In today’s educational landscape, research and development is essential to driving progress and innovation in pre-K-12 teaching and learning. Yet, the dominant approach continues to revolve around market-driven solutions that are developed without evidence or teacher input. Unlike industries such as health care and energy, where there is seamless integration between scientific discovery and practical application, education often lacks a formal process that bases investments in tools and solutions on scientific investigation and proof of effectiveness. This fragmentation in R&D leads to inefficiencies, wasted funds on solutions that do not serve most students and missed opportunities for innovation that can improve learning gains.

In health care, the efficacy of a new treatment or medication must be rigorously demonstrated before it can reach real-world practice. In education, research should similarly align with the practical needs of students and educators to ensure that solutions work and genuinely help all those they are intended to impact. This trajectory from initial scientific breakthrough to classroom application demands rigorous measurement, evaluation and feedback. It requires a commitment to exploring, making mistakes and always improving without sacrificing a dedication to positive change. And it requires meaningful and frequent input from the people who will use these innovative solutions — starting at the beginning.

As chief learning officer at the Advanced Education Research and Development Fund, I have seen first-hand the real impact that systemic change and student-centered and research-based design of educational technology can make. Understanding the experiences of students, caregivers and educators is essential to staying learner-focused from the outset, especially because caregivers hold dreams for their children’s futures and teachers know what young people’s academic needs are. Involving researchers, developers and policymakers from the beginning makes it possible to identify the right opportunities and help design solutions that align with the needs of all students. Then, when a promising innovation takes shape, it’s essential to bring in industry experts and investors who can provide the financial backing for an expansion from a single classroom or school.

The need for innovative solutions to help students recover from pandemic learning disruptions has never been more urgent. The nation needs all hands on deck — educator and community engagement, high ethical standards for ed tech and importantly, federal investment in education R&D. Here are four key criteria that teachers, administrators and those purchasing education technology and curriculum for their districts should look for: 

• A strong focus on both scientific evidence and real-world experience is essential in building new solutions for the future. Educators should talk with colleagues about what has worked for them in supporting student learning and improving classroom practice, and engage expertise from many sources — fellow teachers, administrators, industry experts, researchers and policymakers.
  
• Look for products that were created using expert insights from educators, researchers and product developers, based on how students learn best. These should include diverse perspectives to ensure the technology is accessible to students who are disproportionately impacted by poverty. Ask questions about where the product was piloted, in what types of schools, in what geographic locations, with which demographic and socioeconomic groups — and look for evidence of positive impact.
  
• Does the product foster inclusivity, equity and transparency? Does it serve the best interests of all the students involved while treating each as an individual? Does it ensure data privacy, is it accessible and does it offer diverse content? Will it work in rural areas and in large, diverse cities? These are key ethical questions to consider.
  
• Teachers lack the time and bandwidth to spend their valuable time navigating how to move in and out of each ed tech tool. New products need to work in concert with one another interoperably and mesh seamlessly with teacher workflows. They should not be just created inside a lab, but developed based on what works inside the classroom, with a lot of input from the people who will use them.

These four elements can change the way education solutions are developed, enabling faster, bigger breakthroughs that can benefit pre-K-12 teaching, learning and assessment systems.

But she’ll readily tell you, “There’s just not a lot of stuff that’s worth funding.”

Knight is president and executive director of the Siegel Family Endowment, created by computer scientist David Siegel, a co-founder of the embattled, $60 billion quantitative trading firm Two Sigma. A former Google and Two Sigma employee herself, Knight sees her role as helping to bring evidence-backed tools to market — tools “that we can learn something from.” 

That has led her to underwrite small, often experimental undertakings such as Project Invent, which works with students and teachers to promote design thinking, focusing on student needs and inputs. For instance, if students want to improve the quality of school lunches, instead of asking nutritionists or school staff to design menus, a school would turn to kids to study the problem and suggest solutions. 

She also supports Building 21, an innovative high school network in Pennsylvania, and the Modern Classrooms Project, a nonprofit that promotes instruction paced by students, relying on mastery rather than seat time.

Knight has espoused an approach that she calls “inquiry-driven philanthropy,” searching for schools and startups doing important work — and treating grantmaking “as almost field experimentation” alongside more traditional research she funds. “Everything has an orientation toward, ‘What can we learn from this, success or failure, to give back to the field?’”

