Last week, I spent three days at the Maine Department of Education’s annual educator summit. I attended because I wanted to see how teachers were being trained and what initiatives the Department would introduce this year. What I saw there shocked me.

The department is scaring teachers into believing that advances in artificial intelligence (AI) will render the subjects they teach obsolete, and that the education system must be reimagined to teach and measure soft skills that cannot be automated away, like adaptability, empathy and problem solving.

Over the next month, the MDOE is hosting community meetings across Maine where they will introduce these ideas under the banner of “Measure What Matters: What Makes a Great School in Maine?” I attended one of these meetings alongside a group of teachers at the summit. The facilitator started by asking the group, “What is something you had in school that doesn’t exist anymore?” Teachers mentioned things like cursive writing, home economics and rote memorization.

Then, the facilitator played us a video showing various jobs whose workers had been replaced by robots and AI. We saw a montage of self-driving trucks; automated restaurants, farms and factories; drone deliveries; and robot surgeons, all set to ominous violin music. The facilitator herself acknowledged that this video routinely invoked fear in viewers.

Given this world of rapid automation and technological change, we were told, schools must change too. It no longer makes sense to have traditional, siloed subjects like English, math and science. Instead, schools should teach broader skills: creativity, social intelligence and entrepreneurship. Subject knowledge no longer makes sense because students can just Google or ChatGPT answers to questions.

We were also told that schools need to do away with “old smart,” defined as what you know and how much you know, and replace it with “new smart” defined as students’ capacity to “not know” and “continuously stress-test their beliefs about how the world works.” Perhaps George Orwell should have been clearer that 1984 was a cautionary tale, not a guidebook.

These themes were echoed by MDOE Commissioner Pender Makin in her keynote address at the summit. She told us that “change is so rapidly advancing that we can’t with any confidence predict what the world is going to be like,” warning of a deluge of information and misinformation churned out by generative AI. She spoke of the societal need for “bold, self-directed entrepreneurial creators and makers who can think on their feet.”

Let me be clear: There is no reason to turn our backs on traditional education practices because of advances in AI. Literacy, numeracy, knowledge and wisdom remain – and will remain – the most important skills teachers can impart to our children.

We should, by all means, teach students to use new AI tools in a safe and effective manner. But the idea that technological progress requires the abandonment of common-sense academics and quantitative measures of school success is science fiction.

What the MDOE’s new dystopian turn is meant to conceal, quite obviously, is that Maine schools have been rapidly declining by any objective metric. The department’s own numbers show that 35% of students score below state expectations in English, 51% score below in math, and 64% score below in science.

Once a top-ranked state on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, Maine’s lackluster performance in recent years has prompted the department to try to discredit the test. Maine even ranked last in the U.S. News and World Report’s 2024 state high-school rankings, with only two Maine schools in the top 25% nationally.

It’s not AI, robots or automation that are threats to our students succeeding in a technologically sophisticated future. It’s a department that is willing to abandon tried and true educational methods and metrics for new-age platitudes and futurist fantasies. Their experimental programs have not worked in the past, and they will not work now. Instead, Maine students will fall further behind on the fundamental knowledge and skills they need to succeed.

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The cold never bothered them anyway.

Homebuyers are grabbing their winter gear and flocking to far-flung Maine — where they’ve managed to drive up the median home price a bone-chilling 78.5% in just five short years, a new report reveals.

According to freshly published findings from industry news site Pro Tool Reviews, The Pine Tree State has experienced the most significant increase in median home prices of any of the fifty since 2019 — jumping from $219,000 to $391,000.

The explosive growth comes in spite of the fact that Maine’s population has trickled upward a mere 0.32% since 2008, according to research conducted by Pew Charitable Trust — well below states like Texas (1.52%) and Florida (1.34%), better known for their heated housing markets in recent years.

Maine’s tiny capital, Augusta, experienced the most dramatic change, according to the report.

Neighboring New Hampshire slid into second place on the list, experiencing a 76.4% rise in average residential real estate prices since 2019. 

The new wave of northern New England homesteaders don’t appear to be struggling to make their purchases either — The Granite State ranked highest for size of downpayment, boasting $72,750 on average.

Another state in the region took third place on the overall list — Rhode Island, which experienced a 73% jump.

Meanwhile, the most affordable state for homebuyers right now is Louisiana, where the median home price is just $254,000, researchers revealed.

Texas took second place, followed by Oklahoma, Mississippi and Indiana rounding out the top five.

In determining what “most affordable” means, Pro Tool Reviews took into account not just the median home price (in which case Oklahoma would take first, with its $240,300 median price tag) but also the average salary, average down payment and the amount of homes in the state that sell for more than their asking price.

“Only 13% of homes in Louisiana sell for over the list price,” the report analysis commented of the Bayou State, where the average salary is $54,134.08,

“This represents the fourth-lowest figure of all states analyzed — 27.3% of homes in the state have their list price lowered before being sold,” researchers said.

A licensed hunter with an antlerless deer permit can harvest an antlerless deer in the designated district and an antlered deer statewide. Antlerless deer permits may be acquired through the lottery, and any remaining permits will be available for purchase on the MDIFW website.

There is no fee to apply to the antlerless deer permit lottery. Successful applicants must claim and purchase the permit for $12 (plus $2 agent fee).

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