...don't miss the NBC News look at what videos students are watching on their school-issued devices.
And don't miss Matt Barnum's coverage of the Trump administration official who likened ed tech to tobacco. The problem there is that its being used as an argument against continuing Erate (pendulum again...).
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| It's a lovely time of year in Massachusetts. Do get out and enjoy it. My photo of a former schoolhouse in Belchertown yesterday. |
The tabs I have open:
At 4 PM last Friday, October 2, State House News Service sent an article entitled as follows:
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| Headline reads "Ads critical of Boston Public Schools removed from T" |
NBC 10 picked up the article, which you can read here.
Saturday's edition of the Boston Globe included this column from Adrian Walker, headlined "Dark Money comes for the Boston Public Schools," in which he attempted to chase down who it was that was funding the new "Next Chapter Boston" and their $1.5M ad buy.
This then spun over the weekend into accusations of who could possibly have made the call to pull the ads, cries of censorship, and no movement towards any discovery of who was funding the ads that would have followed Boston secondary school students on their way to school each morning.
Should we ever get to the bottom of who funded the ads, it is, as Walker notes:
People who suddenly pour big money into something like that aren’t just trying to “raise awareness” — whatever that really means. They are trying to influence public policy. And the public has a right to know who they are, and what they really want.
The website, for what it's worth, offers a sign-up and a letter calling for "measurable, public goals" in clear language alongside an explanation of how the budget is being used for "evidence-based instructional practices and curriculum in all subjects."
And maybe that's it. But I think that's a lot of advertising for that.
My guess as to what they want is this: I don't think it is a coincidence that these ads went up the same week that the U.S. Treasury released the rules on the federal voucher program. Massachusetts, as has been noted this week, is neither in nor out; Governor Healey had said she was awaiting the rules to decide. Her response last week was:
“Well, you know, what I understand is that Treasury has released temporary regulations. I don’t know what that means. So, you know, what I’ve said from the beginning is this, and I’ll continue to say, we need to make sure that nothing harms public education.”
Having the local public transit scream that the largest public school system in the state was failing its students would give an extra push to any riding who might have influence on Beacon Hill as Healey is continuing to decide.
As others, including Marketplace, have noted, it is private education that is most likely to benefit from these programs. And when we talk about private education (especially in a place like Massachusetts), we tend to think of college prep schools with brick buildings on leafy campuses. For states that already have vouchers, though, that isn't what you should think about. You should think about a few reporters at the local brew pub coming one fire inspection away from approval as a private school, as ProPublica reported this week, in a piece in which they applied to create of a private school in North Carolina, Arkansas, and West Virginia.
And even as it isn't that easy in Massachusetts, where private schools have to be approved by their local school committee, within a limited purview, the chance to use federal funds (the dollars here would have been federal tax dollars) for non-public, non-publicly-allocated and -accountable uses is deeply concerning.
And possibly was worth $1.5M in advertising.
The backlash’s “why” is simple at its core. Many Americans feel like they never consented to any of this. I had no idea that my online interactions would one day be scraped en masse for AI model training. I didn’t ask for Instagram to enable deepfakes on my account. I didn’t want Google to push AI-generated answers at the top of search results. I woke up one day, and generative AI features were stuffed into every corner of all the software I rely on without my consent.
When Gaggle quarantines a draft, when Securly assigns a kid a rolling “wellness level,” when a detection system decides the shape in a student’s hand is a gun, the software is filing a report about a young person’s intentions. And it arrives first. It shows up carrying the authority of a system that cost the district millions and speaks in the grammar of objectivity, and it lands in front of an administrator or a school cop before the kid has said a word. The student’s account comes second, when it’s generally too late.
Hard to "believe kids" when they're always the ones responding to something that has already been invested, literally, which such authority.
Florida's voucher program and so-called parents' rights push has just run headlong into 2000 years of hierarchy, with the Florida Attorney General receiving, upon his push to force Catholic schools that are receiving vouchers to allow students to attend even if they are not vaccinated, a tour de force letter from the Roman Catholic bishops of Florida, which I really recommend you read.
Respectfully, any insinuation that a government official can dictate to the Catholic Church (or any religion) how to apply her tenets and dogma, violates well-established constitutional religious freedom rights. It is beyond cavil that the bishops, not the state, decide how to interpret and apply Catholic principles and theology.
