Artificially Intelligent - Part III

Where we locate K12 in the Hegelian Problem-Reaction-Solution cycle.

This is the third essay in a series of four where I discuss the implications of AI in American public schools. You can find Part I here and part II here.

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The other night, I was at my son’s practice chatting with a fellow mom about all things AI as it relates to school. She paused when a friend of her high-school-aged son walked by and asked him if he knew about AI. He laughed and said everybody uses AI all the time. He said he finds it particularly valuable for math.

That’s where I dropped in, being both savvy and obnoxious. I asked him if he used Gauth. He said, “It’s the best for math. It shows you every step to the solution and explains them.”

Then I asked him if his teacher required him to show his work on math assignments. This is when he smiled sheepishly. See, the kids aren’t using Gauth to “learn math”. The kids use AI like Gauth to satisfy the teacher’s well-meant but hopelessly outdated attempts to hold kids accountable for learning. Gauth gives them all the steps, clearly outlined, that they can just copy for a teacher who demands that students “show their work.” Now, to be fair to Gauth, it does also explain the steps. Some kids pay attention to the explanations; others don’t. Either way, students skip the doing.

I pushed him further. I asked if he knew kids who used Gauth for essays. He laughed again. The other mom asked him why he was laughing. I stepped in so he wouldn’t have to lie. “Gauth will produce writing at a certain grade level, which makes it hard for a teacher to prove you cheated.” I then turned to him and asked, “Do your friends use Gauth for papers?”

He responded, “Yup. Almost all of them."

“Yeah. I’m a teacher. I know.” With that, he was released.

The mom looked at me, clearly, gobsmacked. Finally, she choked out, “I didn’t know it was that bad.”

Between equitable grading and restorative justice policies, public schools have destroyed accountability for students. Into this absolute chaos that is burning teachers out at casualty rates that make the Somme look like a spring picnic, Districts have added 1:1 device policies, giving every student a laptop or iPad and more or less telling teachers: “Figure it out”.

Worse still, policymakers have glommed onto the ridiculous proposition that all classrooms should be student-centered, which means the children direct their own learning. In a perfect world, this wouldn’t be so bad, because a student would have the requisite background knowledge and curiosity to want to look into something deeply, and then would be able to use her grade-level-or-better literacy to read, question, re-question, then produce something that demonstrates what she learned.

Instead, 1:1 device policies have mostly resulted in the digitization of old worksheets in the form of slide decks or Google forms on the teacher side and near-unlimited daily internet-surfing for students.

91% of public middle and high schools have handed every student a school-issued laptop or tablet; 84% of elementary schools have done the same. District grandees are increasingly telling teachers that since AI is the future, they should incorporate it into all their lessons. District management, almost none of whom were ever good (let alone great) teachers, never tell staff how they should go about using AI with students. Not only that, their mandates fully ignore the elephant trumpeting while excreting on the priceless antique Persian rug in the room: how do students who don’t have much knowledge about anything conduct nuanced tutoring-style conversations with an LLM?

The teacher corps we have at the middle- and high-school levels are powerless to redress this because the profession of teaching has been eviscerated by counterproductive policies like equitable grading and our laughably unserious teacher training colleges. Teachers are now something between daycare providers and HR managers with little technical expertise themselves. They are charged with overseeing a factory full of workers who don’t know what they’re building or why. We teachers should push back, but it’ll only cause pain and there’s no guarantee we’ll actually change a thing. We all get paid regardless of what the factory turns out. Why make waves?

Using methods I detailed previously here, the system incentivizes teachers to do the least possible work. It does not look for experts in the field, it looks for young, inexpensive, debt-laden college graduates and conditions them to follow orders using the carrots of summers off and tenure and minimal accountability (we can always blame the parents!), teaching them it’s okay to just follow orders even if doing so means their students don’t learn much.

