Elementary Education – Dare to Teach and Learn

Happier News for a Change

When so much of the news is distressing, here’s a break with some good news about education:

The American Exchange Project helps students build bridges across the American divide. Co-founded by 29-year-old David McCullough III, grandson of the late Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David McCullough, it pays to for youth to spend a week in the summer after senior year “in an American town that is politically and socio-economically and culturally very different from the one that they’re growing up in,” McCullough said. Participants report bonding with others very different from themselves and seeing shades of gray in a world that used to be more black-and-white. (cbsnews.com)

Boston has opened high school reengagement centers that “offer a proven, scalable way to help more students find a path to a diploma and a better life.” Dozens of volunteers visit the home of students living well below the poverty line who have had poor attendance to encourage them to stay in school. Bostons’ four-year graduation rate went from 59% in 2006 to 81% in 2022. The five-year rate jumped from 65% to 84%. Other districts could certainly duplicate this effort. (nextcity.org)

Indiana already had some work-based programs to prepare students for chosen careers, including those that do not require college. Now their Career Scholarship Accounts are available to every student as a sophomore in high school. “Students participating in qualifying programs can apply for $5,000 each year to pay for career training courses, enroll in earn-and-learn opportunities and cover the costs of items like transportation to and from work sites, uniforms, tools and certification exams.” (the74million.org)

Education Reimagined is developing partnerships with educators, communities, and researchers to shift the current model of schooling to “one built on community-based ecosystems of learning that offer deeply personalized opportunities to all students.” For example, the brand-new City View Community High School in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, uses the local Chamber of Commerce as students’ home base and creates personalized learning activities, connected to standards, and community-based projects and problem solving. (the74million.org2)

Michael Hayes, a male fifth-grade language arts teacher at Hidden Valley Elementary school, started “Men Count” to ensure that Charlotte students see more men of color in the school so that many can see themselves. Male volunteers from all over Charlotte participate, providing role models children can relate to. (charlotteobserver.com)

Hope Chicago is taking a two-generation approach to attacking poverty by working with five Chicago schools to provide scholarships for both students and a parent of those students. As long as the student stays in school, the parent does, too. An April 2023 report by “Belfield, a City University scholar, found that college enrollment rates averaged 74% — a 17% increase — in the organization’s first year partnering with the five schools.” Chicago Hope plans to expand the program. (the74million.org3)

Ed tech nonprofit UPchieve offers free, individualized, on-demand academic support. This 24-hour online tutoring service relies on 20,000 volunteer tutors to offer free, on-demand academic and college application support to any U.S. middle or high school student attending a Title I school or living in a low-income neighborhood. (the74million.org4)

Two years ago, some students at a 60% white school in East Ridge, Minnesota, met to brainstorm what they could do to make students of color feel less isolated. They founded the Close the Gap club, which offers free tutoring by students for students. 40-50 teens participate and appreciate the support, finding it easier to get help from peers than teachers. (startribune.com)

Last spring Aleksander Simeunovic, a high school student in Batavia, Illinois, created Fox Valley Coding Buddies to promote online safety and digital literacy for elementary and middle school students. The group has already hosted 46 workshops across eight suburban school districts for students in grades 3-8 with 1,550 student participants, using 76 trained volunteers and eight executive board members. They tailor each workshop to the specific schools’ needs. (www.shawlocal.com)

New Jersey is the first state in the country to require public schools to teach media literacy to K-12 students. They believe that “students will become better citizens as adults by learning how to conduct research, analyze information, determine credible sources and ask questions to better reach their own conclusions.” (dailygazette.com)

Last month St. Charles, Illinois, offered a parent program entitled “Make Kindness Go Viral: Addressing Cyberbullying at Home.” A presenter from the Cyberbullying
Research Center provided information on how kids use the Internet and their devices first and then examined cyberbullying, sexting, and unwise social media use along with practical strategies for identification, prevention, and response. (district303.org)

Two college students in Tulsa, Oklahoma, live in a senior community for free in exchange for performing music concerts and practices and engaging with residents. Although the financial benefits attracted them, both they and the residents say the bonding has been wonderful. The students bring joy and life to the facility, and the residents provide encouragement and advice. (kjrh.com)

A first grader in East Grand Forks, Minnesota, has been working on improving her reading by going door to door in her community and practicing by reading to seniors. Not only has Maggie’s reading improved as the seniors support her and help with difficult words, but they really enjoy the company! (kare11.com) In my own hometown retired adults work in the elementary schools as volunteers and report the cross-generational experiences are truly fulfilling. Perhaps we can expand opportunities like this across the nation.

