superintendent Mark Johnson didn’t want made public.

When the state bypassed an expert educator committee’s unanimous recommendation to award a multimillion-dollar reading screener contract to iStation, I uncovered and published internal public records showing Superintendent Mark Johnson’s backroom attempts to pressure the evaluation team into changing their minds. The records also exposed something else: Johnson and DPI Communications Director Graham Wilson had publicly claimed the committee never reached a consensus. The documents proved that was false. The public release was damaging enough that Johnson eventually backed down, and the contract went to mCLASS, the tool the educators had recommended from the start. The NC Open Government Coalition awarded me a Citizen Journalist Sunshine Award for the work, which more than made up for the cease-and-desist letter I got from iStation’s lawyers.

Merit Pay (Pathways to Excellence):

The PR firm tried but failed to convince NC teachers that merit pay was a great idea

When the state rolled out the “Pathways to Excellence” proposal to scrap experience-based teacher salaries for merit pay, I turned to public records to see what was happening behind the scenes. The documents I released exposed a manipulative marketing playbook engineered by a high-dollar PR firm in secret sessions which state law required to be public. The State Board and DPI intended to use this strategy to break down the objections of educators and permanently impose merit pay on all teachers. But the transparency changed the game, and after pushback from educators across the state, the State Board abandoned the plan.

And of course, no reflection on this decade would be complete without a nod to a couple of the most memorable moments along the way:

The arming teachers, testosterone and Washington Post saga:

English class warmup activity: Constructing a persuasive argument

After I wrote an op-ed opposing a bill to arm teachers, a critic emailed to call me a wimp who clearly didn’t spend enough time in the gym. Instead of reacting, I turned his poorly written insult into an ELA lesson, having my middle school students analyze his response and offer suggestions on how to make his writing more persuasive. I published a piece about the lesson in the Washington Post and sent it to him. After being schooled by seventh graders on a national platform, he wrote back to apologize.

Superintendent Mark Johnson and “White Fragility”

Superintendent Johnson just wasn’t ready for this level of introspection.

When Superintendent Mark Johnson used state email to demand a Black State Board member resign over comments about dismantling white supremacy, I wrote an open letter arguing that he was using his platform to silence legitimate conversation about race and power in public education. Then I mailed him a gift-wrapped copy of White Fragility to help him process his strong feelings. (Johnson apparently couldn’t handle the reading assignment. He refused the package and had it returned to Amazon.)

***

It’s easy to laugh at those bizarre moments, but looking at the broader education landscape today, it often feels like things haven’t improved. In some ways, they’ve gotten worse. The same fundamental battles keep resurfacing under new names. Yet, knowing how much worse things would be if we had all just stayed silent makes the fight worth it.

None of this work I mentioned above happened in isolation. The tips, the documents, the anecdotes, the expertise all came from colleagues and parents and readers who trusted me with their stories and took risks to make sure the truth got out.

Thank you to every colleague, parent, and reader who has stood in solidarity with public school educators and students. Seeing what we’re up against right now, I suspect we’ll need at least another ten years of advocacy ahead of us.

Here’s to the next decade of trouble.

You Can’t Gaslight a Gas Station Sign

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On Thursday night, Donald Trump was standing near the reflecting pool at the Lincoln Memorial talking to reporters about a renovation project in Washington. The discussion was part of a broader focus on reshaping parts of the capital — large-scale construction ideas and symbolic projects meant to leave a visible mark on the city. 

At the same time, Americans were dealing with rising gas prices and the fallout from the war with Iran, which has disrupted tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz since early March. One reporter tried to connect those two realities and asked why the administration was focused on projects like this. 

Trump’s response was immediate.

“Gas prices are way down. Have you looked?”

I want to pause there because this was not the usual kind of political lie.

The national average for a gallon of regular gasoline was $4.59 as of May 7th, according to AAA — up $1.40 from a year ago, and the highest weekly average since 2022. Gas crossed $4.00 nationally for the first time in nearly four years just five weeks ago, driven largely by the conflict with Iran squeezing supply through the Strait of Hormuz. Prices are not way down. They are near a four-year high.

Most political dishonesty lives somewhere far away from ordinary experience. Politicians argue about trade deficits, GDP growth, appropriations bills, intelligence assessments, and diplomatic strategy. Most people do not have the time or expertise to independently verify those claims, so politics becomes a contest of trust, identity, and media narratives.

Gasoline is different.

Every morning, you back out of the driveway, pull onto the road, and glance at the giant illuminated numbers standing beside a gas station. You remember those numbers instinctively. You know whether gas feels cheaper than last week or more expensive than yesterday. You absorb it through repetition, almost without thinking.

That is why this particular lie feels so different from one of Trump’s regular whoppers. Gaslighting depends on getting people to doubt what they can plainly see. But gasoline prices are one of the few facts Americans verify directly and constantly. The evidence is not abstract or buried in a report. It is standing beside the road in four foot-high numbers, the same for everyone who passes it, regardless of who they are or what they believe.

