We don't encourage children to play with poison

 ...and we shouldn't be pretending generative AI is anything but.

Let me preface this by saying that this is a tough read, so please keep that in mind.

And in no other country

Minneapolis Mayor Frey at a press conference yesterday

Inevitable day after headline: 

from today's Minnesota Star Tribune

 Today's New York Times op-ed:

...it bears repeating: The prevalence of this problem is not normal, no other country has to deal with it to this extent, and we are not powerless to act.

How AI violates civil rights: Biden-era OCR guidance

Happy back to school!
WOW, we are seeing some terrible, no good, very bad AI professional development and recommendations for educators out there!

Considerations for Worcester's fall election

Because we have our preliminary election approaching, I offer the following considerations I am using in making my decisions over whom I vote for.

As always, these are my thoughts as an individual Worcester voter.

1. No fascists.
   As with many other terms of specific historical "bad guys," this is one that has become an insult flung at those with whom one disagrees. That isn't what I mean when I use it. I'm using here the definition shared by the American Library Association in their "Making Sense of Current Events" presentation.
   

“Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints, goals of internal cleansing and external expansion” (Paxton, 2004, p. 218)

While I've seen this less markedly in the campaign materials I've seen, the "preoccupation with community decline" certainly is something that comes through with some.

2. If they've been in office either this past term or before, and they didn't actually do the job--didn't review the agenda for meetings, didn't pay attention in meetings, didn't schedule or attend subcommittee meetings--no, thank you.

3.Whether or not they've served in the role for which they're running, if they make it apparent that they haven't the faintest idea what, by state law and municipal charter, their job actually is, I'm not interested.

This rather narrows the field. 

____
PS: If you leave a flyer on my mailbox that says "Sorry we missed you!" and I have been home all day, you really, really don't get a vote from me. 

What Meta AI is allowing in their rules of operation

The examples on this one are frankly so gross that I don't want them on my blog, but I also realize that not everyone clicks through, and so, AFTER the jump, I'm providing the screenshots from this Reuters piece written from the actual internal Meta rules. 

Public school districts having to provide transportation for other schools hurts public school students

Obligatory school bus photo, from my recent vacation in Canada,
because, yes, I take photos of school buses even on vacation.

Making the rounds right now is this report in The Guardian from Ohio, which, like Massachusetts, requires that public school districts provide transportation to students within their bounds to private and charter school students in their bounds.¹

A shortage of drivers and buses combined with the threat of fines, means that public school districts in Dayton and around Ohio find themselves relegating their own students to the back of the transportation line.

On Gene Haas and his "donation"

 

Well, look at that: it appears that the bidding on the ongoing effort by Gene Haas to improve his Google results is now up to $500K!

As the T&G is linking to a paywalled New York Times report on Haas' 2008 conviction of felony conspiracy to commit tax evasion, for which he served two years in federal prison and paid a $5M fine on top of paying $70M in restitution, let me help you out with a gift link. The T&G itself wrote about this at the time of the initial grant. You can also read about that initial discussion, in which the students played a big role, here. 

Back to school discussions on use of AI

 Two to read: 

That's a woodland aster. 
That means you should start your school shopping, New England.

It's still inflation

...still

 Big h/t to Superintendent Bill Runey of Dighton-Rehoboth, quoted in the Enterprise coverage of "what's up with these overrides":

The “root cause” of all the overrides is that the state has not been increasing education funding to counteract rising costs, said Superintendent of the Dighton-Rehoboth Regional School District Bill Runey.

And how has this interacted with the end of federal pandemic aid?

 The end of federal money meant to help students recover from the pandemic disruptions is leading to overstretched budgets, Runey said. Districts knew they shouldn’t have used the money for costs that recur each year — like teacher’s salaries — but they didn’t really have a choice, he said.

“We had students who were struggling with learning loss. We had students who were struggling with emotional issues,” he said.

Those effects are lingering beyond the three years schools had access to the extra money, he said, and students still need services from psychologists and adjustment counselors.

“Those services don’t come from a laptop and they don’t come from new cafeteria tables, or a new basketball hoop. They come from people,” he said.