It’s easy to feel discouraged about education given the strains schools are facing and the impact of the pandemic on learners. News items like these can remind us that good work continues around the country. We should support it and urge expansion of the best initiatives.

A Soothing Reprieve

To counter the endless onslaught of bad news, I have made a conscious effort to seek out and notice any good news. One source is the What Could Go Right newsletter and podcast from the Progress Network, which brightens my day.

So I’ve decided to start collecting good news about issues I’ve been blogging about. Here are some encouraging stories.

Responses to Book Banning

Library commissioners in Llano County, Texas, voted to keep its three-branch system open after officials had threatened to close the libraries after right-wing protests about their content. The commissioners had removed a number of books based on a single complaint, then dissolved the current library board and replaced it with book banning advocates including the complainant. When other residents won their lawsuit calling for the books’ return, the county considered closing the libraries pending the suit’s resolution. But, “Under intense scrutiny, the commission blinked. Its leader acknowledged feeling pressure from ‘social media’ and ‘news media’” (washingtonpost.com).

The Brooklyn Public Library is providing free access to its entire catalog of 500,000 digital books to anyone aged 13 to 21 anywhere in the country as a response to book banning. Youth receive an electronic membership card that doesn’t require parental approval. In the last year, the library has registered more than 6,000 teens in all 50 states, and they’ve already checked out over 70,000 books. Their press officer says, “That’s a wonderful thing, because it means that we’ve provided 6,000 more teens access with books and information. But it’s also a heartbreaking thing, because it means 6,000 teens need it” (fastcompany.com).

The Bluest Eye is back on high school shelves in Pinellas County, Florida. Florida HB 1467 lists the felony charges for school librarians could face if they allow any books that are pornographic or harmful to minors. The superintendent banned this book because one parent made an informal complaint about a rape scene in it. Last month seven district media specialists decided to make the book available in district library media centers for high school students with no parental permission required, and teachers will be able to use the book in their classrooms provided they follow district policy on controversial materials, which calls for parental consent and alternative options (tampabay.com).

A Response to Learning Loss from the Pandemic

Atlanta, Georgia, has added thirty minutes of classroom instruction per day for three years to help students catch up. Some elementary teachers have moved up each grade with their students to give them a head start every fall (Chicago Tribune 4/23/23p. 5).

A Response to the Teacher Shortage

The University of Wisconsin has just extended its Teacher Pledge program to help reduce the severe teacher shortage. UW pays the equivalent of in-state tuition and fees in exchange for teaching in a Wisconsin PK_12 school for three to four years after graduation. 556 students have taken the Teacher Pledge, and 226 Pledge alumni are now teaching in classrooms around the state of Wisconsin (wisc.edu).

Social Media and Education

Two judges in Kane County, Illinois [where we live] have developed an hour-long presentation geared toward middle school students that explores the harmful and potentially criminal effects of cyber bullying and sexting. They’ve presented the program in Kane County and in Chicago and hope to expand it (Kane County Connects 8/23/22).
Huntley, a northwestern small town in Illinois, has launched a new platform for students and parents “to report instances of bullying, mental health concerns and unsafe situations in schools.” Those who reach out will be connected to staff in real-time, allowing two-way communication and providing students with easy access to staff for help (huntley158.org).

Student Activism

Two students in northern Illinois suburbs have joined forces to get bills passed to expand history course to include Asian Americans and indigenous Americans. They have been working with state legislators, and Illinois passed the Teaching Equitable Asian American History Act in July 2021, the first state in the nation to require public schools to teach Asian American History. Now they are working with students in Washington, New York and New Jersey — trying to get similar bills passed in those states and on the federal level (dailyherald.com).