Which raises a harder question: what does it mean that this tactic is being deployed anyway?

In a country where Americans increasingly live inside separate media realities — where trust in institutions, journalism, and government statistics has eroded for decades — the gas station sign may be one of the last genuinely shared facts that nobody can argue with. It doesn’t come from a pollster or a think tank or a talking head on cable news. It is simply there, updated daily, indifferent to politics. You can dismiss the Bureau of Labor Statistics as a deep-state operation. You cannot dismiss the number on the sign you just drove past on the way to work.

This matters beyond the specifics of gas prices or Iran. When political leaders make claims that directly contradict what people experience in their daily lives, they are not just lying about a fact. They are testing whether reality itself still works as something we share. The lie works, if it works, not by convincing people that prices are low, but by creating enough noise and confusion that people stop trusting what they can see with their own eyes.

The gas station sign is a mundane artifact. But it has become a kind of bedrock — a public measurement that no speechwriter can fully spin and no partisan narrative can entirely erase.

It keeps telling the truth whether anyone is listening or not.

Why NC Educators Are Marching: Taking the Fight for Our Students to Raleigh on May 1

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North Carolina educators inside the House of Representatives chamber, May 16, 2018

For over a century, North Carolina was known as the “Education State” of the South—a place where public schools were the engine of economic growth and social mobility. However, since the current legislative majority took control in 2011, we have witnessed a systematic reversal of that legacy. What started as “fiscal restraint” has evolved into a fifteen year-long campaign to devalue the teaching profession and defund traditional public schools. 

That’s why educators, parents, and advocates from all 100 counties are fed up and descending on Raleigh this Friday, May 1. We aren’t just marching for ourselves. We are marching because the following policy choices made by Republican leadership over 15 years of majority rule have brought our schools to a breaking point.

Teacher Pay & Compensation

The foundation of a successful school system is a workforce of high-quality, dedicated professionals who feel valued and supported. When we compensate teachers fairly, we ensure that the most talented individuals can afford to stay in the classroom, bringing their years of expertise to our children rather than being forced out of the profession by financial instability.

Since taking power, the Republican majority has systematically eroded the financial security of educators by:

Teacher Pipeline & Workforce

An effective education system requires a sustainable “pipeline” to recruit and retain the next generation of educators. By investing in future teachers and providing them with workplace protections, we create a stable environment where students see familiar faces year after year and where schools can maintain a consistent, high standard of instruction.

The legislative majority has fractured this pipeline through several key policy shifts:

Classroom Resources

A student’s learning environment is the physical manifestation of our priorities as a state. Providing small class sizes, modern technology, and adequate supplies ensures that every child receives the individualized attention they deserve and has access to the tools necessary to compete in a global economy.

Instead of investing in the classroom, the current leadership has stripped away essential resources:

Funding & Taxes

Public education is the ultimate collective investment, requiring a stable and honest revenue stream to meet the needs of a growing population. Proper funding allows schools to go beyond basic instruction, providing the specialized support staff and safe, modern facilities that are essential for a child’s overall development and mental well-being.

Legislators have prioritized tax cuts for corporations while starving our public schools of necessary revenue:

Vouchers & Diversion of Public Funds

The strength of a community is found in its commitment to a shared, public education system that serves every child regardless of their background or income. True educational equity depends on keeping public tax dollars within the public schools that are accountable to the voters and designed to welcome everyone.

Over the last 15 years, the majority has progressively moved to privatize education by siphoning public funds:

  • Expanded Opportunity Scholarships into Universal Vouchers: What began in 2014 as a program targeted at low income families has been transformed into a massive transfer of wealth. By removing all income caps, the state now uses public tax dollars to subsidize private school tuition for the wealthiest families in North Carolina—including those whose children have never spent a single day in a public classroom.
  • Eliminated Accountability for Taxpayer Dollars: While public schools are micro-managed by state mandates, the hundreds of millions of dollars diverted to private and religious institutions come with almost no state oversight regarding curriculum, teacher qualifications, or student outcomes.

Curriculum & Local Control

An honest and comprehensive curriculum prepares students to think critically and engage thoughtfully with the world around them. Respecting local control and the professional judgment of educators ensures that our schools remain spaces of learning rather than political battlegrounds, fostering an environment where all students feel seen and respected.

The legislature has increasingly interfered in local classrooms with partisan mandates:

The Path Forward

The energy we feel on the streets of Raleigh this Friday, May 1, must be carried all the way to the finish line. The current legislative majority has held power since 2010, and the results for our public schools have been devastating. We have seen a systematic dismantling of the very things that make North Carolina’s schools great, and it is no longer enough to just protest—we must participate.

The upcoming midterms represent the most critical turning point for our state in a generation. It is time to elect leaders who will prioritize the classroom over corporate tax cuts and who believe that every child deserves a world-class public education. When we head to the polls this November, let’s take the spirit of May 1st with us and vote for a new majority with the courage to reinvest in our teachers, our students, and our future.