I will also note again: the only reason you're not seeing this in the cities yet is because they've been receiving Student Opportunity Act increases, which, rather than going to the additional teachers, additional services, additional supplies and so forth that were actually why we all pushed so hard for the change are going to cover inflationary changes.
We've got one more year and then that's gone, too. 
Action is urgently needed on INFLATION.  

Is there bad news on AI in education? Edition whatever

 Yes, friends, there is ALWAYS bad news in AI education!

First up, Benjamin Riley is as frustrated as I am about AI in education and this nonsense "moonshot" notion, in a post that I urge you to read from first to last.

Some schools have been using AI surveillance software, and it not only is triggering false alarms; it has resulted in not only student discipline, but also students being arrested.

And yesterday, we had another release of research which tells us the same things we find every time we ask: 

Asked to generate intervention plans for struggling students, AI teacher assistants recommended more-punitive measures for hypothetical students with Black-coded names and more supportive approaches for students the platforms perceived as white, a new study shows...

Common Sense Media found that while these tools could help teachers save time and streamline routine paperwork, AI-generated content could also promote bias in lesson planning and classroom management recommendations.

Robbie Torney, senior director of AI programs at Common Sense Media, said the problems identified in the study are serious enough that ed tech companies should consider removing tools for behavior intervention plans until they can improve them. That’s significant because writing intervention plans of various sorts is a relatively common way teachers use AI.

The report from Common Sense Media can be found here. 

I will echo Riley's post then, here: 

Add to that all of the generative AI systems. 

There's actually some really interesting points on enrollment in this report

 ...but friends, you are not going to glean them from reading the Boston Globe's coverage.

Please enjoy these lovely flowers from Montreal,
which have nothing to do with this post otherwise.

In June, Joshua Goodman, a professor at BU, and Abigail Francis, who is pursuing her doctorate there, released a study looking at Massachusetts school enrollment from pre-pandemic levels to now. Massachusetts is a handy one for this because the state tracks not only public school enrollment but private and homeschool enrollment (not all states do). 

Their research uncovers three main points: 

I have tabs open today, too

 Here are three to read:

• The way that we know what is going on with our local government, including our schools, is through local news, which is being infected by AI-generated slop. WGBH has good coverage on this "pink slime journalism."
  

• Josh Brake applies Frog and Toad's "Cookie Box Principle" to AI use. I would go a step further and go all the way: toss it entirely.

• The 74 takes up the new "AI Academy" [wince] that the American Federation of Teachers has announced they'll open. The title of the piece is "Will new AI Academy help teachers or just improve tech's bottom line?" The issue of course is even worse than framed by the question, which remarkably is actually framed in the article: 
  

  Writing in her Substack newsletter, ed-tech critic and AI skeptic Audrey Watters called AFT’s partnership with the tech companies “a gigantic public experiment that no one has asked for.”
  Unions, she wrote, “should be one of the ways in which workers resist, rather than acquiesce to … the tech industry’s vision of the future.” By joining forces with big tech, she said, AFT is implicitly endorsing its products. “Teaching teachers how to use a suite of Microsoft tools does not help students as much as it helps Microsoft. Teaching teachers how to use a suite of Microsoft tools is not so much an ‘academy’ as a storefront.”
  Benjamin Riley, who has also written critically about generative AI in education, said observers should “100% worry” that the new partnerships represent a play for market share.
  “It’s very obvious from a product standpoint that they see education as one of, if not the primary, place to go with their product,” said Riley. “And the fact that AFT is willing to say, ‘Cool, let’s get some of that money and we’ll build a training center to help teachers use it,’ I can see why OpenAI would jump all over that.”
  But he questioned whether AI training is what AFT members really want. He suggested instead that the union should recommit to helping teachers more deeply understand how learning works. “They haven’t been opposed to it,” he said, noting that it has long run an “Ask the Cognitive Scientist” column in the magazine it mails to members. “But in reality it just hasn’t been a priority. Improving pedagogy hasn’t really been, to my eyes, a union priority for a long time.”
  Riley, who in 2024 founded the think tank Cognitive Resonance to explore AI issues, said an organization like AFT should ideally be thinking about whether embracing AI will lead to better outcomes for children — or whether it could “potentially erode and devalue the work of human teaching” while opening up schools as customers for AI companies.

