Column: Artificial intelligence and schools
Retired Superintendent Curt Dubost.
– As anyone who ever worked with me will readily attest, I am easily the most technologically ignorant, incompetent nincompoop you can imagine. So why presume to write about AI when the first rule of composition should be to know what you’re writing about? I know enough to have several concerns, which I hope will be addressed in a common-sense manner that people with my limited tech skills can understand and then fully support.
First, just a little historical context. When I first went to school in the early 1960s, television was the latest technology that experts were sure would result in increased student learning and performance.
It didn’t.
Shortly thereafter, computers did revolutionize the world as well as education. One of the first things we learned and still face is that the “experts” would have a hard time staying ahead of the hackers . A vivid memory I have of that era was when the movie “WarGames” came out in 1983.
The principal of the high school where I worked then as an assistant was in the school’s main office, chatting with staff one afternoon. He was sharing how entertaining the movie was. You may call the plot involved AI, a high school computer whiz kid, a retired eccentric scientist, a game of Tic-Tac-Toe, and global thermonuclear war. The office was full of support staff and students waiting to see their counselor or face a disciplinarian like me. The principal added that the movie’s plot was surely implausible in so many ways, especially right at the beginning when Matthew Broderick changes his school transcript from his home.
The adults in the office all agreed.
Some moments later, I called in one of the kids waiting to see me on some kind of referral. Keith was a brilliant kid who chose which classes merited his interest, hence effort, and which his disdain. He came to school most of the time in a costume from “The Rocky Horror Picture Show.” I almost looked forward to my exchanges with him, and we liked and respected each other. I often told him if he wanted to see me, he needn’t get in trouble to be sent in, but he said debating with me was more interesting than class.
Oh, and his mother was head of the PTA.
Anyway, Keith told me the movie was totally plausible and proceeded to prove it by using my office desktop ( with my permission but without my password) to access his school district student records and change his permanent transcripts to straight A’s and perfect attendance with no referrals. Right in front of me in less than ten minutes.
Thankfully, I had enlightened superiors who chose to thank rather than interrogate him and instead hired him as a district consultant on tech security, where he excelled.
Computers did change school in too many ways to list. Each of us now carries exponentially more tech capability in our pockets or on our wrists than the Apollo astronauts had to go to the Moon in 1969. Teachers and students have immediate access to way more content than was in all the encyclopedia sets, which used to adorn the walls of many classrooms, as well as all the books in the library. Our schools have infinitely more readily accessible student data to inform and individualize instruction.
The summer I spent researching for my dissertation in the library at USC could all now be done with my smartphone at home. Was that time and effort misspent? I certainly remember more of the research than if it had been generated by AI and printed out for me to complete my Review of the Literature.
Are schools better in terms of actual increases in student performance?
Yes and no is, I suspect, the right answer. Test scores aren’t up as had been hoped and predicted.
AI seems different, though. The stock market certainly thinks so. The opportunity to suffer unforeseen dire consequences remain, however, very real as evidenced by Keith forty years ago, and they potentially now are way scarier.
How do schools get in front of rather than simply react to AI and its many potentially revolutionary benefits, while avoiding the many potentially unforeseeable problems? Some with potentially catastrophic consequences? How do we convince students that there are facts important to know in order to learn how to access information critically online. We need the experience and background knowledge to ascertain whether or not the AI-generated response is credible. Being good at Jeopardy isn’t the only reason to know facts. I wrote last month about the importance of Core Knowledge.
Learning how to “Google” isn’t enough to be educated. How do we convince students that writing their own essays builds not only integrity and factual background knowledge but also trains one to think critically and organize thoughts and facts for a coherent understanding and presentation? How do we ensure students have enough “number sense” to recognize obviously wrong answers? Meant to leave a fifteen percent tip and you missed a digit and left 1.5%?
This is particularly important when your search background may result in an algorithm deciding which opinions and sources match you, while not necessarily providing the most objectively accurate answer. How does that not result in two wildly different “truthful” answers to the same question, primarily based on the profile of the person who is asking? This leads inevitably to the alternative realities about election results and other issues that so divide our democracy.
In secondary and post-secondary schools, plagiarism is already a huge issue. A whole new legal specialty is the defense of college students accused of AI plagiarism. We used to have programs that could scan student essays and see if the work was copied from another existing text. Now that seemingly can’t work as the material isn’t copied; it’s newly generated by AI.
What should schools do? I’d say a robust debate about the issue to start, with examples to show what kinds of AI-generated research are beneficial and which cross over into cheating. Once we agree to those examples, we need to train teachers, parents, and students as to what is and is not acceptable. This training will be critical, as once done, grave consequences for intentional violations should follow, including failure and expulsion.
I hope our schools don’t wait to see what issues arise from AI and instead work proactively, while we still can, to benefit from it, not suffer from it. AI could be a great tool for self-editing of original compositions. I’m sure it would have many great suggestions to improve this column now that I HAVE written it. I also though fear creating AI to police AI is a scarily disturbing response.
Speaking of old movies, 2001 came out in 1968. What geniuses were Arthur C Clarke and Stanley Kubrick!
….but whatever became of HAL?
– Former Paso Robles Joint Unified School District Superintendent Curt Dubost
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