Category: Artificial Intelligence

Do Alpha Schools Deliver on Their AI Promise?

A recent article in the Chicago Tribune about a second Alpha School opening up in Chicagoland piqued my curiosity. I decided to do a deep dive into their programming and any research and evaluation I could find.

There are some features I love. I avidly support the small student/teacher ratio, the time devoted to life skills and real-world experiences, their project-based and problem-based learning, and the use of their mascot, Steve the Yet Yeti, to promote a “growth mindset” [the conviction that learners can grow and develop through hard work and learning from failures].

But we should be concerned about the level of self-promotion and lack of outside validation and the dependence on AI tutoring that marketing expert Edward Nevraumont says “is closer to ‘turbocharged spreadsheet checklist with a spaced‑repetition algorithm.’” (www.astralcodexten.com) Unbound Academy, for example, an Arizona charter school that claims to use the Alpha Schools curriculum, “projected 60% proficiency in math off a baseline of 34% and ended the year with 10% compared to an Arizona state average of 34%. They projected 65% proficiency in ELA off a baseline of 40% and ended with 28% compared to an Arizona state average of 42%.” (www.edweek.org)

Alpha Schools uses the NWEA MAP (Measures of Academic Progress) to measure progress. MAP uses a computerized adaptive that is adapts as each child progresses. It is not considered a standardized test, and “schools are allowed to modify their preferences when interpreting data

which can inflate scores and performance.” Their results are “based entirely on an internal analysis of NWEA MAP test data and haven’t been independently verified by third parties. Critics have also challenged the statistical methodology, alleging use of ‘inflated MAP growth ratios’ and ‘misused medians’ to produce impressive but potentially misleading results.” These concerns led the state of Pennsylvania to reject their proposal for a school there. (https://npec.colorado.edu) Van Schoales , a senior policy director at the nonpartisan Keystone Policy Center, warns that “The website is covered in figures suggesting that Alpha students are not merely doing better than students elsewhere but blowing the doors off them. No outside study supports any of it, and the MAP and SAT numbers are close to meaningless without knowing whether Alpha students are being compared with students of similar background. That comparison matters more here than usual: tuition runs as high as $75,000 a year, and every family in the building went looking for this school. (https://fordhaminstitute.org) Where is the evidence of their highly touted success?

Alpha Schools claim they can help students do twice [or now 2.6 times] the learning in only two hours each morning, though students often self-report needing more time than that. They say they accomplish this by depending on Artificial Intelligence [AI] tutoring with “guides” to help students. Is Alpha Schools dependence on AI tutoring for academics effective when most current research says it is valuable as a supplement rather than a replacement for instruction? If the AI programs are more like worksheets than Socratic dialogues, do they foster critical thinking effectively? What sort of training and preparation do the “guides” have? I could not find answers to these questions.

Educational neuroscientist Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath, author of The Digital Delusion: How Classroom Technology Harms OurKids’ Learning– And How to Help Them Thrive Again, argues that “If learning could truly be accelerated at the rates claimed by Alpha schools, then students would finish a complete K–12 education by the second year of elementary school – an obviously absurd implication. EdTech developers have long promised faster and easier learning. But speed and ease have never been the hallmarks of deep education. Real learning is slow, effortful, and deliberate.” He reminds us that covering content does not equate real learning. He defines learning at the effort to “‘think through knowledge’ and ‘transform ideas’. The time students spend revising ideas, debating them, and applying them across varied contexts is not wasted time.” (https://npec.colorado.edu)

Gerald LeTendre, an educational policy researcher at Pennsylvania State University, says that good tutoring is not equivalent to good teaching. “There’s no evidence in the literature that you can substitute a pure AI tutoring model and still achieve all of the multiple effects that one gets from studying in a classroom.” Indeed, a 2025 literature review of 28 studies that involved a total of nearly 5,000 K–12 students found that while AI-driven intelligent tutoring systems generally had positive effects, the advantage was negligible when compared with nonintelligent tutoring systems that also used active learning models without relying on AI. (www.scientificamerican.com)

Another article warns about the limitations of the teaching guides. “When a child hits a conceptual wall that requires a human to explain it differently—not replay a

video or serve up a parallel problem—the system breaks. Guides are facilitators, not subject-

matter teachers. Multiple parents describe guides who gave incorrect methods just to push

a student past a stuck point and keep their dashboard metrics looking clean.” (www.aifunlab.io)

The guides are “outsourced foreign contractors with no teaching background.” (https://terryu.stubstack.com)

We need to ask what the impact of a reliance on screens over human interaction is? Doctors and psychologists warn that overuse of technology can have damaging effects on young kids – and make teens more likely to suffer from social anxiety, low self-esteem and depression. “I believe it’s dangerous to wipe teachers from classrooms,” said Joe Vercellino, a Detroit Teacher of the Year and founder of The Lion Heart Experience, which brings mental health programming to schools. “What I worry about is what it will take away from our human development.” (https://nypost.com)

Stanford University Researchers at the Scale Initiative for Learning emphasize the importance of a strong student-tutor relationship “as an essential contributor to engagement and improved outcomes in high-impact tutoring. “o date, AI does not replicate human relationships. Most AI tutoring developers interviewed describe the goal as applying specific AI strengths rather than replacing human relationships.” (https://scale.stanford.edu)

I also question Alpha Schools’ use of extrinsic motivation and rewards. Students rack up Alpha Bucks by hitting daily academic minimums, mastering lessons, and turning in work on time. They buy rewards that actually matter to them: AirPods, Taylor Swift merch, snacks, or access to the lounge. They also offer the 100-for-100 to new students, paying students $100 for every 100% they make on the Texas STAAR test. (https://alpha.school/blog) Although extrinsic rewards may prompt desired behaviors, do they develop a lifelong love of and commitment to learning? Should learning be transactional? What will cause students to continue to learn when rewards are no longer part of the package?