She has also said educators and policymakers are missing something in the conversation about classroom technology, reducing it to an “all or nothing” question. “We either have to say ‘No tech’ or ‘Very low tech — lock away the phones, keep the kids disconnected, ban ChatGPT, etc.,’ or it’s ‘We’re all in. Every kid gets an iPad. They’re going to learn on technology all day.’ ”

Accordingly, she has many thoughts on AI, the current panic about phones in schools, and how she separates good ed tech from bad.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The 74: You’ve said your goal is to fund “deeply unsexy things” in ed tech to invest in. As someone who gets email pitches every morning about deeply sexy things that I’m very skeptical about, that was a breath of fresh air. What are “deeply unsexy things?” Why is that important?

Katy Knight: Philanthropy can be very much like the private markets and everything else, consumed by Shiny Object Syndrome. We are just as fallible and just as susceptible to chasing the Next Big Idea, the next sexy thing. And I think that’s fine in some respects. Philanthropy should be risk capital, which means sometimes there’s going to be a sexy thing that will impact the social sector — and we should fund it.

But more often than not, change is happening on the back end. It’s not always something new, and it’s not always using the latest and greatest technology. Sometimes we’re talking about the reality of the digital divide in a place where people want to be talking about generative AI, and that’s not capturing attention. So it’s even more important that we, as a philanthropy with the bully pulpit, are thinking about what are the layers of the bureaucracy that we can tackle to achieve systems change? Even though they’re unsexy from a news perspective or a razzle-dazzle perspective, I think they are actually impactful and interesting.

Let’s talk about some of the things you’re funding, starting with Quill.org, the non-profit that offers free AI-powered writing, reading comprehension and language skills lessons. What’s your thinking there?

Quill is sexy, in that they’ve got this front-facing technology. Everyone wants to talk about consumer-facing tools. What’s less sexy, I think, is that we’re not talking about how it’s the latest ChatGPT model. This is about years and years of actual teacher feedback. It’s about training something really specific. It’s relatively niche. And those are the kind of AI applications that I think actually have the highest potential: Applying a powerful technology to something niche should have outsized impacts. That kind of thing makes sense to me. I think there’s a lot of opportunities for us to think about, “O.K., if we weren’t just chasing the best, coolest image-generating technology, what might we be doing to actually serve student need and teacher need? It starts from asking questions about what matters, what the actual challenges are, and then you get to something that’s useful — even if it’s not as shiny as some of the other ed tech startup things that are coming across your inbox.

You’re also funding Quill and others to develop a “Responsible AI Playbook.” Say more about that.

Even though the social sector is smaller than the private markets in terms of investment in new ed tech tools, if we have even a small chorus of people thinking about responsible AI and pushing back against this overarching narrative that we just have to let it run amok, that’s net beneficial to the field.

Talk about the small chorus. Who are the other singers? 

The big one is the Learning Engineering Tools Competition. The other network we’ve been involved with is the Global Ed Tech Trialing Network. The Jacobs Foundation (based in Zurich, Switzerland) helped found this group of funders, developers and researchers globally who are now thinking together about responsible development, specifically through the lens of “How do we create real-world environments for developers to test their tools and hear feedback from teachers and young people more directly,” rather than just building things that sound like they’ll capture a lot of market share.

Can you say more about the trialing network?

We are funding some of the U.S. work, particularly through our partners at Innovate Edu and Leanlab. Leanlab has been crucial because what they do really at their core is very much aligned with this vision of having real live environments where there’s some co-creation of these tools. We’re funding that work through them. They’ve had two global meetings that I participated in. 

Leanlab Executive Director Katie Boody Adorno has built a very cool, small, nimble organization that’s focused particularly on the notion of the co-design of ed tech tools. They work with startups that are really genuine about wanting to design for impact, not just for investors. And they create relationships with schools to have teachers be paid for their participation and to have teachers actually be testers and provide feedback directly to the designers at these startups. I think it’s just a very cool model for almost an accelerator for impact, rather than an accelerator for marketing.

Do you have thoughts on phone-free schools?

It’s a simple solution to a complex problem. On the one hand, in a vacuum, I might say “Absolutely, we need to be more distraction-free.” And much like when I was in elementary school and they were taking our Tamagotchis away, we’ve got to put the phones away. On the other hand, I understand the complex issues of school safety, of child care arrangements in a world where parents have to work. Thinking about what students are in school for — and what we want them to be doing, and how we want them to be learning, and whether or not we want them to feel so attached to these devices — is a really important conversation. But we can’t divorce it from reality: We live in a really uncertain and sometimes dangerous world, and I understand the perspective of parents who might want to be able to reach their kids during the day in the event of an emergency and other things. 