A teacher who knows her subject, transmits that knowledge coherently, designs practices that help students move it into long-term memory and expects students to later demonstrate mastery of all of the course material makes admin’s job much harder. Her hard work puts the lie to their grading systems (they’re all gamed) and behavioral controls (there aren’t any).

She is a threat, so she must be taught to change. Administrators will effect this in one of two ways. The first strategy: break her with commendations. Because she is accomplished, admin will assign her the hardest classes, the worst kids, and give her more responsibility to “support” her colleagues. If she brings to these new responsibilities the same integrity with which she approached her previous duties, the workload will become unmanageable. She’ll have to cut back in some areas. If she doesn’t, the job may crush her.

If admin is really punitive, they’ll visit her classroom frequently when she’s just figuring out how to manage the heavier workload under the guise of a newly minted concern that her instructional practices may be slipping. Depending on the state she works in, she could be reassigned or dismissed as a result of a few less-than-stellar classroom visitations by admin. After all, it’s “to each according to his need, from each according to his ability” in teaching.

Or, admin can let the parents do the job of ridding the school of a talented teacher who holds students accountable for learning. A not insignificant number of students will rebel against such a teacher, judging her class “unfair”. They will rightly recognize that the teacher has flipped the script on them because she is an outlier. Some of those students’ parents will see it that way too and will have zero compunction about complaining to admin about a “hard” teacher, especially considering how their child's cousin is having a much easier time with a lot less work in the other teacher's class.

An administrator, most likely a newly-minted Assistant Principal, will then remind the teacher of the Equitable Grading and Trauma-Informed Teaching policies adopted by the District, asking her if she’s implementing Best Practices for both in every class for every child, while also differentiating instruction for the multiple types of learners, respecting their individual learning styles, as well as keeping in mind the needs of the various English Learners and implementing all prescribed accommodations for the multiple Special Education students with Individualized Education Plans mainstreamed into her classroom. The AP will imply that she’ll visit more frequently to support her. She’ll also be coming to look for fidelity to District-recommended practices and strict adherence to District and site policy. She will record instances when she doesn’t see it. After all, parents are important stakeholders; they should be heard.

At the same time, the assistant principal will remind the teacher that it is her job to communicate effectively and in a timely manner. The most demanding parents have unmet needs she should try to meet since that should also help meet the unmet needs of her actual student. This is also a tacit, but clear message that there will be no intercession on her behalf from the main office.

In response to all of this, she will have two choices: either resign to maintain her integrity or lower her standards to keep her job.

The reason I’m explaining all this is so that you can see that the path of least resistance for a teacher already travels through a device. Because we’re student-centered, there’s no point in teacher-led whole-class instruction — all the kids are doing different things and are at different places in their “learning journeys” anyway. The teacher just posts directions for the day’s work, allows the kids to turn it in when they’re ready in accordance with equitable grading practices, and leaves them alone to do it. It’s generally better not to see what they’re actually up to on their devices than to try to enforce rules the site principal has no incentive to follow up on.

The teacher then bases a student’s final grade on three markers: (1) on how much work he turned in, regardless of quality, (2) if some learning can reasonably be extrapolated from the kid’s work (you always can find some evidence of learning, even if you have to call the kid in at lunch for an oral examination because almost no work was turned in) and, crucially, (3) how much of a PITA his parents are.

Students have also been conditioned. They have been promoted year after year, minimal effort consistently rewarded with maximum points. The best work a teacher will often see is copy-pasted — a huge problem in 1:1 device schools.

Now, you might be thinking, “But there are safety controls on my kid’s device!” Let me tell you something: Google is not blocked, Google’s AI is not blocked, Google Games are not blocked and YouTube is not blocked. So, yeah, your kid might not be able to access PornHub (might not; ask me about my students who had mastered the process to bypass security measures and load a VPN on their devices by the middle of September) but now that the Ed.D.s are herd-thinking their way to all-in on AI, your kid will have access to those tools as well, which means that literally every assignment can be cheated. Now your kid can finish his work in under ten minutes, then return immediately to futzing around on the internet (or his phone, which has zero limitations if the school has a lax discipline policy). The teachers have no incentive to do the hard work necessary to create assignments that would be difficult to cheat so they won’t ever disincentivize students from outsourcing everything to Gauth or successive iterations of similar technology.