The required Alpha Schools Bootcamp is notoriously stressful. Every freshman at an Alpha High School must complete a set of 18 challenges that the program considers essential life skills, like “selling an idea, speaking compellingly in public, teaching themselves something difficult, receiving critical feedback productively, working effectively with others, and doing demanding work without complaint.” Students must pass a test to show mastery, and they do have unlimited opportunities to succeed. (https://alpha-high-bootcamp.vercel.app/ But students in the bootcamp “are also required to pass an eyebrow-raising heart rate challenge, in which they’re hooked up to live monitors in front of their classmates and presented with a pre-recorded video of their parents berating them.” (https://futurism.com) Is that part of a humanitarian approach to education? What about the required social media posts that must achieve a minimum of 100 organic followers? (Ibid.)

If Alpha Schools students are indeed more successful academically than their peers in public schools, how much of that is due to the inherent self-selection? With a tuition range of $40,000 to 75,000 a year, aren’t their students likely to have stronger backgrounds and more drive to succeed? Doesn’t the high tuition self-select a student body that comes to school already advantaged, especially since under-performing students are invited to leave?

Despite all these red flags, Secretary of Education Linda McMahon promotes Alpha Schools. During a Fox Business interview, she said, “I certainly believe AI is definitely a tool used correctly, and I’ve seen it in action,” McMahon said in the interview. “I have visited the Alpha School in Austin, Texas, where they use AI for the first two hours every single morning… It is incredibly effective.” (https://truthout.org) She said she was very impressed by her visit to the Austin campus. (www.kxan.com) And in a CNN interview this summer, when Dana Bash asked her if Alpha Schools were a proper model, McMahon replied, “It’s working wonderfully.” (www.nytimes.com) Of course, this is the same cabinet member who once referred to artificial intelligence as A1, the steak sauce. She may be easily taken in, but I join the many educators who seek serious evaluation of Alpha Schools before we consider them the answer for the future of education.

Schools must change. They are not adequately addressing students’ needs, nor are they preparing them for the future. But let’s not jump to this model without more information…

we should be wary. There must be a better way.

AI’s “Jagged Intelligence”

If you’ve read my earlier blogs about Artificial Intelligence and teaching, you know that I’m convinced it’s here to stay, that the questions we should be answering are how can we use it to improve teaching and how can we limit the harm it can do. I don’t pretend to have the answers, but I’m committed to the questions and exploring our options.

Recently I had the privilege of reading Mason Broxham’s blog on Riddance called “The Accountability Gap.” As someone who believed that guardrails are our best hope to limit harm, I was startled to read, “At Riddance, we’ve observed a pattern in our investigations: When two or

more AI systems overlap, the guardrails designed to reduce harm and prevent Terms of Service (ToS) violations stop working like they should.” (www.riddance.ai) He goes on to explain that this is a structural phenomenon. Because AI is sometimes “stitching together AI scenes that were not necessarily problematic in isolation,” and because platform moderation is automated, AI is not capable of recognizing the harmful content that evolves from these patchwork efforts.

“The AI that made the content had no mechanisms in place to understand the harms it perpetuated, and the AI moderating the content had no general concept of what those harms look like in the first place,” he argues. Human beings make decisions in a context that informs those choices. Humans live in a “real, messy world of interconnected reasons and norms” that informs their “decision-making calculus.” AI models lack this kind of overall context, creating what Broxham calls the “accountability gap.”

This thunderbolt struck terror in my generally optimistic vision. If guardrails cannot create real accountability, what can educators do? I posed the guardrail issue to my husband and sons, all of whom work/worked in tech. In the AI arms race, one son sees a dire future while the other works on building better guardrails. My spouse argues that “humans using AI will probably be able to work around the above guardrails. Furthermore, immoral builders of an AI system can just not put in needed guardrails. All this means is that just like before AI, humans will be able to be immoral and illegal even using AI.” My pessimist son lists tools with capacities that keep me awake at night.

I struggle to maintain some optimism in the face of these discussions, and the inertia of education and the overwhelming power of AI make me wonder if we’re doomed. I don’t have an answer. I do know that we’re failing to ask enough questions, to bring together enough human minds to counter this trajectory. But we cannot afford to wait. I hope that people smarter about this than I am are doing more than I currently know… We need them to.

Will A.I. Triumph?

I am mortified! The New York Times posted a quiz, “Who’s a Better Writer: A.I. or Humans?” They offered five pairs of writing samples in a variety of styles and genres. They asked A.I. to “to choose an existing piece of strong writing and then craft its own version using its own voice.” Readers then indicated their preference for each pair. (nytimes.com)

Certain that I could tell the difference, confident that A.I. could not have as strong a voice, I plowed through the quiz quickly. I was wrong. I choose more A.I. than human-written passages. Even my scientist spouse did better than that!

What happened? I can blame the small sample, the particular genres chosen that don’t happen to be my favorite, or even the stars not aligning… but I think the truth is that A.I. has made huge progress in writing effectively.

So, confession over, what are the implications for writers and the teaching of writing? I’m going to switch gears here: instead of offering evidence-based and cited information, I’m going to share my own musings.

Efforts worth considering:

  • Writers have been reading. Our kids have not been reading. We must do more to foster the habit of reading, especially the reading of good writing and of passages longer than sound bites.
    • Resurrect the pattern of Silent Sustained Reading using printed books for young students to build the habit of reading and to improve attention spans.
    • Revise book choices in school to include works with more appeal alongside some of the canon.
    • Consider using excerpts of longer works.
    • Develop book clubs in classrooms where students choose what to read more freely and then “sell” their choices to their classmates.
  • Let go of formulaic writing like the five-paragraph essay. That’s exactly the kind of writing that A.I. can do, perhaps even better than most of us. Instead, look for more meaningful writing tasks that depend on the author’s voice.
  • Teach the concept of author’s voice and of original work. Perhaps start with music and have students identify singers whose voice is instantly recognizable; then play with writing samples. Perhaps offer a quiz like the one the New York Times provided, but choose strong works likely to have an appeal over the A.I. version.
  • Provide more writing time in class without access to technology tools. If students are using tablets or laptops, turn off the internet access temporarily to limit access to technology tools like A.I.
  • Use a writing workshop approach and portfolio grading to show that the process of writing matters and helps writers produce better finished works.
  • Teach students to use A.I. to assist them instead of replacing their own efforts:
    • Brainstorming tool
    • Sounding board – let it play devil’s advocate to make the opposite case in a persuasive piece, for instance.
    • Help with character development and word building.
    • After developing one’s own outline for a piece, ask it for one and use additional ideas for scaffolding.
    • Feed a draft into A.I. and ask it to create an outline – that will show disorganized and disconnected parts.
    • Help with sentence variety by asking it to evaluate and improve variety in sentence length, type, and openings.
    • Help with transitions.
    • Identify a specific, desired tone like “conversational” and ask A.I. to revise the piece in that tone.
  • Show students A.I. written passages riddled with misinformation and passages that are badly written as exemplars of what’s wrong with using A.I. in place of their own writing.
  • Teach students to write effective and specific prompts for A.I. Not only will they get more out of their A.I. collaboration, but that in itself is a form of writing that will help them improve their clarity and focus.

