Teaching – Dare to Teach and Learn

The Culture Wars: A Harmful Distraction

Politicians and other public figures continue to push the culture wars as a distraction instead of focusing on solving the very real problems facing our schools and communities. Their actions cause harm while preventing the kind of collaborative problem-solving we so urgently need. All of us must speak up.

The American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom (OIF) reported 695 attempts to censor library materials and services and documented challenges to 1,915 unique titles in just the first eight months of 2023. The number of unique titles challenged has increased by 20% from the same reporting period in 2022, a year that had already shattered censorship records. Challenges to books in public libraries accounted for 49% of documented challenges, compared to 16% during the same reporting period in 2022. Challenges by a single person or group demanding the removal or restriction of multiple titles dominate, with over 90% of the overall number of books challenged included as part of an attempt to censor multiple titles.

“These attacks on our freedom to read should trouble every person who values liberty and our constitutional rights, said Deborah Caldwell-Stone, director of ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom. “To allow a group of people or any individual, no matter how powerful or loud, to become the decision-maker about what books we can read or whether libraries exist, is to place all of our rights and liberties in jeopardy” (uniteagainstbookbans.org).

Libraires themselves are under attack. “Some libraries have received bomb threats; others are at risk of having their funding slashed, or even face closure, over disputes about book removals. In some instances, librarians have been harassed, threatened and called groomers and pedophiles” (nytimes.com).

According to PEN America, the movement to ban books is driven by a vocal minority demanding censorship despite a 2022 poll showing that over 70% of parents oppose book banning. PEN counted book removals in school and classroom libraries during the 2022-2023 school year and found 3,362 cases of books being removed, a 33 percent increase over the previous school year. More than 1,550 individual titles were targeted. Many of the same books are challenged around the country, including classics by Toni Morrison and Margaret Atwood, and contemporary young adult fiction by popular authors like John Green. “The most dramatic spike in book bans took place in Florida, which removed more than 1,400 books and surpassed Texas as the state with the highest number of removals, according to PEN. Florida emerged as a hot spot for book challenges after the state passed several laws aimed in part at restricting educational and reading material on certain subjects. As school districts scrambled to comply with the new regulations earlier this year, some teachers and librarians removed entire shelves of books” (pen.org).

Free speech advocates worry that some school districts will further limit book access by suspending new book purchases or avoid stocking books on topics that might be viewed as controversial. “The way it’s going to begin to manifest may look different,” said Kasey Meehan, the lead author of PEN’s report. “We’ll begin to see this chilled atmosphere play out in different ways, either through quietly removing books, or not bringing books in, in the first place” (nytimes.com).

The novelist Nora Roberts responded to the decision of a Martin County, Florida school to purge eight of her novels based on the complaints of a single member of the conservative group Moms for Liberty: “All of it is shocking…If you don’t want your teenager reading this book, that’s your right as a mom — and good luck with that. But you don’t have the right to say nobody’s kid can read this book.” The very same parents who want their parental rights protected too often would do so by denying those rights to other parents (washingtonpost.com).

Alexi Giannoulias, Illinois Secretary of State and State Librarian, recently testified to a Senate Judiciary Committee, “Our democracy depends on a marketplace of ideas [that] will not function if we ban books, because we will be banning ideas and preventing our children from thinking for themselves and having the ability to debate and learn and understand different perspectives” (chicagotribune.com). But even in Illinois books are being removed. The Yorkville school board removed the book Just Mercy from the curriculum, deeming it inappropriate and upsetting for teens. This book explores issues in the American justice system and should promote meaningful discussion. I’m proud of Yorkville High School senior Alexis Barkman. She said, “By allowing the opinions of a select few to influence what is taught in our classrooms, you’re sending the message that their beliefs are more important that the quality of our education. You’re depriving us of our freedom to read and form our own opinions about the subjects you deem too controversial” (shawlocal.com).

Such behavior for political purposes is offensive to me. Look at a Missouri candidate for governor, State Senator Bill Eigel. A long-shot at best, he very publicly used a flamethrower to set cardboard boxes on fire. Eigel said he would burn books he found objectionable, and that he’d do it on the lawn outside the governor’s mansion. Later he claimed this was all a metaphor for how he would attack “the woke liberal agenda” (chicagotribune.com). Is this dangerous stunt more important than the key issues defined by Missouri University Extension: economic opportunity, educational access and workforce preparedness, and health and wellbeing (muextensionway.missouri.edu)? Of course not.