Chicago Public Schools students who are members of the Chicago Chess Foundation travel to Ghana to hold competitions for Ghanian students and build cross-cultural understanding. They’re already planning a return next year and hope to bring Ghanian students to the United States (Chicago Tribune 4/30/23 p. 4).

We need to find these nuggets and celebrate them – not all the news is bad these days. This is my gift to you!

AI Revisited

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.

Hypocrisy Is Winning

The same parents arguing that they should control what their children read and learn want to control what all children read and learn; they will not accord other parents the same rights they’re fighting for. That’s complete hypocrisy!

As a teacher, I have always supported parents who want to be involved in their own children’s education. When some of those parents expressed concerns over book choices and curriculum, I worked with them. I remember a parent’s apprehension over the suicides in Romeo and Juliet given the death of her son’s older brother by his own hand. I offered alternatives. In the end, however, assured that we would talk about the tragic foolhardiness of the two protagonists’ making such an irrevocable choice, she chose to let him participate and made sure to follow up with conversations at home. I felt good about that whole experience.

I do not support the banning of books and courses or the rewriting of books. I find the present push by parents and parent groups to make decisions not just for their own children but for everyone else’s children both unfathomable and unacceptable. If teachers and schools afford those parents a role in their own students’ education, who are they to deny other parents the same option? Yet the current push to rewrite and/or forbid different works (and even entire courses, like Florida’s response to the AP course in African-American history) would deny others the very freedom those parents are seeking. That’s wrong.

Emily Style, founding Co-Director of the national SEED Project (Seeking Educational Equity and Diversity) describes curriculum as a window and a mirror: “education needs to enable the student to look through window frames in order to see the realities of others and into mirrors in order to see her/his own reality reflected. Knowledge of both types of framing is basic to a balanced education which is committed to affirming the essential dialectic between the self and the world” (wcwonline.org). While she supports parents’ involvement for their own children, she writes, “I draw the line, however, at their insisting that their values, which limit the perspectives their children can consider, must be universal. Parents who want their children to understand history as it really occurred should have equal rights” (nationalseedproject.org).

This push for censorship and control not only limits rights of families who think differently, but it cripples our ability to understand and learn. “The possibility of a more just future is at stake when book bans deny young people access to knowledge of the past” (theatlantic.com). Our students will face a global context; they will live and work with people of varied perspectives. Our nation needs these students to be better prepared for that context. The philosopher George Santayana wrote, ““Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” If our youth study a fully sanitized history, how will they learn from the past in order to forge a better future? If any potentially offensive terms are cleansed from books, how will they fully understand the past? “With lessons from the past, we not only learn about ourselves and how we came to be, but also develop the ability to avoid mistakes and create better paths for our societies” (mooc.org).

Furthermore, this push to limit access to multiple perspectives and to address unsavory realities of our shared history comes from a minority of parents that would force their views on all others. A 2022 Harris poll showed just 12% of respondents wanted books on divisive topics banned, and upwards of 70% of Americans, including both Democrats and Republicans, oppose such bans (Time.com). “In the name of vindicating their ‘rights,’ parents with special interests are pursuing tactics that the overwhelming majority of parents and citizens reject” (Ibid.).

So will we continue to allow minority rule to limit our options?

These arguments apply not only to the choice and availability of books, but to the revision of books as well. Megan McCardle reminds us that the sanitized version of Shakespeare’s work by Thomas Bowdler, the version that removed all profanity, was for a time the best-selling version until people realized what great writing had been removed. She calls Inclusive Minds’ revisions of works by Roald Dahl “lobotomies”; instead, we should “give children a window into the real past, as the people living there saw it, rather than compress their reading material into an eternal now. If our moral ideas are so self-evidently correct (and to be clear, I think that in many cases they are), then it should be easy to train children to recognize the past’s mistakes” (washingtonpost.com). Washington Post books columnist Ron Charles acknowledges the value in Aunt Jemima’s syrup losing its racist icon and Dr. Seuss books losing offensive illustrations but writes, “The absolutist position against tinkering with dead authors’ works is generally the best one. And right-wing efforts to ban swaths of stories about Black Americans and LGBTQ+ people make all efforts to ‘fix’ literature sound sinister” (Washington Post Book Club newsletter 2.24.23). PEN America CEO Suzanne Nossel warns that “[r)ewriting novels — like efforts to rewrite history — has origins in authoritarian playbooks. We need to learn from the perspective of the past, not eliminate viewpoints we no longer accept” (Ibid.). She urges us to support children’s development of autonomy and critical thinking, to help them test their own opinions and beliefs.