We have been using technology to improve writing since the advent of personal computers and the internet. Spellchecks, grammar checks, and internet research are old hat. More sophisticated programs have offered tools to evaluate and improve readability, sentence variety, etc. Before the turn of the century, the high school where I taught for my last 24 years was the beta site for AT&T’s writing analysis program, Writer’s Workbench. I had my writers run their drafts through the analysis, then turn in their first draft along with the analysis and their revision. I saw huge growth for many of them. I know we can figure out how to use these tools for good.

And I know that we have to figure that out. We don’t have a choice. I graduated high school before most of the technology that students now take for granted. I didn’t have a calculator and needed to depend on a slide rule (which, I admit, I never fully mastered). I wrote lots of papers in high school and over 80 in college, all of which were drafted longhand on yellow legal pads with arrows and asterisks to my revisions, before most of them were typed on a manual typewriter. I got my first electric typewriter in college, my first computer in 1981. I have watched the inevitable progression of tech into every aspect of our lives. I helped promote that progression by having a paperless problem-solving classroom in the 1990s where students used Palm handhelds, a web target to share files, a classroom computer, and CDs to turn in their work. I commented on and graded their work directly on their CDs. I responded to their writing in the computer lab in real time, and I had my writers turn in their portfolios digitally. Instead of fearing the constant new opportunities, I worked to harness them

A.I. is here. It isn’t going away. Are we brave enough, determined enough, smart enough to figure out how to harness it? I certainly hope so!

A Happy Success

Last week I had the privilege of speaking with a double class of sixth graders and their two teachers. I told the story of how this came about in the previous blog; now I can tell what it was like.

Before I started talking about writing nonfiction and the importance of revision, I encouraged them to interrupt with questions at any point. They frequently did, asking to see my books, asking if I made money writing them, asking where I got my ideas. You could power a city with their energy!

When I asked why they wrote, the first answer was, “for fun”—my heart sang. When I asked about purposes for writing, they were able to list many. They also understood the importance of audience, agreeing that a letter to a grandparent would describe their weekend differently from one to a buddy. And when I asked about artificial intelligence and both its impact on and role in writing, their sophistication blew me away. Students referenced the unreliability and poor quality of AI writing, though they acknowledged using it.

I talked about my own writing journey, from being in a junior high writing group and seeing my poems—bad though I now know they were—in print to the writing of my most recent book, my first work of fiction. I encouraged them to read widely because it was fun and would make them better writers. Many nodded at that, and some even described their favorite books and series. Others complained that they hadn’t found books of interest, and I encouraged them to use librarians as resources, assuring them that once they found the right books, they would want to read them. I told the story of my scientist husband’s journey from near-illiterate writer to accomplished memoirist, thanks in good part to the support a writing group. They were responsive and engaged; I found their gusto inspiring.

Then they formed small groups to revise the AI-drafted poorly written paragraph I’d sent. They could read it on the whiteboard, and all of them had it on their Chromebooks. Despite the occasional grumbling about group work, their groups did rewrite the paragraph. Some just reworded it without reducing the wordiness, but some did a really good job. If I were to do this again, I would emphasize finding the main idea and amplifying it without extras, and I would explain the difference between revising and editing better.

After our debriefing, students began to pack up. One brought me a part of her story to read, several surprised me by asking for autographs, and one gave me the picture that you see here as a gift. They really made me feel validated. I hope they found it to be a good learning experience. I know I learned from them.

When I research the state of education for my blogs, the doom and gloom can be daunting. This experience gave me far more hope than the research implies. Two committed teachers working together with a large group of learners, coping with some chaos to produce enthusiastic and effective results—that’s what schools should be like.   

I’m so glad I had this chance… but I confess that I no longer have the stamina more teaching would require. I came home and took a nap! So thank you, students and teachers, for inviting me, and keep on writing!

AI to the Rescue

Schools face a financial cliff. Last March the U. S. Department of Education cancelled all extensions of Elementary and Secondary Education Emergency Relief (ESSER) funds. The new policy requires states to reapply; in the meantime, they don’t receive the funds. “The clawback of previously approved funding extensions is resulting in students losing access to evidence-based programs that are addressing learning loss.”  (www.afterschollalliance.org) These financial cuts hit especially hard given the increased special needs of students since the pandemic: mental health support, tutoring to catch up, addressing behavior and attendance issues, falling enrollment, etc.

The vast majority of school funding goes to salaries for personnel, on average 81%. (www.the74million.org) That reality has two significant consequences: funding cuts almost invariably require cuts in personnel, and any measures that maximize the use of personnel can help offset such cuts.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) can help “prioritize and enable broader academic, staffing, and budget goals. And most importantly, strategic scheduling can help ensure that all students get access to the courses they want and need to be on track to graduate, remain inspired to attend and excel in school, and be empowered to pursue a postsecondary pathway.” (www.the74million.org2) Misty Rieber, the chief academic officer of Lubbock Independent School District, which serves approximately 25,000 students in West Texas, says “there are few questions more paramount than how your staff and students spend their time every day, what positions you’ll hire for, how many teachers you will hire, and how students will be able to interact with them. Equitable resource allocation across schools, proper access to core courses and electives, and dedicated support to sub-groups begins with the development of a school schedule. And perhaps the most overlooked aspect of scheduling is the ability to develop innovative staffing and budgeting solutions.” (Ibid.)

