can we stop considering Sal Khan an expert now?

 I very much appreciate Matt Barnum's piece this week on how it turns out---color me shocked--that Sal Khan's whole forecast on how AI in education was going to work out is not. 

Three years ago, as Khan Academy founder Sal Khan rolled out an AI-powered tutoring chatbot, he predicted a revolution in learning.

So far, the revolution hasn’t happened, he acknowledges.

“For a lot of students, it was a non-event,” Khan told me recently about his eponymous chatbot, Khanmigo. “They just didn’t use it much.”

Khan gives this analogy: Imagine he walked into a class, sat in the back of the room, and waited for students to seek out help. “Some will; most won’t,” he said. That’s been the experience with AI tutoring, he said. It doesn’t necessarily make students motivated to learn or fill in gaps in knowledge needed to ask questions.

And in a particularly "we could have told you that" bit: 

 Kristen DiCerbo, the organization’s chief learning officer, said AI can only respond to students based on what they ask. And it turns out, she said, “Students aren’t great at asking questions well.”

Right, because asking good questions is part of learning which is a thing that has to be taught.

I really can't do better than Audrey Watters on this: 

 It's a change from the sweeping rhetoric of Khan's 2023 TED Talk in which he proclaimed that, "We’re at the cusp of using AI for probably the biggest positive transformation that education has ever seen." Invoking the highly questionable (that is to say utterly un-replicated) findings from the classic "2 Sigma Problem" paper by Benjamin Bloom – a paper first published in 1984 and invoked now by decades of ed-tech evangelists – Khan claimed that “the way we’re going to do that is by giving every student on the planet an artificially intelligent but amazing personal tutor.”

Amazing. Or ... not.

She observes that inevitably, the response of the rejection is to then given students (and teachers, often) no choice but to use whatever the new hip tech thing is that is around, which is, of course, just what Khan Academy has done; from Chalkbeat:

Now Khanmigo is incorporated directly as a way students can get advice as they’re working through specific problems. A spokesperson said the organization made this change because “students were not seeking out Khanmigo’s help as much as we had hoped.”

Four things I would have preferred the House do this week

1.  Move forward the bar on religious exemptions for vaccinations. Just this week, the West Virginia bar withstood a federal appeals challenge. Just today, the AP is noting that babies too young for the MMR vaccine become "sitting ducks" in an outbreak. Given the anti-vaccine push by the federal government (as much as the courts are doing what they can), we cannot afford cracks in our community immunity. 
   
   
2. Do literally anything at all about Massachusetts being the only state in the country that has Democrats in charge of both chambers and the Governor's office and has a 287(g) contract with ICE. 
   Seriously. Anything at all. You could even pass a bill to make it illegal, like Maryland or Virginia, as that's the whole reason we have a legislature: making laws. 
   
   
3. Pass legislation protecting our immigrant neighbors from being preyed upon by the federal government, like the PROTECT Act, which passed out of committee two weeks ago, yet somehow was not seen as being as urgent as that bill on cell phones. I have been told they passed this? I haven’t seen that, if so. 
    
4. Move forward the legislation that updates how inflation is calculated in the foundation budget, and make it effective for FY27, better aligning the foundation budget with district costs (and perhaps keeping us from the mistake of digging even bigger hold harmless aid holes).
   
   

please enjoy these pansies from my walk to work in Boston

The House passed the most draconian social media ban in the country

From State House News Service this evening:  

The House on Wednesday put Massachusetts on track to join a handful of other states in placing restrictions on children’s social media use – an issue that is playing out in courts across the country. The House passed legislation on a 129-25 vote, largely along party lines, prohibiting social media use for children under 14 and requiring that social media platforms obtain parental consent for users aged 14 and 15. Representatives said the legislation closely follows a similar law in Florida, which is still being challenged in court two years after it was passed. The legislation leaves many of the regulatory decisions surrounding how to enforce the policy amid an ever-evolving online landscape up to Attorney General Andrea Campbell. Reps added language to the bill that limits some parental monitoring of social media usage "to protect certain vulnerable populations," Rep. Peisch said on the floor, and adds further protections for 14- and 15-year-olds related to the "addictive nature" of some platforms. The bill also bans students from using their cellphones throughout the school day. The House dispensed with almost all of the 29 amendments filed on the legislation through two consolidated amendments.