This concerted effort to cleanse both libraries and curricula along with individual books has librarians and educators fearful and uncertain. “Over the past three academic years, legislators in 45 states proposed 283 laws that either sought to restrict what teachers can say about race, racism and American history; to change how instructors can teach about gender identity, sexuality and LGBTQ issues; to boost parents’ rights over their children’s education; to limit students’ access to school libraries and books; to circumscribe the rights of transgender students; and/or to promote what legislators defined as a ‘patriotic’ education”[washingtonpost.com2). Teachers find themselves self-censoring and restricting what they say “about race and the darker parts of U.S. history” (Ibid.). At least 160 educators have already resigned or lost their jobs because of fights over the appropriateness of instruction on race, history or LGBTQ issues (washingtonpost3). Armed individuals terrorize school board meetings, while librarians face harassment and threats (Ibid.). Hannah Allen of The Washington Post warns:

The goal, extremism monitoring groups say, is to spread the ideology at the grass-roots level by taking on — or taking over — school boards, city councils, sheriff’s departments and other local institutions. In the case of libraries, they say, book bans are only a first step, followed now by legislation to weaken librarian control over collections, moves to strip libraries of legal protections and, in some examples, efforts to defund libraries altogether (Ibid.).

Adults who demand wholesale banning of books and rewriting of offensive passages in a desire to protect their own children cripple the learning of all children. Books like Maus, a graphic Holocaust novel that “show readers how personal prejudice can become the law. The irony is that in banning books that make them uncomfortable, adults are wielding their own prejudices as a weapon, and students will suffer for it” (theatlantic.com2). It is time for the rest of us to support not only the rights of these parents, but also our own. We must demand the same respect for our values that they demand for theirs and end this tyranny of the minority. Only then can we hope to raise enough citizens with an understanding of multiple perspectives and the chance to live well in an ever more diverse and challenging world.

Enough!

It’s happened again. And again. And again and again and again. On Monday, February 13, 2023, gunshots erupted at Michigan State University. Three dead, five injured. “For a generation of young Americans, mass shootings at schools or colleges once considered sanctuaries for learning have become so painfully routine that some of them have lived through more than one by their early 20s. People a few years older grew up with active shooter drills. Their younger counterparts have become repeat survivors of traumatic violence.” (nytimes.com). Michigan State students include survivors of the Sandy Hook and Oxford High shootings.

We know our youth are struggling. Mental health issues, many of which predate the pandemic, were exacerbated by it. A new report from the Centers for Disease Control warns “of an accelerating mental health crisis among adolescents, with more than 4 in 10 teens reporting that they feel ‘persistently sad or hopeless,’ and 1 in 5 saying they have contemplated suicide, according to the results of a survey published last year [washingtonpost.com].

The threat of school shootings and the shooter drills compound these anxieties. More than 100,000 American children attended a school at which a shooting took place in 2018 and 2019 alone (Cabral et al., 2021), and researchers are finding “evidence suggesting a deterioration in shooting-exposed children’s mental health” [stanford.edu]. These experiences have direct, deleterious consequences.

High school students exposed to a shooting at their school were:

3.7 percent at the mean less likely to graduate from high school
9.5 percent less likely to enroll in any college
17.2 percent less likely to enroll in a four-year college
15.3 percent less likely to obtain a bachelor’s degree by age 26
6.3 percent less likely to be employed
had $2,779.84 (13.5 percent) lower average annual earnings between the ages of 24 and 26 suggesting a reduction of $115,550 (in 2018 dollars) in the present discounted value of lifetime earnings per shooting-exposed student. With approximately 50,000 children per year affected in recent years, the aggregate cost may be $5.8 billion per year in terms of lost lifetime earnings among survivors. [Ibid.].