When I was at the ASU+GSV Air Show last spring, somebody I was with said, “Take a good look around: Half of these guys will be gone by next year.” On the one hand, that seems like a very cynical thing to say. It also seems entirely right. Is it a good thing that companies come and go, that you’re always dealing with somebody who’s got a different vision? Is that a healthy thing for education?

In any private market solution, some cycling of companies and iteration is not a bad thing. I think there’s a mismatch between how the tech startup venture world works and how education products need to work. In the VC-backed startup world, we’re funding a bunch of things with the intention that one or two of them will have 100x, 1,000x returns, and a lot of them will go bust. Those companies are incentivized and encouraged to capture as much market share as possible to achieve that investment return. Whether they are actually impactful to students or not is almost irrelevant in that initial drive to capture market share.

That’s not to say that there shouldn’t be competition and a diverse set of tools that educators can dig into. But if they’re getting served up a shiny new presentation for a new tool that they’re being told they absolutely need every month, that sort of churn is incredibly disruptive. 

How do you separate good ed tech from bad? 

When I hear a startup say that their total addressable market is all 80 million students in the country, I know it’s unlikely that product is worthwhile because there are so few ed tech products — there are so few products in general — that can actually serve every single student in the country. So unless you’ve got a more limited perspective on what the market is, I don’t think you’ve actually aligned what you’re building with the reality of what is needed.

I was heartened to read in journalist Audrey Watters’ newsletter last month that she’s returning to writing about ed tech. She wrote that she’s ready to “dutifully remind you that the future of human and machine learning as envisioned by Silicon Valley’s libertarian elite is a pretty shitty one.” Thoughts?

I love that! I mean, look: Not to zoom out too much, but I think as a society we’ve grown somewhat accustomed to being test subjects for tech companies across the board because everything is free. And they say, “Oh, if it’s free, then you’re the product.” And we are. “We’re releasing a new version of this tool. Your email client is going to change tomorrow.” Do you have any say in it? Nope. We’re very used to living in a world where we’re told what to do by tech platform companies and they will manage just how they see fit.

That doesn’t work for education. That doesn’t work when you have no grounding in learning science, pedagogy, or even just being in a classroom. And so I think that is not just an education problem. It impacts the education sector specifically, but I do think it’s a broader societal concern. Our interaction with technology is not one where we have enough agency.

The latest chapter in AllHere’s dizzying collapse revealed more information about the once-lauded company’s finances and its relationship with the Los Angeles Unified School District. But the hearing failed to answer key questions about why AllHere went under after garnering $12 million in investor capital, a blizzard of positive press and a contract with the nation’s second-largest school district to create “Ed,” the buzzy, AI-powered chatbot.

During the hearing held over Zoom, one of AllHere’s only remaining executives, former chief technology officer Toby Jackson, struggled to explain why the company paid ousted CEO Joanna Smith-Griffin $243,000 in expenses from the past year and owed $630,000 to its largest creditor, education technology salesperson Debra Kerr. 

“I don’t know exactly the nature of all of [Smith-Griffin’s] expenses. She was the CEO and so that is one of the outstanding questions that we also have,” Jackson said when quizzed about the six-figure amount by the bankruptcy trustee. “She did do quite a bit of travel as the CEO of the company.” 

Similarly, Jackson said he had no invoices to substantiate the $630,000 debt to Kerr, who is a longtime associate and social media booster of Los Angeles schools Superintendent Alberto Carvalho, dating back to his days leading Miami-Dade schools. Kerr’s son, Richard, is a former AllHere account executive who told The 74 this week he pitched the AllHere deal to Los Angeles school leaders.

“I’m not really sure what exactly that entails,” Jackson said of Kerr’s claim.

Moments later, Kerr chimed into the Zoom hearing, arguing the company owed her the money after she helped AllHere close the lucrative deal in L.A. Kerr said she was never paid her commission from the first payments that LAUSD made to AllHere under the contract. 

The district has said it paid AllHere roughly $3 million of the $6 million for the chatbot, which was taken offline shortly after AllHere announced in June that it was in financial distress and had furloughed most of its employees. 