Too often, schools “roll over” the previous year’s schedule even though it may no longer be appropriate for the upcoming year. Building a master schedule is an intensive, demanding, complex process. AI can transform this process. Lubbock, Texas, schools used AI to analyze thousands of possible scheduling scenarios, a task too broad for individuals, thereby allowing them to avoid defaulting to a prior schedule and instead to align the schedule with school and district priorities while meeting the student needs more efficiently. (www.the74million.org3)

After piloting using AI for master scheduling in select schools, Austin, Texas, now uses it for all 33 middle and high school master schedules. Trying to decide how to balance the needs of a student body that includes special education students, students on 504 plans, and emergent bilingual students added additional challenges that AI manages. (www.edweek.org)

AI can optimize resources and provide strategic alignment and adaptability to unexpected changes because it can process a level of complexity that considers countless variables: teacher preferences, student elective choices, room specifications, state rules, teacher certifications, class size issues, enrollment numbers both for specific classes and schoolwide, etc. A process like this is nearly impossible manually.

The Stanford Scale Initiative Accelerator for Learning published a 2025 research brief about this entitled The Key Resource of Time: Master Schedules and Effective Allocation of Students and Educators. They describe AI-driven scheduling tools as powerful solutions that “not only reduce the manual workload for administrators but also introduce a data-driven, strategic approach to scheduling, ensuring that student needs, teacher availability, and institutional priorities are balanced more effectively than ever before… By leveraging machine learning algorithms and predictive analytics, AI scheduling platforms can analyze historical enrollment patterns, optimize course placement, and anticipate scheduling conflicts before they arise.” The brief lists concrete benefits:

  • Identifying staffing inefficiencies and potential budget savings. 
  • Creating better instructional delivery for special student populations, especially inclusion settings, to ensure that instructional specialists can focus on their content areas.
  • Enabling academic interventions by grouping students and assigning them to targeted instructional supports such as MTSS [Multi-Tiered System of Supports, a proactive and preventative framework that integrates data and instruction to maximize student success from a strengths-based perspective] and learning acceleration strategies.
  • Supporting strategic priorities by building in professional learning communities or common planning time (e.g. professional development blocks for first-year teachers and common planning periods with their mentor teachers).

It’s time for more districts to take advantage of the very positive outcomes that AI offers, at least in the area of building master schedules. Avoiding human error and dealing with layers of complexity that are challenging to solve manually should compel districts to invest in this process. Ultimately, they will save time and money, allowing them to avoid unnecessary cuts.

AI and Education: Enemy or Partner?

AI isn’t going anywhere. That means educators and their students must figure out how to use AI responsibly and effectively. Many believe that it has the potential to make education more individualized and equitable.

The U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Educational Technology (OET) released new guidelines for EdTech companies earlier this year called “Designing for Education with Artificial Intelligence.” “The report underscores the need for ‘responsible innovation,’ adding, ‘educator and student feedback should be incorporated into all aspects of product development, testing, and refinement to ensure student needs are fully addressed.’ (www.the74million.org) Dan Fitzpatrick is right: “The message is clear for developers. Innovate responsibly or risk irrelevance… In a world increasingly defined by AI, creating truly intelligent and ethical AI for education isn’t just an opportunity. It’s a responsibility.” (www.forbes.com)

XQ, the group rethinking high school, reminds us that AI tools are not just for educators: “they also exist to improve students’ learning. Rather than focusing exclusively on improving output (such as lesson plans and assessment materials), makers should also emphasize improving outcomes, such as student proficiency and engagement.” (www.the74million.org) Ann-Katherine Kimble, XQ’s Director of School Success, said that students “deserve a point of view that believes that AI can enhance your practice and knowledge, deepen your creative and responsive approaches and help educators capitalize on the sweet spot where the art of teaching and the science of learning meet.” (Ibid.)

What does that look like in real life? One example comes from students in a high school in Memphis, Tennessee. They “explored how to build AI applications to track hand movements for American Sign Language, highlighting the value of learning how AI works, writing code in Python and experimenting with tools like Google’s MediaPipe.” Their teacher insists that concerns about teaching are overblown, since AI never sounds like a high school student. (Ibid.)

Teachers like Tim Brodsky, “recognized by the U. S. Department of Education for his innovative use of generative AI to support multilingual learners in his AP courses, developed a system of real-time automated feedback. Brodsky can analyze data and get insights into his students’ needs this way.  (Ibid.)

When AI developers and educators work together, they can ensure tools that work both technically and pedagogically. For example, Nikki Wallace, an educator at Crosstown High in Memphis, had students looking at statistics for infectious diseases that impact Memphis. Their chatbot helped them progress through the science project by unpacking and generating complex questions such as “What community partners in Memphis can I reach out to?” and “What information in the research might I have overlooked?” and “What governmental systems are in place?” (Ibid.)

AI is no doubt going to proliferate in schools. The challenge for educators is how to make its expansion support learning. We know that AI can help produce customized lessons for students at a rate that isn’t realistic for teachers. It can adapt lessons not only for students who are struggling but also for those who would benefit from more challenging work, and it can provide real-time feedback to individuals at a rate beyond what’s possible for a teacher with a room full of students.

AI might also be used to develop “intelligent textbooks,” using an iPad app with interactive text that can “suggest questions about the content and areas for future inquiry that are

customized for each individual… [and]can change the reading level of the text and also include

supplemental photos, videos and materials to help students understand what they’re studying.” (theconversation.com)

AI can also improve assessment because it can adjust the difficulty level of questions by identifying patterns. I am in my third month of using Duolingo to resurrect my Italian, and I’m fascinated by how this app incorporates review of my errors and adjusts instruction based on my progress. Students should have that opportunity.  And AI can personalize learning: “an AI-powered recommender system can generate tailored assessment questions, detect misunderstandings and suggest new areas for a learner to explore.” (Ibid.)

