(And Chromebooks). Before we had a son, my wife and I had always assumed we'd send him to public school. But over his first year, we've been getting the feeling that it might be hard to find a public school whose curriculum isn't entirely mediated by iPad. It turns out we were wrong about that intuition, but only in the sense of the specific device: "In a national survey conducted by the Times last November, about eighty per cent of K-12 teachers said that their districts use Chromebooks," which was depressing enough, but it turns out that the Chromebooks are now the way that Google's going to inject its large language model into my future kindergartener: "[this Chromebook rollout] has created a vast captive market for Gemini and helped make A.I. in schools a near-universal prospect." And it looks like the 20% without a Chromebook
probably have some other device with some other AI on it. [
ungated]
This is not the first time we've talked about computers becoming ubiquitous in schools, but I think it's the first time we've talked about AI apps being nearly universally distributed as soon as kindergarten. I have a couple of thoughts that the article doesn't touch on but that seem essential to discussion (and then I'll post the requisite choice quotes).
(1) It's crazy to think that a parent might assiduously keep screens away from their kid for five years just for the public school system to hand them one when, given that they're in kindergarten, all they really need are crayons, blocks, and picture books;
(2) I think anybody with the means is going to try to avoid lobotomizing their kids with terrible laptops and terrible apps, so while we've always had an elite/normal educational split in this country, now we're going to have an elite that knows how to read and a great swathe of people who know how to watch TikToks and can't operate without being able to ask Claude what's going on;
(3) It seems like our entire public educational apparatus has been captured by Silicon Valley; I guess that's been true for a while now.
Alright, absolutely infuriating quotes for you:
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.
...
No single company has a monopoly on A.I. in K-8 education. In Boston's public schools, sixth graders used chatbots powered by OpenAI's ChatGPT and Anthropic's Claude to prepare for this year's statewide standardized tests. In New York's and Los Angeles's school districts, among others, kindergartners talk to a gamified reading bot called Amira, which records children's voices in order to provide A.I.-driven feedback. A public-school parent in Brooklyn told me about a second-grade art class in which the students can cook up A.I. slop using Adobe Express for Education. When a group of fourth graders in Los Angeles used the same Adobe program to design a Pippi Longstocking book cover, it spat out highly sexualized images.
...
Last month, New York City's Department of Education began soliciting public feedback on its preliminary guidelines for using A.I. in K-12 classrooms, which include this admonishment: "The question is not whether AI belongs in schools. The question is whether we will collectively build a system that governs AI to serve every student and every stakeholder."
...
The feasibility of such a scenario is yet to be established. But a new educator training program called the National Academy for AI Instruction may offer teachers a chance to stress-test some of the many promises that the A.I. industry has made to their profession. The academy, which is headquartered at the United Federation of Teachers' office in Manhattan, is a joint project of the U.F.T. and the American Federation of Teachers, and is funded via a twenty-three-million-dollar partnership with Microsoft, OpenAI, and Anthropic. The in-person and online classes offered by the academy are intended to help educators "not accept the inevitable but navigate it," Randi Weingarten, the president of the A.F.T., told me.
...
The [New York] city D.O.E. official overseeing the guidelines, Miatheresa Pate, is a current recipient of a fellowship jointly offered by Google and GSV Ventures, an ed-tech venture-capital firm whose portfolio includes Amira and MagicSchool. (Other names on the current Google-GSV fellowship roster include top school officials in Berkeley, Dallas, Los Angeles, and Newark, and statewide officials in Colorado and Maryland.) "If you ask tobacco companies to help write your school's policy on cigarettes," Garrett quipped, "you're going to end up with guidance on how to smoke responsibly in school."