I'll note that the letter does a nice job of laying out why one might required universal vaccination, by the way, something which I'd appreciate more of our Massachusetts politicians reading.
Steve Revilak has been posting highlights from the Arlington, MA archives via his Bluesky account, and I very much appreciated, as a child of the 70's, this one from 1971 about the latest menace on the street of Arlington: BIG WHEELS!
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Kids have been off task and distracted in school long before Chromebooks or iPads existed. But some parents and experts say devices only make it easier to engage in non-academic, inappropriate and even dangerous content.
This is especially challenging for young children whose brains, self-regulation skills and self-control are still developing.
The audit found that none of the examined meta-analyses provided a valid basis for the claims they advanced: none had a coherent construct, none sufficiently assessed publication bias, and all had severe heterogeneity. Statistics were misapplied, miscalculated, and misinterpreted. A majority (61%) of the randomly vetted primary studies were problematic, most commonly because the outcome measured didn’t match the meta-analysis.I await any of the educational publications I read, all of which have ongoingly significantly boosted this breathless urgency of such use in education, to put this one of their front page.
Some things I have been reading:
We know from leaked documents that Google considers schools “pipeline of future users,” as leaked documents have shown, and it appears that being "Google trained," as the AI bubble continues onwards, isn't sufficient, as Google is now training Google Gemini evangelists, as NBC news reports.
I recommend reading it, though I'll also note that Peter Greene does quite a nice job of channeling some of the rage I feel reading it, as well. The observation I'll make is that the notion that those objecting to or opposing the use might have any valid points is of course waved away.
One must convert or one is not worthy of consideration.
The Globe writes today about the work the Cambridge Public Schools has done on auditing their screen use. You might remember my writing about this back in February, when the Crimson wrote about it. You can find the May 19 report to the Cambridge School Committee online here. Their main takeaway:
Again, note that the district has taken the concerns of families seriously, has done real work on it, and the district is changing policy and procedure as a result.
I'm going to suggest that districts insisting that children must use technology in schools when parents don't want them to--and when teachers and students are also objecting--is not going to go well for the districts.
Learning is seldom about swiftly generating a final product. It’s about the slow, arduous work necessary for getting to a final product. From a great teacher’s perspective, what a student wrote in her final paper is less important than the weeks of researching relevant sources, assembling evidence, and outlining an argument. That great teacher doesn’t want a student to just write the correct answers on the exam; he wants the student to spend hours and hours reading texts closely, figuring out why that formula works, or trying different approaches until landing on the right method.
Along similar lines is this opinion piece in The New York Times this week by David Wallace-Wells (whose level-headedness on cell phones in schools I also appreciate).
The chorus of boos from graduates responding to A.I. boosters at their graduates has only grown this week (my count is up to five, if we include the graduation at which the A.I. announcement of graduates' names went haywire), and Marisa Kabas of The Handbasket starts there in her recent "Hating AI is good, actually."
And I'll be interested to see what Pope Leo has to say in his encyclical Magnifica humanitas ("Magnificent humanity") being released next week. Encyclicals, which is a letter of Catholic teaching, take their titles from their first few words, so we have a hint of his opening with that. Unusually, the Pope will be releasing the encyclical himself, speaking, it is thought, to how important it is to him.
The thing is: having more people trained by a corporation in using that corporation's product is not actually a thing to brag about.
For the past two weeks, nearly every day brings at least one, if not more, article about the tech backlash in schools. An attempt at a roundup:
Nearly one-third of students from kindergarten to 12th grade nationwide use i-Ready, including in nine of the 10 largest school districts.
And the impact on student learning is not nearly as clear as one might like. I really recommend reading, especially if you're in a district that uses it.
A New York City specific parallel to the excellent piece I linked to last month by Jessica Winter in the New Yorker, New York Intelligencer's "Help! My Kindergarten Is All In on AI. “Are they taking over? Yeah, they’re taking over.”" which speaks not only to the depersonalization of apps teaching kids to read and practice math, but notes the "vast amount of data" that STMath*, for example, is collecting from every child. Never forget what it is actually about for the companies:
“These companies are literally mandated by their corporate charters to maximize profits in any way possible,” said Bridget Kessler, a mom of elementary-school-age children in Flatlands who also serves on her local community-education council. “So how can I trust that they have the best interests of my kids in mind?”