I remember when the internet became a real part of our school. Librarians taught students how to evaluate websites and use them widely. We can educate librarians to become leaders in verifying information in the age of AI. They – or teachers – can teach students to research the author or organization, using tools like the P.R.O.V.E.N. Source Evaluation method, which recommends that readers check the author’s credentials and affiliations, consider the authors’ advanced degrees or expertise related to the topic, explore other work have they written, question who funds the organization and their affiliations? Do any of these affiliations reveal a potential conflict or bias for one particular viewpoint? (www.wqow.com) These are the kinds of questions used to evaluate websites before, but they are even more important now.

Librarians and teachers can challenge students to use good search techniques, like using two words together in quotation marks like “Mars landing,” searching keywords rather than full sentences, and limiting searches by domain names, such as .org, .gov, or .edu. Students should verify the original source of the information and check original studies when possible. This is especially important for news stories that my misrepresent or misquote the original sources.

Staff should teach students to use fact-checking websites like InfluenceWatch.org, Poynter.org, Politifact.com, or Snopes.com to verify claims. A Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review article found that the “high level of agreement” between fact-checking sites “enhances the credibility of fact checkers in the eyes of the public.” Students should also pause and reflect about the impact of a piece: we know that writing that triggers a strong emotional response increases our tendency to believe fake news, so a thoughtful approach and investigation can make a difference.

(www.the74million.org)

It is far too tempting for school districts to play ostrich and wish for AI to disappear. It won’t. Responsible educators will figure out how to harness this tool for good and limit its damage. It may seem like a daunting task, but we must rise to the occasion or we will fail our students and our nation.

Partnering with AI

Image courtesy of Dall-E

Educators around the country recognize that AI is ushering in an unavoidable transformation. Those who fear this transformation wring their hands and try to block AI, “ [b]ut the barricade has fallen. Tools like ChatGPT aren’t going anywhere; they’re only going to improve, and barring some major regulatory intervention, this particular form of machine intelligence is now a fixture of our society” (nytimes.com). The “breakneck pace of AI developments suggests that humans could never outrun it,” so we need to learn how to embrace AI and use it wisely. Educational technology researcher Mike Sharples, of the UK’s The Open University, says transformers like GPT-3 are set to disrupt education. Teachers will have to change the way they teach. “As educators, if we are setting students assignments that can be answered by AI, are we really helping students learn?” he asks. (thespinoff.co.nz)

Education faces a critical choice now: we can fight an inevitable shift, or we can learn to use that shift to improve teaching and learning. The first approach is doomed, the second overdue. The pressure of AI should force educators to develop deeper questioning and thinking approaches.

We already know about efforts to defeat AI that won’t work. Last December Markham Heid, a health and science writer, called for handwritten essays to “beat AI.” He claimed, “The dump-and-edit method isn’t necessarily an inferior way to produce quality writing. But in many ways, it is less challenging for the brain — and challenging the brain is central to education itself” (thewashingtonpost.com). While writing by hand has a different neurological impact than keyboarding that may be useful, it also has significant drawbacks: slowing down the process for fast keyboarders who cannot write as fast as they think [a major issue for me], potential legibility issues for the teacher who’s reading the work, and greater challenges to performing significant revision. And handwritten essays would have to be completed during class time, to ensure no use of AI, which would shorten any writing opportunity.

Nor can we avoid “cheating with AI” by turning to technology. Tools to detect the use of AI and prevent cheating “aren’t reliably accurate, and it’s relatively easy to fool them by changing a few words, or using a different A.I. program to paraphrase certain passages” (nytimes.com).

From Kevin Roose, a technology columnist: “Instead of starting an endless game of whack-a-mole against an ever-expanding army of A.I. chatbots, here’s a suggestion: For the rest of the academic year, schools should treat ChatGPT the way they treat calculators — allowing it for some assignments, but not others, and assuming that unless students are being supervised in person with their devices stashed away, they’re probably using one” (Ibid.). This approach fails to address writing outside the classroom adequately, though. Should we just succumb to AI or consider how best to make writing outside the classroom enhanced by AI instead of being replaced by it?

Mike Sharples, a professor in the U.K., used GPT-3 “to urge educators to “rethink teaching and assessment” in light of the technology, so that we might make it a teaching assistant and a tool for creativity instead of a cheating resource (theatlantic.com). Paul Fyfe, English professor and instructor in a “Data and the Human” course, went further, asking students to “cheat” by writing an assignment with AI and then reflecting on “how the experiment tested or changed their ideas about writing, AI or humanness.” He argues that students who refine their awareness of artificial prose may also be better equipped to recognize what Fyfe calls “synthetic disinformation” in the wild. Students in his experiment, for example, discovered plausible-sounding false statements and quotes from nonexistent experts in the essays they produced with the help of AI” (https://www.insidehighered.com/).

Peter Greene, a writer about K-12 policies and practices, posits that “Authentic assignments grow out of classroom discussion and debate. When an English class studies a particularly rich work of literature, the focus and emphasis will grow out of the class itself, leading naturally to ideas for essays about the work. The discussion becomes one of the texts being considered, and it’s a text the software has no access to.” He also suggests using local concerns, current events, and real issues in the school community; such topics are not only challenging for algorithms to fake, but they also tend to be “richer and more rewarding.” Research papers that use primary sources and live interviews are another option. (forbes.com)

If ChatGPT kills certain types of writing, like formulaic five-paragraph essays and typical college admission essays, will that really be a loss? Only if we fail to replace those performative types of writing with deeper, more meaningful kinds of writing. For example, Greene suggests using  ChatGPT as a prompt tester. If teachers feed their prompts to the chatbot and it produces an essay they would consider well-written, then “that prompt should be refined, reworked, or simply scrapped… if you have come up with an assignment that can be satisfactorily completed by computer software, why bother assigning it to a human being?” (forbes.com2)

What other concrete strategies will make AI a helpful partner in education?