“I never did collect any commissions and it’s in the contract based on commission percentages that would have been made on any sales accrued,” Kerr told the trustee.

Smith-Griffin, who now lives in North Carolina, was not present for the Zoom hearing and could not be reached for comment. There were indications in the hearing that her separation from AllHere was not amicable, including that the former CEO has refused to disclose the password to her $500 company-owned laptop, one of its few remaining assets. 

Court records show that Jackson, now the head restructuring officer, earned $305,000 a year in his role with the company before it shuttered, nearly three times the $105,000 paid to Smith-Griffin, a Harvard University graduate who built AllHere in 2016 with financial backing from the prestigious institution. 

Filed in mid-August, AllHere’s Title 7 bankruptcy petition strengthens doubts that it could find a new owner to take over its mission as an AI pioneer in K-12 schools. That scenario was put forth by a Los Angeles school district spokesperson earlier this year with the assertion that “Ed” could still be successfully launched as a personalized, interactive learning acceleration tool for all of the district’s roughly 540,000 students and their families.

Instead, court records show AllHere’s few remaining employees are preparing for “the wind down of the company” and officials acknowledged during Tuesday’s proceeding that AllHere was unable to fulfill the terms of its contract with L.A. Unified. 

A lawyer representing the school district was present at the hearing. In a statement Tuesday evening, a district spokesperson said LAUSD is “evaluating its next steps to pursue and protect its rights in the bankruptcy proceedings.” 

Kerr and Carvalho 

Ties between Kerr and Carvalho go back to at least 2010, when she worked for the behemoth education company Pearson. Back then, she gave Carvalho and Miami students what she called “front-row access” to an original print of the U.S. Declaration of Independence. Ever since, Carvalho, who took over leadership in Los Angeles in 2022, has been a regular staple on Kerr’s social media. 

A LinkedIn post promoting L.A.’s chatbot noted that the tool worked in partnership with services from seven companies including Age of Learning, the creators of digital education program ABCmouse and where Kerr previously worked as head of sales. 

Kerr didn’t respond to requests for comment but her son, Richard, who began working at AllHere in 2022, said among the school district deals he worked on for the company was the chatbot project in Los Angeles. 

“We had a big deal in L.A. and the investors, I guess, didn’t have patience to wait to get paid from it,” he said. 

Kerr said he met with education officials in Los Angeles and “did a lot of work” helping the company secure the ageement. When asked about his mother’s role in closing AllHere’s contract in Los Angeles, Kerr said “she had a lot to do with it,” but didn’t elaborate further. 

A statement from the L.A. district spokesperson said that “Los Angeles Unified launched a competitive” request for proposals that received “multiple responses,” which eventually led to AllHere’s selection. This spring, Carvalho went on the road with Smith-Griffin to promote “Ed,” billing the chatbot personified by a yellow sun as being “unprecedented in American public education.”

Before he was furloughed, Richard Kerr said AllHere was a great place to work — in part because of Smith-Griffin’s leadership.

“It’s very unfortunate what happened to Joanna. I thought she was on a great path and she was doing an amazing thing,” he said, adding that she made a mistake when she “brought in the wrong investors that were pretty vindictive” and decided to cut short the company without giving it a proper chance. 

AllHere’s former senior director of software engineering, who became a company whistleblower, told The 74 earlier this year that AllHere struggled to meet the terms of its contract in Los Angeles and took shortcuts that violated bedrock student privacy principles and district rules. Both the district’s independent inspector general and top administrators have launched separate investigations into what went wrong with AllHere.

Even though his mother, Debra Kerr, was on the Delaware court’s Zoom call Tuesday, Richard Kerr said he was unaware his former employer had filed for bankruptcy.

What’s left

The company’s few remaining employees and board members, including former Chicago Public Schools Chief Executive Janice Jackson, have not made themselves available for comment. 

AllHere investor Andrew Parker, who was on vacation Tuesday and didn’t attend the court hearing, now serves as the company’s secretary. In addition to Janice Jackson, other players who signed AllHere’s bankruptcy petition are Andre Bennin, a managing partner with the investment firm Rethink Education, and education consultant Jeff Livingston. 

Even though Smith-Griffin is no longer with the company, court records show she still has a significant stake, holding 81% equity in its common stock. Rethink Education was by far the company’s biggest outside investor. 