Earlier in the piece, by the way, is something I have found particularly insidious: the use of so-called "fellowships" to infiltrate school administrations:
Three years ago, Google partnered with the AI-focused investment firm Global Silicon Valley Ventures to “advance technology” in education — through programs like Amira, which GSV Ventures has a stake in. Top education administrators have joined the Google GSV Education Innovation Fellowship, including superintendent of Manhattan high schools Gary Beidleman and chief academic officer Miatheresa Pate, who is responsible for the city’s AI guidelines. In a policy document from the fellowship, Beidleman advises educators on how to get parents and teachers to accept AI: Find “early adopters and key messengers” to convert skeptics and achieve a “cultural shift” from within.Such programs are not approved by school committees, despite being a commitment of time, and often no one checks if they align with the goals, policies, and values of the district.
Speaking of making money off of all of this, 404 Media reported that the OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft are all supporting the federal Literacy in Future Technologies Artificial Intelligence, or LIFT AI Act. They aren't doing that out of the best interest of students.
In terms specifically on AI, I thought this piece in Vanity Fair in which AI is appearing in TV shows and it is always a bad guy was really telling:
The Hacks team also explores the real-life messaging that the tech community has been using—that “AI is coming whether you like it or not,” a catchphrase that is heard around Hollywood on a near-daily basis. Ava (Hannah Einbinder) pushes back on that idea, criticizing this “forced inevitability.” “People like you are always saying that it’s happening whether you like it or not, but you are the ones making it happen,” she says. “You could easily stop it if people could say that they don’t want it—but you don’t give people a choice.”
Statsky says that aggressiveness from the tech community about AI’s inevitability is a red flag for her as a writer. “Sometimes, when something is being forced so hard, you can smell behind it that it’s not organic and it’s not natural,” she says. “If this was really the dream technology that they were pushing, well, then why are you needing to force it down our throats?”
“OpenAI knew this would happen. It’s happened before and it was only a matter of time before it happened again,” Joshi said in a Monday statement. “But they chose to put their profits over our safety and it killed my husband. They need to be responsible before another family has to go through this.”
Attorneys for Joshi also reiterated that “ChatGPT inflamed and encouraged Ikner’s delusions; endorsed his view that he was a sane and rational individual; helped convince him that violent acts can be required to bring about change,” adding that the software provided what he viewed as encouragement to “carry out a massacre, down to the detail of what time would be best to encounter the most traffic on campus.”
...and that means that we are due for the backlash.
Some of us would say: overdue. As the Boston Globe wrote last week:
Across the state people are rallying to address it — from Fall River to Winchester, Northampton to Cambridge. And pressure is coming from every direction: parents in Scituate, the teachers union in Melrose, cost-conscious administrators in Arlington.
The list of concerns is long. Young children, glued to screens, miss out on needed play and socialization; older students, glued to screens, use them to bully each other. High schoolers rely on AI to cheat. School-issued laptops, taken home, keep sleep-deprived youngsters up past their bedtimes.
Above all, critics worry that the hypnotic flicker of screens is coming between students and learning.
The 74 wrote of this as a parental backlash, but I think that's probably oversimplified. The New York Times article from last month looked specifically at a middle school in Kansas that had deliberately gone limited tech, an effort that came from educators.
One issue not mentioned above in the Globe's list is that of student privacy; Curriculum Associates, which owns iReady, is currently being sued (for one):
In the original complaint the plaintiffs allege the company “creates and extracts reams of personal information from K–12 students.”
“Using that data, Curriculum Associates creates detailed data profiles of students that are used to predict and influence their behavior and guide decision-making about them. It further uses that information for commercial purposes, including developing, marketing, and delivering its own products,” the complaint said. “Curriculum Associates also allows numerous third parties to access the information it obtains from K–12 students for the commercial benefit of both Curriculum Associates and those parties.”
One of the issues at hand, according to the complaint, is that students in schools that use i-Ready are required to be in school, where they are required to use the software during the school day with no alternative, and without giving their consent about the use of their data.
