A few weeks ago, my ears perked up when a gaggle of middle school volleyball players in my car were talking about the teachers they don’t like; I have an unfortunate appetite for tweenage gossip, and sometimes it yields relevant information. Most of it was petty: One has a resting angry face, another is too strict at lunch. But then somebody said, dismissively: “And I bet she uses A.I. to grade our papers.”
I don’t think this is true, but that it could be true is already corrosive. Even seventh graders can see artificial intelligence is a lesser form of care and attention. And now unregulated A.I. has the potential to chip away at their trust of the educational process, from the moment they start kindergarten.
The push for A.I. in K-12 schools is now coming from the president, who released an executive order on April 23 calling for use of the technology in all grades. Secretary of education Linda McMahon has previously said her goal is getting the federal government out of education, sending control back to the states and empowering parents, but apparently there’s a carveout for nudging Big Tech’s continued incursion into the classroom.
The executive order claims that “A.I. education in kindergarten through twelfth grade (K-12) is critical” because the United States needs “to develop an A.I.-ready work force and the next generation of American A.I. innovators.” The executive order commands the secretary of education to also “prioritize the use of A.I. in discretionary grant programs for teacher training” so that they might “integrate the fundamentals of A.I. into all subject areas.”
Personally, I do not trust McMahon to responsibly administer anything having to do with A.I. when she repeatedly confused A.I. with A1, the steak sauce, in a speech earlier this year: “A school system that’s going to start making sure that first graders, or even pre-Ks, have A1 teaching in every year. That’s a wonderful thing!”
There are already many schools across the country that are integrating A.I. into the curriculum, though I fear that in many places it’s being done without appropriate forethought or data privacy safeguards. “What I can say with a fairly high level of confidence is that A.I. is being forced upon schools without any particular context or funding that would allow them to make informed decisions about what may or may not be valuable to them,” said Alex Molnar, the director of the National Education Policy Center at the University of Colorado.
