American education has been quietly rebuilt for a new mission. Digital platforms promise “personalized learning” and career readiness—but they also collect behavioral patterns and emotional data to build psychometric profiles from the earliest years of school. Common Core, Social Emotional Learning, Portrait of a Graduate, competency-based education, and career pathways function as parts of a larger whole. Together, they form a digital infrastructure that enables AI to measure, predict, and shape how children think, behave, and understand themselves and the world around them.
In this Broadside, investigative journalist Priscilla West draws on government documents, foundation documents, corporate partnerships, and international frameworks to piece together the story hiding in plain sight. As she makes sense of this bewildering landscape, the deeper story is not artificial intelligence itself. It is the construction of artificial education: a system of continuous surveillance, sorting, and conditioning—and one of the most consequential, least understood transformations of our time.