Another major contributor to outsourcing all the work to the computer for everyone in K12 was Project-Based learning. The idea behind PBL was that we could embrace the kids’ digital nativism with 1:1 devices and “projects” which no longer mean making a bird-feeder or an ashtray or even a last-minute, late-night trip to find poster board. Project-Based Learning basically turns all learning into a research project where the kids discover the information for themselves, guided by the teacher to whatever extent the teacher chooses to engage. The important thing is that when a principal pops in, she sees the students on their devices “working” on their projects. This is the most gamed educational reform I’ve experienced in my lifetime. Mostly, it’s an excuse for a teacher to award a good grade to a kid who plays on his device all day, whips together a lousy slide deck at the last minute and awkwardly presents his findings by reading directly off the slide deck to his classmates from the front of the room.

I don’t know how much you’ve played around with AI, but I urge you to give any of these LLMs a project prompt and tell them the end result needs to be a cool slide deck, with both achievement- and literacy-level calibrated to the ____ grade. I just ran a test on Gauth and it took about 3 seconds to give me this:

As with communism, the proponents of Project-Based Learning will say, “That’s not real Project-Based Learning!” While that is the case (I used to train teachers on PBL), most tenured teachers have exactly zero incentive to acquire the knowledge and skillset or do the heavy lifting required to manage dozens of very different projects by learners at all different levels and get them to produce something knowledge-rich and beautiful to boot. Hilariously, equity gets in the way of this too. A teacher doesn’t want some kid coming in with a gorgeous project because her mom and dad could afford fancy materials when very low-SES students or “traumatized” middle-income kids in the class have no chance of putting something like that together.

While your child will likely never complain about this new, improved school workflow and you’ll certainly be pleased by his grades, I’m sure you can see that this fraud is both pernicious and potentially devastating.

“But the tests! Surely the tests will mean my child studies!” Equitable Grading practices mean that tests are more like practices. Summative tests can be retaken. Now, Best Practices for equitable grading are “that students should have multiple opportunities to show their learning, and each retake should be preceded by support so that there is improvement. At the same time, teachers have a limited amount of time and capacity (just like their students), and teachers have many options to balance these two interests.” Yes. That’s exactly right: teachers do have many options, and they will default to the easiest. Reality on the ground in a class of 30+ kids (x 5 in middle and high schools) says students will retake the same test until they score well enough to pass it. If things get rough, the teacher will look for “evidence of learning” and just put that in the place of an F to get a kid to passing. Like I said earlier, “evidence of learning” is subjective to the point of meaninglessness.

Among a small cadre of ethical teachers, there has been an understandable and strong backlash to this “guide on the side” approach. A number of books advocating the reemergence of the teacher-centered classroom and how to effect it have surged in popularity. Yet, our schools mostly haven’t improved. But then I noticed something I found odd. Recently, vanilla posts from X accounts I follow advocating Direct Instruction, most of which are relatively new, are getting huge view numbers, well, huge for a niche subject like DI at least. The change came fast and without any event that could have driven such interest.

And then, the other morning, I shot bolt upright in bed from a dead sleep when it finally hit me. Direct Instruction is something that LLMs can already do on a 1:1 basis. Your public school most likely already has the devices to implement it in most schools, even elementary schools. Retraining teachers to actually teach after the system has discouraged it for years and years would be difficult, time-intensive, and very, very expensive. That makes AI the quickest, most cost-effective answer to the very appropriate parental desire to re-institute teacher-led classrooms in our free, public K-12 schools.

AI looks like a perfect solution to many of the problems plaguing K12 schooling. I can’t say for certain how it will work out, but after 20 years in conventional public schools, I can tell you how it probably will in my next post.

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