  • Create outlines: Cherie Shields, a high school English teacher in Oregon, had students in one of her classes to use ChatGPT to create outlines for their essays comparing and contrasting two 19th-century short stories that touch on themes of gender and mental health. Students evaluated the outlines and then used their revised versions to write their essays longhand. She said this approach “had not only deepened students’ understanding of the stories” but also ”taught them about interacting with A.I. models, and how to coax a helpful response out of one” (nytimes.com).
  • Focus on process as well as product: New Zealand education technology expert Stephen Marshall, from Victoria University of Wellington: “Teaching that looks at a completed product only – an essay for example – is finished” (thespinoff.co.nz)
  • Use AI to learn to edit and verify instead of regurgitating: Ben Thompson, full-time writer for Stratechery, which provides analysis of the strategy and business side of technology and media as well as the impact of technology on society, suggests a radical approach: schools should have a software suite that tracks AI use and challenges students to use that suite to generate their answers to one given prompt: “every answer that is generated is recorded so that teachers can instantly ascertain that students didn’t use a different system.” He predicts that “the system will frequently give the wrong answers (and not just on accident — wrong answers will be often pushed out on purpose); the real skill in the homework assignment will be in verifying the answers the system churns out — learning how to be a verifier and an editor, instead of a regurgitator.” Wouldn’t that help develop critical twenty-first century skills for an AI-dominated world? (stratechery.com)
  • Evaluation and critical thinking: “Several teachers…instructed students to try to trip up ChatGPT, or evaluate its responses the way a teacher would evaluate a student’s”  (nytimes.com). Krista Fancher’s student loaded a social entrepreneurship project from the previous year and “asked chat gpt to find everything wrong with the solution. It did. He used the list of flaws to redesign the project and built a new prototype designed to connect grandparents and their grandchildren.” (ditchthattextbook.com).
  • Problem-solving and synthesis: AI can help students create projects in which themes and elements are connected in non-linear fashion. One teacher annually checked her seniors’ understanding of Paradise Lost by having them put John Milton on trial before local lawyers, asking if he had successfully justified the ways of God to man. (forbes.com)
  • Teacher planning: use AI to
    • write personalized lesson plans for each student
    • generate ideas for classroom activities
    • serve as an after-hours tutor debate sparring partner
    • serve as a tool for English language learners to improve their basic writing skills.
  • AI applied rubrics: Ronak Shah gave his science fair rubric to ChatGPt and had students submit their work for feedback that would have taken him hours. He and his students found the feedback helpful: “it offered tweaks to improve replicability and validity. It complimented innovative and unique ideas. In fact, it summarized all of its feedback with lots of ‘glow and grow’ phrasing” (edweek.org).
  • Challenge students to best ChatGPT: Shah also gave ChatGPT test questions from his science test and then gave the machine- generated answers to students. He challenged them to improve on the machine’s answer, and “Students were offended at the notion that a robot could be smarter than they are and worked collaboratively to find any way to strengthen the otherwise very strong responses” (Ibid.).
  • Ronak Shah recommends these changes:
    • “First, validate the world students actually live in and question rigid attachments to pedagogy that don’t fit the world they’ll inherit. As teachers, it is our responsibility to open ourselves up to the challenges students will have to face. If we focus our time and energy on that, we’ll be able to do it better. It’s OK to let go of the rest.
    • “Second, change the relationship among students, teachers, and technology… Challenge the students to form an alliance with you, to create content and express knowledge better than a generative AI tool like ChatGPT.
    • “Third, we have to change the way we assess students and the role those assessments play in school accountability. Our assessments are mostly designed to test student thinking on items that are easy to ask and measure on a test. But just because they’re easy to measure doesn’t mean we’re measuring the right things.
    • “Let’s move toward a future where teachers and assessments focus on collaborative, real-world performance rather than answers to narrow skill or fact questions. And let’s embrace ChatGPT and other AI software to help us get there” (Ibid.).

In May 2023, United States Office of Educational Technology published Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Teaching and Learning, a thorough if somewhat academic explorationwith seven recommendations:

  • Emphasize Humans in the Loop
  • Align AI Models to a Shared Vision for Education
  • Design Using Modern Learning Principles
  • Prioritize Strengthening Trust
  • Inform and Involve Educators
  • Focus R&D on Addressing Context and Enhancing Trust and Safety
  • Develop Education-Specific Guidelines and Guardrails (teched.gov)

This committee jargon is unlikely to drive coordinated and meaningful change. Neither individual school districts nor teachers themselves have the capacity and resources to make such global changes. We need a national approach.

Trailblazing teachers are publishing ways to use AI and sharing their ideas – check out “Ditch that Textbook” for excellent examples (ditchthattextbook.com). That’s a great start, but it’s not enough. The pace of AI advancement may seem terrifying, but fear won’t slow it down. We need a coordinated national response on how to deal with AI’s impacts across the board. In education, we need a coordinated national response to professional learning about AI for educators. AI can destroy or transform education. It’s up to us to fight for a valuable and long overdue transformation that will not only convert AI from an enemy to a partner but will also force us to provide the kind of deeper learning opportunities and adaptation of currently needed skills that we have yet to accomplish. The time is now, if not yesterday!

AI Revisited

Image courtesy of Dall-E

The tsunami of information, fear-mongering, and arguing about the impact of Artificial Intelligence has swamped my mailbox and muddied my thinking. There’s just so much that I’m taking a different tack to cover more ground. Here’s a bulleted list for you.