The statistics should frighten us:

Each day 12 children die from gun violence in America. Another 32 are shot and injured.¹
Guns are the leading cause of death among American children and teens. 1 out of 10 gun deaths are age 19 or younger.²
In fact, firearm deaths occur at a rate more than 5 times higher than drownings.³
Since Columbine in 1999, more than 338,000 students in the U.S. have experienced gun violence at school.⁴
There were more school shootings in 2022 [46] than in any year since Columbine.
In 2022, 34 students and adults died [sandyhookpromise.org].

It’s no wonder that our students are anxious. “Perhaps the most disturbing effects of school shootings are the feeling of on-going danger that permeates schools where they have occurred. The school’s climate and sense of community are profoundly damaged” [https://violence.chop.edu].

In a country with more guns than people (about 120 guns for every 100 Americans) [cnn.com], in a country where mass shootings and violence also occur outside school walls, our kids cannot feel safe. As of February 14, 2023, there have been 366 school shootings since Columbine [washingtonpost.com]. The Center for Homeland Defense and Security reports that in 2021 alone, there were 240 incidents in which a gun was either brandished or used in a school.

Although nearly 75% of all US school shootings in 2018 and 2019 had no fatalities, they still left students traumatized [pbs.com].

And the data excludes hundreds of incidents every year that don’t technically qualify but that still terrify and traumatize tens of thousands of children: shootings at after-school sporting events, for example, or gunshots fired just off campus. “In a country where gun violence is now the leading cause of death for kids and teens, millions of children must walk through metal detectors or run through active-shooter drills meant to prepare them for the threat of mass murder” [washingtonpost.com3].

Steven Schlozman, a Dartmouth associate professor of psychiatry, analyzed school shootings over the last five years: “We have very good data that children in proximity to frightening circumstances, such as those that trigger school lockdowns, are at risk for lasting symptoms. These include everything from worsening academic and social progression to depression, anxiety, poor sleep, post-traumatic symptomatology, and substance abuse” [dartmouth.edu]

Our youth deserve better, yet we continue to fail them by allowing politics to prevent change.

We must be more proactive in identifying and responding to potential shooters. Just look at Richneck Elementary School in New Jersey, where teachers warned administrators that a six-year-old boy was disturbed and making threats. Nothing was done until he shot his teacher with a handgun [washingtonpost.com2].

Everytown Research and Policy provides a clear blueprint for making schools and communities safer:

“Enact and Enforce Secure Firearm Storage Laws
Pass Extreme Risk Laws
Raise the Age to Purchase Semi-automatic Firearms
Require Background Checks on All Gun Sales
Foster a Safe and Trusting School Climate
Build a Culture of Secure Gun Storage
Create Evidence-Based Crisis Assessment/Prevention Programs in Schools
Implement Expert-Endorsed School Security Upgrades: Entry Control and Locks
Initiate Trauma-Informed Emergency Planning
Avoid Practices That Can Cause Harm and Traumatize Students” [everytownresearch.org]

So it’s up to us. We have a road map, and we need to fight for it. Write your congresspeople and push for change. It’s long overdue.

A Brave New World?

Chat GPT concerns continue to escalate, and the industry is moving very quickly. Google is about to release Bard, its own AI chat, which Google will not only release to the public for free but also begin using to generate search results. Just today Microsoft “said it would ‘reimagine’ its Bing search engine with technology mirroring the model from ChatGPT creator OpenAI” [washingtonpost.com]. Even as articles warning of disaster from AI multiply, innovators are suggesting way to use AI productively. I will write more about this, but right now I feel an urgency about sharing a recent Washington Post article.

Entitled “Hide your books to avoid felony charges, Fla. Schools tell teachers” it describes the impact of Florida House Bill 1467, passed last July, which “mandates that schools’ books be age-appropriate, free from pornography and ‘suited to student needs’” [washingtonpost.com2]. The new law requires qualified school media specialists who have undergone a state training program to approve all books in the school library and in the classroom. Because that training didn’t occur until last month, the law’s impact is now causing teachers to strip their bookshelves of books or cover them with paper.