Leandro Thrown Out: A Generational Betrayal in North Carolina

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The North Carolina Supreme Court’s decision today to toss out the 30 year-old Leandro suit is a generational betrayal. By dismissing this landmark case with prejudice, the court has shuttered the courthouse doors on hundreds of thousands of students whose constitutional right to a sound basic education remains unfulfilled. This ruling prioritizes procedural technicalities over the lives of our children, ignoring the state’s fundamental moral and legal obligation to provide every child the resources they need to succeed–regardless of their zip code.

This betrayal is even more staggering when contrasted with the state’s fiscal priorities over the last decade. Since the current legislative leadership took power in 2010, aggressive tax cuts for corporations and the wealthiest North Carolinians have siphoned away nearly $18 billion in potential annual revenue. While corporate tax rates have plummeted toward a planned 0%, our students have paid the price through starved classrooms and crumbling facilities. 

North Carolina currently ranks dead last in the nation in education funding effort, with inflation-adjusted spending having declined by 13% since 2003. We are not a poor state. We are a state that has been intentionally impoverished by leaders who would rather put money in their wealthy donors’ pockets than improve the lives of our children.

We cannot allow this to be the final word for our students. It is time to reclaim the soul of our state by demanding our leaders do better and by supporting pro-education candidates who will honor their constitutional oath and prioritize our children over political ideology. 

Join the North Carolina Association of Educators (NCAE) in Raleigh on May 1 for a day of protest to demand that our state finally puts students first. 

Our children’s futures are on the line, and we will not be silent.

ICE raids are driving Charlotte students out of the classroom

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*this opinion piece was first published by the Charlotte Observer

Monday morning I stood outside my school to greet students as they got off the bus.  Our school counselor and a couple of other teachers had made signs to set a positive tone in the face of very difficult circumstances, and I was holding a sign that read ¡Perteneces Aquí! (You Belong Here).  So many students who read our signs seemed pleased by the welcoming beginning-of-the-week message.  Unfortunately, many of our students weren’t there to see it. A whopping 27,000 students stayed home on Monday–more than 20% of our student population and three times the average. 

With the Trump administration’s Border Patrol and ICE activity taking place all over Charlotte, fearful residents are hunkering down to avoid the danger of being accosted by agents who are operating with next to no guardrails.  Under the first Trump presidency, schools, churches and hospitals were protected areas.  Not anymore.

Mass deportations were central to Trump’s 2024 campaign platform–remember “They’re eating the dogs?”  And after winning the election, President Trump didn’t waste a minute. 

On Inauguration Day, Trump’s Department of Homeland Security rescinded a Biden policy which designated certain places such as schools “essential,” saying immigration enforcement must be conducted with careful consideration of “its impact on other people and broader societal interest.”  The new DHS guidelines eliminated protected areas, instead vaguely directing agents to use “a healthy dose of common sense” in carrying out their duties.

On the first day of the Charlotte operation, agents descended upon a church on the east side where members were doing yardwork while their children played.  Some fled into the woods as officers arrested one man and took him away, leaving his wife and children behind.

The same day, near South Boulevard agents smashed a truck window and violently dragged US citizen Willy Aceituno from his vehicle, just minutes after he verified his immigration status for other agents.  Common sense was apparently in short supply.  These incidents and many more across the country make clear that anyone with Black or Brown skin is a potential target of La Migra, regardless of citizenship.

With horrific stories like these filling news feeds everywhere, it is completely understandable that large numbers of immigrant families have decided to keep their children home from school until the danger has subsided.  At a time where the rule of law increasingly feels like a relic of the past, a 1982 Supreme Court decision affirming that all children have the right to a public education regardless of immigration status doesn’t feel like sufficient protection anymore.

Based on how similar operations in blue cities have played out across the country, we can hope that soon these agents will leave and our students will return.  Counselors will be available to support students navigating this frightening time, and teachers will bend over backward to catch them up on what they missed.  But the impact on our children’s mental and physical health will remain, creating new challenges for schools to address.

According to a UC-Riverside report from this summer, even the threat of being separated from family can result in “profound emotional harm,” including anxiety, depression and behavioral problems.  Fear of a family member being disappeared can lead to academic disengagement and increased absenteeism.  Attendance data from schools in central California showed a 22% increase in absences following immigration raids, with youngest learners the most impacted.  

Our schools should be sanctuaries where all students feel they belong, not places of fear and surveillance.  Our children should be able to enjoy their Constitutional right to come and learn alongside their peers, undistracted by anxiety about whether their mom or dad will be there when they get home.  So what is a community to do when those things aren’t happening?

If we genuinely believe in the promise of public education, we have to defend it.  That means demanding policies that protect schools as essential and off limits to immigration enforcement.  It means speaking out against raids that terrorize families, US citizens or not.  And it means standing together with our students so they know that every single one of them pertenece aquí.

with teammate Keisha McClain