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!

As a result, I was relieved to find that the Biden-era Office of Civil Rights guidance on avoiding discrimination in the use of AI issued in the final weeks of that administration, which the Trump administration sent down the memory hole, was saved by others: it can be found online here. I have downloaded it and I recommend you do so, as well.

When anyone is recommending that IEPs or parent communications or translations be generated in such a fashion as saving work, make copies. Leave them out on conference room tables. Frame them. Put them on the fridge. 

And while I have neither time or patience this week to read the recent "policy guidance" generated by our own Department here in Massachusetts, while you're at it, read Benjamin Riley on recent moves on AI:

Where to start with the bullshit, where to start. Among other things, the resolution states that the state board of education (BESE) must play a “critical role…in ensuring equitable access to high-quality AI instruction.” I would love for someone at BESE to tell me what “high-quality AI instruction” they have in mind, because there sure isn’t any rigorous research I’ve read to support the existence of such a thing. Likewise, BESE wants to “assist local school systems in evaluating and adopting adaptable, high-quality AI learning solutions”—but what are these so-called solutions? What exactly is the problem that these purported solutions are solving for—that humans exist?

The delicious irony here is that the Louisiana AI resolution is clearly designed to position the state to go after whatever federal education funding trickles out from the Trump Administration’s Executive Order-palooza on AI. I am sure all the conservative education pundits who railed against the Obama and Biden Administrations for “federal overreach” into state education policy will condemn this effort too, because they place principle ahead of naked power grabs, right?

Hmmm, sure.