And books aren’t the only front line. The United States Senate is arguing over a dress code even as the nation faces a likely government shutdown and its consequential impact. A black student in Texas just filed a federal civil rights lawsuit because his high school disapproves of his dreadlocks even though he ties them up on his head to meet school requirements (chicagotribune.com). When we continue to face an achievement gap for students of color and a school-to-prison pipeline, is this really our priority?

Heidi Stevens, my favorite Chicago Tribune columnist, said it best: “Stop pretending book bans are about sex… Stop pretending we can solve the most pressing, dire issues of our time – the climate crisis, the opioid overdose epidemic, gun violence, the recent doubling of childhood poverty – the mental health crisis among young people – without including all sorts of voices, stories, perspectives, ideas, experiences, and wisdom in public discourse and policy making” (www.chicagotribune.com). Please heed her call to action and reach out to your elected officials.

“Let the Children Lead the Way”

Whitney Houston was right when she sang, “I believe the children are our future
Teach them well and let them lead the way.”

At a time when political polarization continues to fracture families and communities, we hear voices of reason among our youth. An opinion piece in The Washington Post this week proves that once again.

Eli Tillemann, a senior at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science & Technology in Alexandria, Virginia, described a divisive issue in his school that led to further polarization among adults (washingtonpost.com). This top-rated magnet school saw its selective admissions process overhauled by the Fairfax County School Board in an effort to improve diversity. No longer would applicants have to pay a $100 application fee or undergo standardized testing. Sadly, the infighting that followed nearly ended the Parent Teacher Association and a lawsuit was filed with the Supreme Court.

Tillemann shows more maturity than most of us when he writes, “Over the past two years, many of my classmates and I have learned a valuable lesson from this factional squabbling: It doesn’t work. When a society separates into warring camps, no one is left to have a meaningful conversation about fixing the underlying issues.” Instead of taking sides, he and many classmates decided to write their own curriculum, to learn to debate constructively and “to build a program that prepares students to navigate our increasingly tribal cognitive ecosystem.” With help from Niels Rosenquist, a psychiatrist and an interdisciplinary researcher at Harvard Medical School, and digital media executive Stuart Schulzke, they created “Dialectic,” a program now being looked at in states like California, Utah, and Massachusetts.

As president of both the Democrats and Republicans at his school, Tillemann has brought them together to host lectures on “the science around communication in the digital age, the neurobiology of tribalism and, perhaps most important, how to disagree.” He writes that more than 70 students attended the kickoff lecture, and that he and his classmates really want to learn how to disagree better, how to avoid the tribalism so apparent in the adults around them.

These students seek to tackle controversial problems, working together to generate better solutions. He writes, “This is not just civility for civility’s sake. The best outcomes in policy, business and life usually emerge from a competition of ideas and a compromise on solutions.”

These young people recognize that their solutions may not be adopted, but they hope to change the acrid environment surrounding the debate about the issue. They recognize that the well-intended changes to the admissions process are still flawed, and they are suggesting options to avoid some of the problems. I am impressed!

But Tillemann is right that we need more work like this around the nation. He says it far more effectively than I could: “Americans must level up the caliber of our discourse by relearning the benefits of practical debate. Constructive, respectful disagreement is vital to a functioning democracy. It is time for both sides to embrace a new strategy for resolving our differences.”

Out of the mouths of babes…

The Power of Perspective

Richard Thomas as Atticus Finch and Yaegel T. Welch as Tom Robinson in BroadwaySF’s “To Kill a Mockingbird.”

We just had the privilege of seeing Aaron Sorkin’s adaptation of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird in Chicago. Full disclosure: TKAM is one of my favorite books, and I loved teaching it to high school students. I love the Gregory Peck movie, too. But Sorkin’s version made me rethink the book. He forced me to recognize some of its limitations even as he managed to make it feel incredibly current.

I grew up with parents who worked for civil rights, and I have tried to honor their commitments by making my own efforts. The horrific events that propelled “Black Lives Matter” spurred my women’s activist group to build on our reading and discussion of White Fragility with other readings and with actions, like questionnaires for school districts and local candidates. I’ve always believed myself to be an ally even when we didn’t seem to be making much impact. So Atticus had always seemed heroic to me.

Toni Morrison was right in 2015, however, when she argued that TKAM perpetuated a “white savior” narrative, in which whites led the fight for civil rights and blacks were helpless, passive actors. So how do we acknowledge the limitations of a book that fit its time period but now seems outdated?