Because an older Florida law makes the distribution of “harmful materials” to minors a third-degree felony, punishable by up to five years in prison and up to a $5,000 fine, these new rules have a chilling effect on book selection and student access. A spokeswoman from the Florida Department of Education warned that teachers who violate the law may face penalties on their teaching certificates as well. And “because of uncertainties around enforcement and around what titles might become outlawed, school officials have warned teachers that their classroom libraries may expose them to the stiffest punishments” [Ibid.].

At least two counties, Manatee and Duval, have already directed teachers to remove or wrap up their classroom libraries. Many educators and teachers have expressed outrage. Students have shared their frustration as well. According to Broward School Board member Sarah Leonardi, Florida “is a state that seeks to limit access to knowledge and resources that don’t fit in a conservative ideological box. … It is a state that is making it more and more difficult to educate or parent a child without constant fear of retribution” [news4jax.com].

This initiative is chilling for so many reasons. As a teacher, I believe my responsibility is to develop critical thinking skills. How can students think critically if they aren’t exposed to multiple ideas? As an educator I feel great concern over the burnout and frustration of those currently in the classroom, especially when we already can’t fill all those shoes and when the pipeline of new teachers is grossly inadequate. How can we expect teachers to do their jobs well when we keep threatening them and questioning their professionalism? As a co-founder of my school district’s Gay Straight Alliances and of the Illinois Safe Schools Alliance, I fear for the well-being of sexually minority youth when their resources are among those being removed. How will they manage without support?

I come to this with a clear bias. My parents allowed me to read anything as long as I would talk about it with them. When I outgrew the Cherry Ames series and other books in the children’s department of our library, they helped me get an adult card when I was still in grade school. I read Nevil Shute’s On the Beach and William Saroyan’s The Human Comedy well before my teens. Was I traumatized? I was growing up during the panic over bomb shelters, and Shute’s novel gave me a way to discuss fear of the apocalypse with my parents. Saroyan fed my curiosity about the human condition and dealing with loss. And when I took a paperback considered racy back then [though pretty benign by today’s standards] on a sleepover and finished it that night, my girlfriend asked to read it. Her mother sent it back to my mother in a plain brown wrapper, clearly appalled. My mother’s reaction: “Everyone has to make their own decisions about what’s appropriate. You did nothing wrong, but she has every right to decide differently for her daughter.” I still support that vision.

As an English teacher, I always offered alternatives when parents expressed concerns, but I do believe that students should be exposed to a variety of ideas so they can make their own evaluations. Depriving students and teachers of books that foster critical thinking is backwards. I wonder how many of the books I so loved teaching, precisely because they challenged student’s understanding of the status quo and provoked thought and discussion, will pass the test in Florida. Will students miss books like Catcher in the Rye because of its profanity and references to sex? Or Lord of the Flies because it reveals undesirable human tendencies? Fahrenheit 451 or Animal Farm because they show the dangers of authoritarian governments? To Kill a Mockingbird because of its portrayal of systemic racism? Beloved or The Color Purple because of the current backlash against “anti-racism”? How do we teach The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn responsibly without exploring Twain’s use of the n-word and whether his treatment of Jim is racist. Each of the books included above has been challenged repeatedly. Each of these books was also a critical piece of my curricula as I worked to help students explore and navigate a world bigger than the one they knew.

Banning books is not new. This level of control, however, frightens me. We cannot have an educated populace equipped to make good decisions and deal with the evolving challenges and changes in our country and in the world. These culture wars will destroy our culture if we don’t fight back.

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.

The Kids Are Not All Right

The stats are in and confirm what we already knew: academic achievement is in trouble. This crisis parallels the mental health crisis students face.