Other top creditors, according to court records, are the law firm of Gunderson Dettmer at nearly $275,000, the information technology company Svitla Systems at $190,000 and $123,000 to well-known education consulting firm Whiteboard Advisors 

Earlier in the summer, The 74 spoke with Gunderson Dettmer partner Jay Hachigian, who said he had only worked with AllHere early in its formation. He didn’t respond to requests for comment this week about his firm’s large outstanding balance with the company. Whiteboard Advisors spokesperson Thomas Rodgers said in an email that his firm previously worked with AllHere but its role is covered by a nondisclosure agreement. 

Court records show the company earned $2.4 million in gross revenue last year but had generated much less since January, about $587,000.

At the time of bankruptcy, court records show the company had active contracts with just 10 school districts, including those in Cincinnati, Miami and Weehawken, New Jersey. Only Weehawken sought to use the chatbot platform created for LAUSD, while the rest relied on an earlier text messaging tool designed to combat chronic absenteeism. 

Despite landing millions of dollars in backing from a group of social impact investment firms, several of which cited their enthusiasm for investing in AllHere specifically because it was led by a Black woman, court records reveal the company’s coffers are nearly empty. AllHere claimed nearly $2.9 million in property and just shy of that — $1.75 million — in liabilities. The company’s actual assets, Toby Jackson acknowledged in court, are much lower. 

It claimed an “unknown” value on pending patents, which Jackson conceded Tuesday had been denied, and $2.88 million for licenses, franchises and royalties for its LAUSD contract. Other assets, including its website and chatbot source code, were also listed at a value of “unknown.”

Jackson said the Los Angeles contract was valued at $2.88 million for the remaining outstanding balance the district owes to fulfill the agreement — money he admitted AllHere would be unable to collect because it has not “held up our part of the bargain in the contract” and is closing shop.

Financial statements to the court show AllHere had $18,000 in savings and just $500 in physical assets: the value of Smith-Griffin’s work laptop, whose contents remain outside the tech company’s reach. 

“We have not been able to obtain the credentials for Mrs. Smith’s laptop. We did not receive any cooperation with that,” Jackson testified Tuesday. “She has been cooperative with some other matters, but not with this one.”

FERPA permits parents and eligible students (typically over 18) to inspect and correct their education records. It also requires consent before disclosure of personally identifiable information from those records, though there are numerous exceptions. In addition, schools must notify parents and eligible students annually of their FERPA rights.

With the advent of education technology, FERPA is really showing its age. Though it has changed slightly since its enactment, the last congressional update was over a decade ago, and regulations from the Department of Education are also woefully outdated. (Updates to the regulations from the Department are frequently said to be imminent, but as of this writing, none are public.)

Privacy concerns have steadily increased over the last few decades, as technology continues to develop and make increasingly intrusive incursions into every aspect of life. While FERPA does provide at least some protections for students — unlike, say, consumers in general — the fact is, it does not mandate adequate safeguards.

Students and families in today’s digital world deserve modern protections that accurately reflect contemporary society and their learning experiences. Here are a few suggestions for bringing FERPA into its next half-century.

First, it should reflect that the information contained in student records is much broader than documents in files or scanned into computers. FERPA needs to protect students’ online information; protected “education records” should explicitly and unambiguously include online data created by students, including web browsing and search histories, interactions with tech tools and artificial intelligence chatbots, and other digital activity.

Second, the concept of directory information — things like a student’s name, address, telephone listing, email address, photograph, date and place of birth, height and weight (for athletic team members) and student ID numbers — needs an overhaul for the digital age. Under FERPA, schools can share this information with a third party or the public generally, unless a parent has opted out. 

Directory information is supposed to be data that is not considered harmful or invasive if disclosed. But given rapid advances in technology, much of it could lead to commercial profiling, identity theft and other harms. The definition should be narrowed, and parents should be allowed to choose what specific information schools can share. And that sharing should be opt-in, item by item, not the current blanket opt-out.

Third, the FERPA statute did not contemplate the extent to which ed tech and other third-party companies would be integrated into students’ daily lives. The Department of Education has since interpreted “school officials” — to whom information can be shared without consent — to include ed tech vendors when they have a legitimate educational interest, perform a function the school would otherwise do, are under the school’s direct control with respect to use of student records and comply with other FERPA requirements. It would be helpful for Congress to very clearly indicate when FERPA-covered information may be shared with ed tech vendors and other third parties that students encounter on a daily basis.

