A months-long Sky News investigation into the US double-tap strike on a Minab girls' school found the Pentagon had tracked the site by satellite since 1987 and could still count children's shadows in the courtyard before firing anyway. What the evidence shows: Three Tomahawk missiles fired from the USS Spruance, 716 kilometers away in the Arabian Sea, hit the Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School in Minab on Feb 28, the opening day of the US-Israeli war on Iran. Witnesses described a second strike hitting the exact spot where a teacher had moved surviving students for shelter, killing nearly everyone who had taken cover there. A third strike followed on the same site. Death tolls range from 156 to over 170, most of them girls aged seven to twelve. The school had been walled off from the adjacent IRGC naval base since at least 2015, had its own website, and was geolocatable through open-source materials any analyst could have pulled in minutes. Built to fail: The Pentagon's own machinery for preventing exactly this outcome had already been dismantled. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth slashed the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence workforce by roughly 90 percent and cut CENTCOM's civilian casualty assessment team from ten people to one, months before the war started. A May Pentagon Inspector General report found the office had become a shell on paper with no budget, no mandate, no real mission. A functioning warning system was defunded on purpose, then blamed for not warning anyone. Accountability buried: Four months on, CENTCOM's commander told reporters the investigation was near complete, yet nothing has been released. Asked in June whether anyone would face consequences, Trump called it a strange question, adding that mistakes are made and war is nasty. The mistake was choosing not to fund the office that exists to catch mistakes like this one. My take: A military that surveilled a schoolyard for four decades didn't fail to see the children, it decided in advance that seeing them wouldn't change the targeting. Nobody in this chain lacked information.

Hedge fund managers, venture capitalists, and tech executives are pulling their kids from public and private schools to enroll them in AI-tutoring startups that pay staff to stop calling themselves teachers and face no state requirement to report how well any of it works. Alpha School, now in a dozen cities and expanding to nearly two dozen more this fall, charges $75,000 a year in San Francisco for two hours of AI tutoring followed by project workshops, using software that tracks how closely a child pays attention. Forge Prep in New Jersey charges up to $36,000 and promises graduates a $200,000 payout if they start a company instead of taking a job. Billionaire Bill Ackman has publicly backed Alpha. Neither school reports outcomes to any state, and Forge's own founder admits there is no data showing things are going well. Alpha sells home-schooling software on top of tuition. Forge's startup fund assumes graduates will found companies rather than join a labor market its own AI curriculum is designed to help automate. Alpha's spokeswoman says its families are overwhelmingly finance, venture capital, and tech workers, meaning the industry building the AI disrupting entry-level jobs is now selling itself a private curriculum to land its own kids on the ownership side of that disruption. Alpha's in-person staff voted to reject the word teacher, and its remote coaches monitoring the AI software are scattered across the globe. Stanford's Victor Lee says dropping the title diminishes the professionalism teaching requires. Stanford's Caroline Hoxby, who studies these programs rather than sells them, says there is negligible scientific evidence behind any of it. My take: The same investor class funding AI tools built to gut entry-level jobs is now buying its own children a private exemption from those tools' consequences, for $75,000 a year. Public schools absorb AI disruption unfunded and unreformed while this cohort builds itself an unaccountable alternative marketed as personalization. This is what class stratification looks like once it gets rebranded as coaching, guides, and life skills.