"on party lines" means it was Democrats who voted to violate young people's privacy, Democrats who voted to make them less safe in school, Democrats who voted to require that we all turn our information over to social media companies.  

I cannot even.

Update: here’s the vote:

"risk eroding the very human capabilities they are meant to support"

Is there bad AI news this week?
Friends, there is ALWAYS bad AI news!

Two things to review: 

• A paper released by Cornell University looking at the "consequences of AI assistance" using mathematic reasoning and reading comprehension (that is, two of the core competencies of education!). They found: 
  

  AI assistance reduces persistence and impairs independent performance: After brief AI-assisted sessions (~10 minutes), participants were significantly more likely to give up on problems and performed significantly worse once the AI was removed, compared to participants who never had AI assistance.
  Effects are concentrated among users who seek direct solutions: Persistence costs were concentrated among participants who prompted AI to solve tasks for them directly. Using AI for hints or clarifications did not produce significant impairments.
  Effects generalize across domains: Effects replicated across fraction arithmetic and reading comprehension, suggesting it is a general consequence of AI-assisted problem solving, not specific to any particular task.

  Their conclusion?
  

  These findings raise urgent questions about the cumulative effects of daily AI use on human persistence and reasoning. We caution that if such effects accumulate with sustained AI use, current AI systems — optimized only for short-term helpfulness — risk eroding the very human capabilities they are meant to support.

  I found this page which gives visuals for their findings very accessible; I include one below. 

  
  

• Sam Altman, the head of OpenAI, is the subject of an in-depth profile in The New Yorker . It reads almost as a parable of hubris: you can trace the loss over time within the company of values expressed early on.
  That he has as much power as he does is horrifying.

Visual from "AI Assistance Reduces Persistence and Hurts Independent Performance"

paying attention to dual language in Worcester

 I've only occasionally been paying attention to what's going on with the Worcester Public Schools¹, but a sequence over the past week has me paying attention. 

Samuel Adams in the U.S. Capitol
Because I am feeling a lot like that about this.

One of the things that is very close to my heart, both personally and professionally, is Worcester's dual language program. Over my transom last week came the following message that had gone to parents in the dual language program: 

on the cell phone and social media bill before the Mass House

 Tomorrow, the Mass House is voting on a bill on social media and cell phones for youth that includes, as the post from WBUR puts it: 

...prohibiting social media use for children under 14, requiring platforms to obtain parental consent for users ages 14 and 15, and banning students from using cellphones in schools.

The Boston Globe adds that it also would share information posted with the parents of young people between the ages of 14 and 15. 

This is terrible in so many ways!

I sent the following email off to my state rep John Mahoney yesterday:

 John,

I am writing to urge you to vote against the proposed bill regarding social media and cell phones that will be before you this week.

Young people in marginalized communities very frequently find support on social media platforms, in many cases, support that they cannot find in their own families and communities. Barring them from those platforms, and, at under age 15, pushing anything they submit to their parents is not only an inappropriate violation of their privacy (which, yes, they have); it may well endanger young people. The rates of rejection and abuse of young people who are gay and trans is high, even in Massachusetts. 

Doing age checks requires ALL of us to submit OUR data to social media companies; this is not something I wish to do, and it is wildly irresponsible for the legislature to expect that of us.

Young people who are currently endangered by the federal government also should not have their communication devices (which also include cameras) [taken] from them at the schoolhouse door. That is the opposite of supportive.

This is, top to bottom, a bad bill, John. Please oppose it.

Thank you,

Tracy Novick 

_______________________________
Do I need to remind you again that my blog posts are just from me as me? Here's that reminder. 

Remember: on the federal budget, this is just the opening round

 You might be concerned or confused by headlines that came through over the weekend like this: 

Did we just DO a federal budget?
We did, but that one was overdue (thus the shutdown) and was the current federal fiscal year budget, 'though it funds next school year.

Now we're starting NEXT fiscal year, FY27, which for the federal government starts in October, which will funding school year 2027-28.

With me?

Now to the alarming headlines: you might remember that we also had alarming news from the initial proposal from the Trump administration for the current fiscal year, too. The House proposal was also alarming, and then the Senate put their feet down and we got a largely level funded federal budget.

So pay attention, but don't panic.