  • Industry is racing ahead of academia: Until 2014, most significant machine learning models were released by academia. In 2022, there were 32 significant industry-produced machine learning models compared to just three produced by academia. “Building state-of-the-art AI systems increasingly requires large amounts of data, compute, and money, resources that industry actors inherently possess in greater amounts compared to nonprofits and academia” [stanford.edu].
  • According to the AIAAIC database, which tracks incidents related to the ethical misuse of AI, the number of AI incidents of misuse and controversies has increased 26 times since 2012 [Ibid.].
  • While the proportion of companies adopting AI has plateaued, the companies that have adopted AI continue to pull ahead, more than doubling since 2017 [Ibid.].
  • “Princeton University computer science professor Arvind Narayanan has called ChatGPT a ‘bulls— generator.’ While their responses often sound authoritative, the models lack reliable mechanisms for verifying the things they say. Users have posted numerous examples of the tools fumbling basic factual questions or even fabricating falsehoods, complete with realistic details and fake citations.” Just look at the supposed case against a law professor, citing a non-existent Washington Post article accusing him of sexual harassment that never occurred” [washingtonpost.com].
  • Will Oremus warns, “The bad news is that anxiety at the pace of change also might be warranted — not because AI will outsmart humans, but because humans are already using AI to outsmart, exploit, and shortchange each other in ways that existing institutions aren’t prepared for. And the more AI is regarded as powerful, the greater the risk people and corporations will entrust it with tasks that it’s ill-equipped to take on… OpenAI is now leading a headlong race, tech giants are axing their ethicists and, in any case, the horse may have already left the barn”  [washingtonpost.com2].
  • PCMag.com reportsthat half of Americans can’t distinguish between AI and human writing, warning that it will only get worse as AI tools continue to improve [pcmag.com].
  • Last fall the Biden White House unveiled an AI Bill of Rights to protect users, but it’s voluntary and has no teeth [whitehouse.gov].
  • Italy has blocked ChatGPT as of early April [nytimes.com].
  • “A group of prominent artificial intelligence researchers is calling on the European Union to expand its proposed rules for the technology to expressly target tools like ChatGPT, arguing in a new brief that such a move could ‘set the regulatory tone’ globally” [washingtonpost.com3].
  • Just this past week, Meta unveiled a Powerful new Meta AI tool that can identify individual items within images, allowing it to generate masks for any object in any image or any video, even including objects and image types that it had not encountered during training [techxplore.com].
  • Also just this past week, a start-up in New York is among a group of companies working on systems that can produce short videos based on a few words typed into a computer using generative AI [nytimes.com2].
  • This month Sen. Michael F. Bennet (D-Colorado) tweeted, “The use of AI is growing — without any required safeguards to protect our kids, prevent false information, or preserve privacy. The development of AI audits and assessments can’t come soon enough” [washingtonpost.com4].
  • On March 29, 2023, “more than a thousand tech leaders and researchers…signed an open letter calling for a six-month pause in developing the most powerful AI systems” [npr.org].

But can you stop a moving train going full speed ahead?

I don’t think so. Clearly we’re in the midst of a transformative upheaval that will change society and the roles within it profoundly. And we are unprepared.

What do we do? We need a major national/international initiative to bring together the best thinkers in varied fields that include technology and ethics; they must develop some standards and vision to help us ensure that AI becomes a force more for good than not. This call to action is urgent.

As educators, we need to stop wringing our hands and move on to the work of deciding how to work with AI. Prohibitions fail. What do we do to use this tool well? What do we do to minimize its potential for harm? Urgent work to be done, long overdue.

Befriending AI

Columns and comments about emerging AI continue to abound, and I find myself “going down the rabbit hole” as I try to determine which predictions are most likely and what changes will occur. Free artificial intelligence apps are widely available. What do we do about them for education?

I’m old, old enough that my youth predates not just computers, smart phones, TV streaming, and virtual reality. I remember the revelations of ATMs, email, fiber optics, robotic surgeries, solar energy, bar codes, and MRIs. I didn’t get my first calculator until college [not that I ever really mastered using a slide rule…], I typed my high school and college papers on a manual typewriter after drafting them on legal pads longhand, and long-distance phone calls were an absolute luxury. I have often pondered the way technological innovations have changed my own life, and the way they changed my teaching.  The one thing I’m sure of is that, for better or worse, tech innovations will continue. It’s up to us to figure out the “for better.”

Free AI, through sites like https://openai.com/ and https://openai.com/dall-e-2/ , will impact teaching. That’s a given. But artificial intelligence, at least so far, is only as good as the data it’s fed. Since it is generative rather than creative, it cobbles together writing from the data sets that have been inputted into “large language learning models” [LLMs], the same tools that allow auto-complete in apps like Microsoft Word and most email apps. These LLMs are, however, much more powerful: “It turns out that with enough training data and sufficiently deep neural nets, large language models can display remarkable skill if you ask them not just to fill in the missing word, but also to continue on writing whole paragraphs in the style of the initial prompt” [nytimes.com]. That means AI can generate the kinds of essays and technical writing we too often ask our students to produce.

Does that make AI the end of teaching content area writing in schools as we know it? I hope so. I’ve long thought our focus on the formulaic three-part, five-paragraph essay stifles meaningful thought. We have an exciting opportunity here: AI can transform the teaching of writing if we let it. If we discard our traditional approach of parroting back ideas in favor of asking deep prompts that require original and personalized thought, we can not only beat the system of having AI replace students’ own writing, but we can make teaching and learning more powerful at the same time. For example, my final exam question for some of my more advanced classes was to trace the evolution of one significant idea throughout the literature we’d read all year along with how the student’s own vision of that idea evolved from the readings. How can AI answer not only questions like what it means to be a good citizen or what our responsibility as humans is to each other but also provide the student’s personal response? I suspected that AI cannot give a profound reply, so I asked it the following prompt: “Based on the books we read, what does it mean to be a good citizen and what do I believe?” As I expected, the generated paragraph was superficial and grossly inadequate:

Being a good citizen typically means being responsible, law-abiding, and actively engaged in the community. This can include things like paying taxes, obeying laws, participating in the democratic process, volunteering, and treating others with respect. Ultimately, what it means to be a good citizen may vary depending on the individual and the context, and what you believe may depend on your personal values and beliefs. [written by openai.com]

My students, on the other hand, grappled with this question with specificity that showed their thinking and their learning.

Issues remain. AI is flawed: “Some skeptics argue that the software is capable only of blind mimicry — that it’s imitating the syntactic patterns of human language but is incapable of generating its own ideas or making complex decisions, a fundamental limitation that will keep the L.L.M. approach from ever maturing into anything resembling human intelligence… Other critics believe that software like GPT-3 will forever remain compromised by the biases and propaganda and misinformation in the data it has been trained on, meaning that using it for anything more than parlor tricks will always be irresponsible” [Ibid.]. Furthermore, our legal system lags behind technological developments, and we have work to do about intellectual property and plagiarism.