Enter Aaron Sorkin. He shifted the focus and added tough questions. Sorkin recognized that Atticus never changed in the book, nor did he have the heroic flaw that Aristotle insisted was required for effective drama. In the book, both of his children experience a loss of innocence, and Sorkin created an Atticus with a sense of humor who had his own loss of innocence. Atticus taught his children that everyone must be treated with respect, but both Atticus and the audience have to grapple with question of how we should respond to those who show bigotry and commit heinous deeds, a very timely question. Sorkin challenged the white savior arc of the book and the passivity of its victimized blacks. He gave his characters of color more agency. His Calpurnia, the black housekeeper and surrogate mother to the children of Atticus, challenges his liberal views and commitment to niceness, forcing him to recognize the corrosive evil of racism. Sorkin’s story questions the purity of our justice system. And the play, which begins with the trial and references it periodically throughout, ends with a call to action as Scout shouts, “All rise!” Sorkin challenges liberals like himself to stop sitting back and offering empathy in place of action.

As a teacher, I long for the chance to take this play back to the classroom as part of an extended study of sources. I’d take Lee’s first novel, Go Set a Watchman, along with her Pulitzer-prize winning To Kill a Mockingbird, the 1962 Academy Award winning movie starring Gregory Peck, the 1990 stage adaptation by Christopher Sergel, and Sorkin’s play script. What a remarkable opportunity to see the impact of a novel’s time period on its views and the perception of it, to recognize the impact of great editing to evolve from the first novel to its follow-up second version, and – most of all – to appreciate the way literature allows us to confront our world and its limitations. I remain a voracious reader not only because reading transports me to other worlds and other worldviews, but because literature and the discussion of what we read gives us a fictional venue to explore tough issues in a context once removed from our own daily lives. The evolution of my response to TKAM reminds me of the power of great writing once again.

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!

A National Emergency

Suicide.

That’s been on my mind a lot lately. A former student, someone with a rich support network, took his life recently, as did our neighbor’s beautiful and talented college-age daughter. We may never fully understand, but we mourn.

A former colleague posted this on Facebook recently:

A month ago a student I was close to told me she relapsed (cutting herself) after 6 Mos. I told the social worker and now that student won’t speak to me and is ignoring my emails. Today another student told me her boyfriend is depressed and she thinks is suicidal, he now goes to a different school but I had him last year. So I had to tell the social worker and they had to call the other school’s social worker. Now that student will likely no longer speak to me after her boyfriend got pulled out of class today. Being a teacher is so tough.

My response wrote itself before I could think it through: “What you do is invaluable! I’ve known two young people to commit suicide recently. Teachers like you are the first line of defense far too often. I’m so sorry about the toll it takes on you, but you know what a difference you may be making in the lives of some of your students.”

The stats are frightening: suicide has become “the second-leading cause of death among people age 15 to 24 in the U.S. Nearly 20% of high school students report serious thoughts of suicide and 9% have made an attempt to take their lives, according to the National Alliance on Mental Illness” (uclahealth.org).

According to the Pew Trust research survey of high school students:

22% said that they had seriously considered suicide within the past year, up from 16% in 2011
18% said that they had made a suicide plan, compared with 13% ten years earlier
10% said they attempted suicide at least once, compared with 8% ten years earlier
Female, black, and LGBTQ+ students had higher rates than other groups (pewtrusts.org)

Suicide prevention resources often list possible warning signs. Too often, adults miss the warning signs or the signs aren’t obvious. We already know that kids often struggle with their mental health, and I’ve called for more mental health support in schools and the community often. What, though, might change this growing tragedy?

Some important steps:

Increase mental health services in schools and the community – that’s urgent!
Train teachers to recognize any warning signs and teach them how to proceed when they do.
Provide training for parents so they, too, can recognize warning signs and know where and how to seek help for their kids.
Support the American Academy of Pediatrics recommendation for universal suicide risk screenings for teens; most people who die by suicide have visited a healthcare provider in the weeks or months before to their death (aap.org).
Publicize suicide hotlines: the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline is available by phone, text, or chat 24/7 (https://988lifeline.org/), and The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is a 24-hour, toll-free, confidential suicide prevention hotline at 1-800-273-TALK.
Expand anti-bullying programs; too many bullied teens commit suicide to avoid the pain.
Teach teens to be realistic about social media.
Teach teens about self-care.
Work on gun safety since firearms account for a growing number of suicides, more than half of all suicides in 2020 (kff.org). Limit gun sales to young adults and teach gun owners to lock up their firearms.
Teach parents to remove or secure dangerous drugs and lethal substances.

Two years ago the American Academy of Pediatrics partnered with the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatrists and Children’s Hospital Association “to declare a national emergency in child and adolescent mental health” (aap.org2). What’s changed in two years? Not enough. The time is now.

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.