And:
According to the complaint, the data in question may include basic information like a student’s first and last name, birthday and gender, as well as things like their race, first language, grade level, school of enrollment, their teacher, data from their responses to questions in i-Ready assessments and lessons, and data collected about the student when the i-Ready profile is set up. The complaint alleges it could also include data about the specific device students used to complete the lesson on i-Ready.
“The data Curriculum Associates generates and extracts from students who use its Products, including Plaintiffs, far exceeds what could be legally or traditionally characterized as “education Records,” said the complaint. “Even if certain data could be characterized as education records, Plaintiffs — like all students — retain significant rights over the personal information contained in such records, which are protected by state and federal law.”
Makes one long for the days of filing cabinets and manila folders.
All of that, of course, is without the looming insistence that AI be part of all of this. I cannot recommend highly enough this piece by Massachusetts writer and parent Jessica Winter in The New Yorker, "What will it take to get AI out of schools." She starts with her own family's experience:
I don’t like A.I., and I am raising my children not to like it. I’ve been telling them for years now that chatbots are manipulative and dangerous, that A.I. image generators are loosening our collective grip on reality, that large language models are built atop industrial-scale intellectual-property theft. At times, I find myself speaking with my kids about A.I. in the same terms that we might discuss a creepy neighbor who lives down the block: avoid eye contact, cross the street when you walk past his house, and, when in doubt, call on a trusted adult. Yes, I, too, have suspected that the creepy neighbor walks on cloven hooves inside his Yeezy Boosts, but he probably isn’t going anywhere—in fact, he keeps buying up properties around town—so just try your best not to engage.
Somehow, I was not prepared for the creepy neighbor to start hanging around my kids’ schools; somehow, I thought we had until high school. In February, my son, who is in third grade at a public K-5 in Massachusetts, came home with a piece of paper in his backpack that read “Certificate of Completion,” for “demonstrating an understanding of the basic concepts of Artificial Intelligence.” He and his classmates had earned this honor, I learned, by playing a computer game produced by the nonprofit Code.org in partnership with Amazon Future Engineer, called Mix & Move with AI, in which the student “designs” a cartoon dancer and “remixes” a popular song—available, needless to say, on Amazon Music. The game is an inane drag-and-drop affair that has little to do with A.I.; the certificate, it turned out, was merely a memento of a pointless and deceptive branding exercise.
Then, in March, students at my eleven-year-old daughter’s public middle school began receiving new Google Chromebooks, and that is when I heard the tap-tap of the cloven hooves approaching our doorstep. The Chromebooks, which the students use in every class and for homework, came pre-installed with an all-ages version of Gemini, a suite of A.I. tools. When my daughter, who is in sixth grade, begins writing an essay, she gets a prompt: “Help me write.” If she is starting work on a slide-show presentation, the prompt is “Help me visualize.” She shoos away these interruptions, but they persist: “Help me edit.” “Beautify this slide.” The image generator is there, if she’d ever wish to pull the plug on her imagination. The Gemini chatbot is there, if she ever wants to talk to no one.
So many times, so many times, I warned her about the creepy neighbor. Now he reads her poems and knows her passwords. He’s always watching through the screen.
We cannot be passive. Our kids deserve better than this.
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| kids. Get it? |
I'm impressed by the follow-up article from the Boston Globe on the House's disaster of a bill passed last week.*
Civil liberties groups and organizations in favor of tech privacy — including some that are backing the bills — warn the proposals could backfire and make online activity even less private by requiring users to submit personal information to verify their ages or parental status.
Some restrictions, experts argue, would also face First Amendment challenges by limiting young people’s speech and vulnerable groups’ abilities to find community online.
They also note that this means we're not fulfilling our responsibility to students:
“Children need to learn how to use social media so they aren’t using it irresponsibly, and we need to learn how to use our phones,” said Max Nash, a junior at Mashpee High School who formed the Coalition for Student Mental Health to lobby for alternative tech policies. “But that requires education and not a ban.”
I appreciate Rep. Gordon in general, but this is such an odd thing to own up to:
Representative Kenneth Gordon, who chairs the education committee, said lawmakers shaped the bill to closely follow a similar law in Florida, whose under-14 social media ban has faced court challenges for two years.
Florida + court challenges seemed like a good path to follow?
And all of this here:
Both the Healey and House proposals would require age verification measures that civil liberties groups and privacy experts say are excessive. All users — not just minors — could be required to give tech companies more personal information, such as photos of government IDs, to prove their age, they warned.