We already knew that student mental health struggles dramatically increased during the pandemic; I’ve written about this often enough. Suicidal ideation and completed suicide rates have both risen. New data from the National Center for Health Statistics, part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, show that suicide is the second leading cause of death for people aged 10 to 34, and the rate for people aged 15 to 24 rose 8 percent. Last July nationwide hotline for mental health emergencies experienced a 45 percent increase in calls, texts and chats in its first month after changing to a simpler phone number [washingtonpost.com]. The stats from the Center for Disease Control offer little hope:

From February to March 2021, the number of hospital emergency room visits for suspected suicide attempts jumped by 51 percent for girls and 4% for boys compare to that period in 2019.
Provisional data for 2021 showed an increase in the national rate from 2020 to 2021, especially for people ages 15 to 24.
Nearly 45 percent of high school students were so persistently sad or hopeless in 2021 they were unable to engage in regular activities.
Almost 1 in 5 high school students seriously considered suicide.
9 percent of teenagers surveyed by the CDC tried to take their lives during the previous 12 months.
The percentage of gay, lesbian, bisexual, other and questioning students reporting a suicide attempt is even higher.
Nearly 30 percent of students said an adult in their home had lost a job, and 24 percent said they went hungry for a lack of food.
More than 230,000 U.S. students under 18 are believed to be mourning the ultimate loss: the death of a parent or primary caregiver in a pandemic-related loss, according to research by the CDC, Imperial College London, Harvard University, Oxford University, and the University of Cape Town.
The loss for Black and Hispanic children was nearly twice the rate of White children.
Schools don’t have enough mental health professionals. Professional organizations recommend one school psychologist per 500 students, but the national average is one school psychologist per 1,160 students, with some states approaching one per 5,000, well below the recommended rate of one for every 500 students. Similarly, the recommended ratio of one school counselor per 250 students is not widespread. [washingtonpost.com]

Now layer that with the disappointing test results for academic achievement. The National Educational Assessment of Progress scores released in April show stark declines, especially in math. “Math scores for eighth grade fell by eight points, from 282 in 2019 to 274 this year, on a 500-point scale, and in fourth grade, by five points — the steepest declines recorded in more than a half century of testing.” These declines come on the heels of a pre-pandemic decline in both math and reading for 13-year-olds [washingtonpost.com]. Many 2019 scores were bad, and current scores are even worse. And the declines play favorites: low-income students and students of color fared far worse [nytimes.com]. Older students – with less time left in their public education to make up learning losses – are recovering more slowly than younger children [washingtonpost.com]. Support for virtual learning during the pandemic varied dramatically among communities, and students who were in virtual learning longer fared worse as well [Ibid.]. I live in Illinois, where schools were closed for a long time. That choice may have supported how much better Illinois did with Covid than many states, but our state’s children now pay the price.

Expressions of concern and hand-wringing over troubling scores will not move us off the dime. I support the call for a historic investment in education published by leading educators in an opinion piece for the Washington Post entitled “To help students shoot for the moon, we must think bigger and bolder” [washingtonpost.com]. Their metaphor of a moonshot is apt; we must support a major effort to address these losses that is both immediate and effective. Under President Kennedy, NASA realized they would need a much bigger rocket to reach the moon than we’d ever built, and major investment allowed the development of the Saturn V that took us to the moon. Research offers several solutions to our current crisis in education:

Providing students with three hours of tutoring, with three or fewer students per teacher — each week can produce a year’s worth of additional growth.
Summer school provides an academic quarter of growth.
One additional period of algebra instruction can teach a semester’s worth of algebra [Ibid.].

I would add a number of other strategies:

Offer classroom teachers more support and professional development.
Offer parents/guardians specific work that they might help their students accomplish.
Increase the teacher pipeline so we don’t have classrooms being combined and supervised by non-teachers, a serious problem now. We need teachers to feel valued and supported, not exhausted.
Increase mental health services on site for both students and faculty/staff.
Increase the mental health pipeline.
Find a way to limit political attacks on school board members so that they can focus on the urgent issues we all face.

None of this will be inexpensive. As a nation, though, we need a 21^st century work force of critical thinkers, collaborative workers, and quality producers. We need a comprehensive approach to mental health issues, behavior, and academics. That won’t happen unless we seize this opportunity for another “moonshot.”

Tag: Elementary Education