   

  
  

Perhaps the line is drawn at education

Two stories from the end of last week about school funding have something in common: Republicans rejected school funding cuts.

Some things to read this week

From tabs I have open today:

• I thought this look at the "anti-conviviality" of generative AI was very interesting and important for those who are in education: 
  

  The expertise you would have gained by growing your own fruit, by trying in fits and starts to make your own vision a reality—these opportunities for growth are completely lost. Unless you actively work against the natural way to use these tools, you become increasingly dependent on them. You can produce and produce without ever growing yourself. Even worse, it's not hard to see how the skills you do have will slowly atrophy from lack of use.

•  Intriguing question being raised by the courts in Canada on if social media companies might hold a "duty of care" to school boards: 
  

  Should the Court recognize a novel duty of care in this case, social media companies could be found liable to individual users and public institutions, such as school boards. 
  
  

• And speaking of Canada, a recent report from the Ontario Ministry of Education yielded this post on the importance of recess: 
  

  As researchers who have long studied the links between school environments and children’s well-being, we know that reducing or restructuring recess time can negatively impact learning and development.
   Indeed, research consistently shows that recess plays a vital role in academic success, mental health and overall well-being.

• You should always read what Zahava Standler at New America writes; today she writes on the crucial role a national Department of Education fulfills and what we stand to lose by not having that: 
  

  Across these policies runs a common thread: We are not in this together, we owe each other nothing, and the future is not our concern. It is a small, mean vision of America.

• Relatedly, the New York Times has a lengthy piece on the damage the Trump administration is doing to community colleges, and, by extension, our communities: 
  

  Community colleges already subsisted on budgets that most four-year schools would find laughable, lean operations that delivered hefty returns on investment for their areas. Get care at a local doctor’s office, or prepped for surgery at a hospital, or treated after an accident, or have someone come to your home to do repairs — “those are all community-college grads, all of them,” the community-college leader told me. “This collateral damage is going to end up being regional economic damage.”

  and the joy in this quote! 
  

  “Milton is the GOAT!” he cried out. “‘Paradise Lost’ is everything that I love!”

What we have here is a failure of imagination

I was wishing for a high school English class with whom to discuss irony when I read this last week:

That master of horror himself Stephen King is throwing the towel on fighting the monster is just a little too on the nose here. 

So now we're losing kids

 Don't miss that the next chapter in the Worcester confrontation with ICE is that now the two girls are missing from DCF custody:

After their mother’s arrest, Nayara Ferreira de Moura and a second daughter, Karoline Ferreira de Moura, 13, were placed in the custody of the Department of Children and Families. On Thursday, Worcester police confirmed there was an ongoing investigation to locate the 13-year-old, Karoline, who is considered an “endangered runaway due to her age,” spokesman Joseph Cersosimo said.

The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children lists both of the sisters as missing on its website.

An attorney for the family told the MassLive news publication that the 17-year-old, Nayara, had returned to Brazil to reunite with her older sister. She was last seen in Lancaster on June 5, according to the center.

Karoline was last seen in the custody of the state’s child protection agency on July 20, police said, although a witness told the Globe she had given the younger girl a ride to the Philadelphia area this past weekend.

So now, in addition to the mother's arrest not making our community safer, we have absolutely put those two kids in danger.  

No, he can't make you do sit-ups

A funny side effect of this week's declaration by Trump that he will be re-what? declaring? the Presidential Physical Fitness Test¹ was a nice social media sharing of everyone who had dreaded it, or hated some parts of it. In the above linked article, the Washington Post even notes this: 

There have long been concerns that the test can involve public shaming of children in front of their peers. It is often described as “embarrassing,” “humiliating” and “traumatizing” by those who had to take it.

As for if it would work: 

 ...it is most beneficial to exercise consistently, which is not necessarily addressed by twice-yearly tests.

It did motivate me to create something which you may find ongoingly useful: 

¹Personal take: if we're going to bring back Cold-War-era PE things, why can't it be gymnastics? Uneven parallel bars and balance beams were fun, even if they were harrowing for any of us using them in basement cafeteria spaces!