Healey’s proposal, for instance, would require social media companies to provide a host of age-specific data that could require checking users’ ages.
People who don’t have such IDs, or might be hesitant to provide them, could then be unable to access a wide range of online content. The bill includes a broad definition of social media sites, including nearly any platform with personal accounts and user-generated content, which opponents argue could encompass sites such as the popular information forum Wikipedia.
That ID hurdle has formed the basis of First Amendment challenges in many states, according to Paul Taske, co-director of the NetChoice Litigation Center, a tech industry-funded group that has successfully sued to have the law set aside in several cases.
“Ultimately, the laws suffer from the same core constitutional infirmity: They block or restrict access for users, particularly minors, but also adults when it comes to speech that is lawful for everyone,” Taske said.
Cybersecurity experts warn that children could bypass the checks, and hackers could seek to steal data collected. Parental consent requirements could present further security issues, with little way for parents to reliably prove their relation to a user, opening the door for nefarious actors who abuse online reporting systems.
More than 400 cybersecurity experts, including from MIT, Tufts University, and Boston University, issued a public letter last month calling for a moratorium on online age verification laws they said “might cause more harm than good.”
“This policy will inevitably massively reduce privacy online by forcing users to reveal more information to service providers than they do nowadays,” the group wrote.
The age verification measures could also run counter to the goals of a separate date privacy bill the state Senate passed last fall and is backed by the ACLU of Massachusetts and other groups. That legislation would allow companies to collect only “reasonably necessary” personal data and permit consumers to opt out of data collection. Companies would also be barred from selling children’s data.
Plus, of course, there are those who have positive uses for social media that would be barred by this bill:
Advocacy organizations also raised concerns about other First Amendment violations, including for users who might face the most repercussions from verification measures and social media restrictions.
Such a law, some argue, could limit teenagers’ abilities to organize political activity, hear the latest news, express themselves creatively, or find community online.
Teddy Walker, a 21-year-old Bostonian who is trans and a leader of a group organized to protect trans rights, said he was isolated and depressed as a teenager until he found solace in Instagram and YouTube trans communities.
“It really helped give me the language and understanding for who I am,” Walker said. The proposed parental restrictions could “lead to trans youth and trans kids being less safe, being less able to access that content online that was so life-saving and life-affirming for me.”
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| you're a mess, you're a mess, good God, you're a mess! |
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*And how often do I say that?
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.”
I thought this piece from NBC on parents opting their children out of technology at school, of interest:
National organizations representing administrators, school technology officers and teachers have urged caution against lumping in classroom screen time with recreational device use at home, saying they need to prepare students for employers who expect students to be fluent with digital tools and artificial intelligence.
But the parents opting out point to research showing that students who used computers at school performed worse academically and that information is better retained when read on paper. And education experts say there’s a significant difference between educating students about technology and completely relying on educational technology.
“It’s a bit of a mirage,” said Faith Boninger, a researcher at the University of Colorado Boulder’s National Education Policy Center who has studied flaws in digital platforms used by schools. “Students don’t need to be consumers of this technology in order to be able to use it in 10 or 15 years, when it’s likely going to be something else entirely.”
I found it particularly interesting that, towards the end of the article, they have quotes from Montgomery County, Maryland:
The Montgomery County Council of Parent-Teacher Associations is pressing the district to provide a formal process to request “non-screen alternatives” for families that have “made the conscious effort to limit their children’s exposure to screens.”
Lisa Cline, a Montgomery County mom who chaired a parent advisory committee focused on technology, said she opted her son out when he was in third grade and then requested each school year that his teachers keep him off screens as much as possible until he graduated high school last year. She said she hopes to work with the advocacy group Fairplay for Kids to launch a national campaign urging parents to opt out of school-issued devices.
“I think it’s a win, actually, if we get to that point where the default is you opt in,” Cline said.
Montgomery County schools were in the news last year as they were the district sued in the Mahmoud case, which I wrote about here, in which the Supreme Court provided for pretty sweeping parental opt-outs on religious grounds for their children in public schools. While the case is not mentioned in the article, I suspect that is only a matter of time.