But AI isn’t going away, and we need to decide how best to harness it. Kevin Roose, author and technology columnist for the New York Times, argues that “schools should thoughtfully embrace ChatGPT as a teaching aid — one that could unlock student creativity, offer personalized tutoring, and better prepare students to work alongside A.I. systems as adults” [nytimes.com 2]. He argues that banning AI won’t work: even if schools block openai.com, learners will find ways to access it. He also assures readers that AI can be a valuable teaching tool, writing about its effectiveness in helping students work through their outlines, helping teachers work though their lesson plans, and serving as a debate sparring partner and an after-school tutor. Roose writes, “Even ChatGPT’s flaws — such as the fact that its answers to factual questions are often wrong — can become fodder for a critical thinking exercise. Several teachers told me that they had instructed students to try to trip up ChatGPT, or evaluate its responses the way a teacher would evaluate a student’s” [Ibid.]. He even sends us to Ditch that Textbook [ditchthattextbook.com], which offers 20 specific strategies to make AI an ally for learning.

Going back to my advanced age… I find myself remembering the controversy about other technological innovations: would calculator use render us unable to do math in our heads, would online translation obliterate the need to learn other languages, would internet research make plagiarism inevitable and hard to spot, etc. Over time, learning from each other, we have managed to harness the potential of other technologies while limiting its harm somewhat. We need to approach AI with that mindset. I expect the journey will be challenging, but if it leads to deeper questions and more hands-on learning, it will be worth it.

Note: The image was generated by Dall-E, but all the writing except the indented paragraph is indeed my own!

AI Is Here!

AI [Artificial Intelligence] has the potential to impact teaching writing in a number of ways. For example, AI-powered writing assistants can help students improve their writing skills by providing real-time feedback and suggestions on grammar, spelling, and style. AI-powered tools can also help teachers grade written assignments more quickly and accurately, freeing up time for other activities such as providing individualized feedback to students. Additionally, AI can be used to create personalized learning plans for students, helping them to progress at their own pace and improve their writing skills more effectively.

While AI has the potential to greatly improve the teaching of English, there are also some potential dangers to consider. For example, relying too heavily on AI-powered tools could lead to students becoming overly reliant on technology and losing their ability to think and write independently. Additionally, AI tools are only as good as the data they are trained on, so if they are not trained on a diverse range of writing styles and voices, they may not be able to accurately assess or improve students’ writing. Finally, the use of AI in education raises concerns about privacy and the potential for bias in the technology. It is important for educators and policy makers to carefully consider these potential dangers and take steps to mitigate them when using AI in the teaching of English.

Bet you thought I wrote those first two paragraphs. Nope! I asked open-source artificial intelligence [https://chat.openai.com/chat] to write them. The prompt for the first was “how will ai impact teaching writing” and the second, “the dangers of ai for teaching English.” Both paragraphs are well written and informative. How many students would offer a more clear and effective expression of the issues?

What does this mean for education? Because each generated block of text and image is unique, plagiarism becomes impossible to identify through an internet search. Students can turn in essays and submit college essays written by AI, and no one would know the difference. What do schools do to adjust to this new reality? Making all writing happen within the classroom period penalizes students who take time with their writing process and prevents true polishing of written drafts. We need to rethink how we teach and evaluate writing.

Artificial intelligence now can also generate unique, free, uncopyrighted images with Dall-E. To make Dall-E work, researchers feed images to a computer, matching them with word descriptors. AI is trained to make connections and then use them to produce new images, but the images are only as good as the input and training. “Bias found on the internet can show up in results, such as a prompt for a “CEO” that produces only white men” [washpost.com].Researchers then overlay “noise” in terms of visual static and teach AI to remove the noise to reveal a clear image. AI generates the images based on the words used as input. Dall-E generated the image accompanying this blog after I requested “a water color image of a computer screen with AI generated images” [https://labs.openai.com]. As a blogger, I no longer have to pay to use images or worry about avoiding copyright issues. Where, though, does that leave visual artists?

Wael Abd-Almageed, a professor at the University of Southern California’s school of engineering, warns that “Once the line between truth and fake is eroded, everything will become fake. We will not be able to believe anything” [washpost.com2]. Such image generation poses clear risks. “Each evolution of image technology has introduced potential harms alongside increased efficiency. Photoshop enabled precision editing and enhancement of photos, but also served to distort body images, especially among girls, studies show” [Ibid.]. AI can generate the kind of “deep fakes” that have been misused politically. Companies that offer and use AI have struggled to build in safeguards, but the technology is progressing more quickly than those efforts. AI researcher Maarten Sap said “asking whether OpenAI acted responsibly was the wrong question. ‘There’s just a severe lack of legislation that limits the negative or harmful usage of technology. The United States is just really behind on that stuff’” [Ibid.].

Hand wringing won’t help. Teachers need to focus on process more than output. New Zealand education technology expert warns that AI will transform teaching: “it’s going to require an awful lot of work from teachers and institutions. Teaching that looks at a completed product only – an essay for example – is finished” [the spinoff]. And, since “AI doesn’t know or care about truth” [Ibid.], educators will need to find strategies to evaluate for truth and teach students those strategies.

Whether we like the advent of AI or fear it, we need to figure out how best to work with it. AI does provide opportunities. For example, “teachers could generate a set of AI ‘essays’ on a topic, then set students (individually or in groups) to critique them and write their own better version” [Ibid.]. AI may even prompt long overdue changes in pedagogy. Perhaps we will finally focus on “better ways to assess for learning, such as constructive feedback, peer assessment, teachback” [Ibid.].

This is all fairly new to education. In the summer of 2020, OpenAI began offering limited access to a new program called Generative Pre-Trained Transformer 3 [GPT-3]. Even if “GPT-3 seems to be manipulating higher-order concepts and putting them into new combinations, rather than just mimicking patterns of text” [nytimes.com], we face a sea change in communication and education. We are behind the 8 ball in thinking about how to adapt and even thrive with this new world order and how to regulate it fairly and effectively. But we must, for a continuously increasing ability of computers to generate text and images is already happening. AI is here now.