Locally, I'm still rather stunned that this was part of the reporting of a local subcommittee meeting:
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| Bluesky post from Governor Healey's account says "Government should embrace new technology --safely and securely--to make life easier for our families and businesses" |
Analyze the beneficial and harmful effects of computing innovations (e.g., social networking, delivery of news and other public media, intercultural communication).
It would behoove the Governor and her administration to do so before continuing to thrust this unwanted change upon us.
In the second case, high school and middle school students in Massachusetts have been organizing walkouts to protest against ICE. This analysis, research, organization, and action is directly reflective of the state's required civics project in both middle and high school, for which you can find the reference guide below.
Most notably, the overall requirement is:
Students complete the real work of engaged, informed participants in a democracy by identifying issues and advocating for change in their communities.
And:
They move beyond the walls of the classroom and exercise their voice.
The thing about education: it isn't, in the end, supposed to be theoretical. Either we mean it, or we don't.
I'm so glad you asked: there is indeed!
Recent research published by Judy Hanwen Shen and Alex Tamkin at Cornell University has found that "[n]ovice workers who rely heavily on AI to complete unfamiliar tasks may compromise their own skill acquisition in the process." From the coverage in Ed Tech Innovation Hub:
The findings have implications beyond software development, particularly for education systems and professional learning environments increasingly adopting AI tools. The researchers argue that AI-enhanced productivity should not be assumed to translate into long-term competence, especially in settings where individuals are expected to supervise, verify, or correct AI-generated work.
The study also raises concerns about overreliance on AI in safety-critical or high-stakes domains, where human oversight depends on strong foundational skills. Without intentional learning design, AI use may reduce the very expertise needed to manage automated systems effectively.
The authors emphasize that AI can support learning when used intentionally, but caution that widespread adoption without structured pedagogical approaches could weaken skill development over time. They conclude that organizations and educators should focus not only on what AI enables people to produce, but on how it shapes the process of learning itself.
(emphasis added)
These are conversations that are badly, badly needed in education. They are absolutely not being had, in the mad rush to ensure it is adopted in classrooms.
I thought this, from The Harvard Crimson's reporting on the Cambridge School Committee, was of interest:
The School Committee also addressed growing concern over technology usage in schools, an issue raised repeatedly during public comment. The discussion followed a policy order last year asking the district to assess students’ screen time and set a formal policy on AI usage.
Murphy said the district’s responsibility is to ensure the benefits of using technology in the classroom are not “outweighed by the types of risks and potential detriments that are also associated with technology being as ubiquitous as it is.”
He recommended the discussion on AI use be moved to the School Committee’s curriculum subcommittee to “provide a forum” for parents, educators, and students to voice their concerns. The district also announced plans to conduct focus groups to gather feedback from educators across different grade levels.
“Trying to strike that balance and understand that nuance — that we want to capitalize on what's available to us, while not falling into, or falling prey to some of the pitfalls,” he said, “I think that's a really difficult conversation.”
A few things of note here:
Just want to recommend that among the things you choose to spend time reading this weekend, you read this piece in The Economist:
Although ed-tech companies tout huge learning gains, independent research has made clear that technology rarely boosts learning in schools—and often impairs it. A 2024 meta-analysis of 119 studies of early-literacy tech interventions, led by Rebecca Silverman of Stanford University, found the studies described programmes that delivered at best only marginal gains on standardised tests. The majority had little effect, no effect or harmful ones. Jared Horvath, a neuroscientist and author of a book called “The Digital Delusion”, has reviewed meta-analyses covering tens of thousands of studies. His verdict: “In nearly every context, ed tech doesn’t come close to the minimum threshold for meaningful learning impact.”
(You are going to tell me that it is paywalled, but all you have to do is input your email address and you can get the column. I promise.)
The prevalence of tech in schools owes less to rigorous evidence than aggressive marketing. Teachers are now flooded with daily offers for free tech. In 2024 American schools spent $30bn on education technology. Globally, it is a $165bn industry. Technology does save money on textbooks and streamline lesson planning. But licensing and training costs add up, and many teachers feel burdened rather than liberated by all the admin and dashboards.
Not to mention what it might be doing with all that data.
I am of course posting this after the Worcester School Committee meeting at which this was discussed. This is partly because this isn't intended as anything other than my thoughts, but it's also rather been a bleak week. It's a hard week to pull together the through line to write.