FERPA should specify that students’ information — including and especially when shared with “school officials” — should be used for educational purposes only and not be offered for sale or used for targeted advertising.

Lastly, it is critical that schools safeguard student information. FERPA does not require specific security controls. It should mandate administrative, physical and technical safeguards, including training for individuals handling student information and prompt responses to data breaches. Schools need funding to better understand cybersecurity issues, as well as to build out necessary infrastructure to collaborate and coordinate cybersecurity efforts. Ideally, Congress would add new cybersecurity funding for schools, because many lack the financial means to implement adequate safeguards.

FERPA was passed 50 years ago in response to rising concerns about new technology. Technology has continued to evolve, and so must FERPA.

With Joe Biden out and Kamala Harris in, the Democrats’ last-minute, presumptive presidential nominee will once again have to reckon with her controversial legacy combatting student absences — and their nationwide surge since the pandemic — as she faces off against Donald Trump between now and November. 

Elected first as San Francisco district attorney and then California attorney general, Harris has offered her tough-on-crime bonafides on the newly forged campaign trail as an alternative to Trump, a convicted felon. Yet just five years ago, her signature education issue as California’s top cop — as she sometimes called herself — was seen as a liability. 

By portraying a crackdown on student truancy as a way to avert future criminals, Harris championed a California truancy law that set into motion a hold-parents-accountable approach that leveraged fines and jail time for chronic absences that are often the result of barriers including health problems and homelessness.

Parents, as a result, wound up behind bars. Such an outcome, Harris said during her failed presidential bid in 2019, was an “unintended consequence.” 

Want more info on Harris’s anti-truancy crusade? EdSource has you covered. 

• Fast forward to 2024: A coalition of education nonprofits launched a bipartisan effort last week to slash chronic absenteeism in half over the next five years, with one expert noting that punitive measures “do nothing but burden families.” 

In the news

A Big Tech reckoning on child safety? Senate Democrats renewed efforts this week to pass the most sweeping tech industry regulations in decades, with the goal of formalizing new online privacy protections for children before their August recess. Taken together, two bills would ban companies from feeding content and targeted ads to teens with algorithms and hold tech firms to a “duty of care” to ensure their products don’t harm kids. | The Associated Press

The White House isn’t waiting for Congress to act. In new guidance, a Biden administration task force outlines strategies parents can use to ensure their children are using the internet safely. | Kids Online Health and Safety Task Force

From AllHere to where? The Los Angeles superintendent plans to appoint a task force to examine what went wrong — and how to move forward — after a company that built its $6 million AI chatbot went kaput. The task force will look into allegations that the company misused L.A. students’ data before it collapsed under financial strain. The allegations were first reported by yours truly. | Los Angeles Times

• Superintendent Alberto Carvalho remains committed to the supposed AI revolution in education, but Los Angeles parents are urging the rhetorically high-flying schools chief to pump the brakes and focus on pressing issues including a literacy crisis and student homelessness epidemic. | LA School Report

New York educators must alert parents at least a week in advance of lockdown drills under new regulations that require the safety routines be conducted in “a trauma-informed, developmentally and age-appropriate manner.” | Chalkbeat

Ending ‘forced disclosure’: A new California law prohibits school districts from imposing rules that require teachers to notify parents when a student changes their gender identity. | Los Angeles Times

A Justice Department lawsuit alleges that employees at Southwest Key, a nonprofit that serves as the largest operator of shelters for unaccompanied migrant children, repeatedly subjected minors under its care to sexual abuse and harassment. | The New York Times

No qualified immunity: Three Honolulu police officers can be sued on excessive force allegations that stem from a 2020 incident in which the cops handcuffed and arrested a 10-year-old girl at her elementary school. “No reasonable official could have believed that the level of force employed against” the student was necessary, a panel of federal judges wrote in their decision. | Honolulu Civil Beat

A ransomware attack targeting the Pueblo, Colorado, school district led to a massive data breach that exposed the sensitive information of students over a 15-year period. | KKTV

The high cost of cyber crime: About two-thirds of K-12 schools were hit by ransomware in the last year, according to a new report by the cybersecurity company Sophos. That’s a significant decrease from 2023, when 80% were targets. But recovery costs have surged over the last year — from $1.6 million to more than $3.75 million. | Sophos

ICYMI @THE74

• Advocates Fear Minnesota Students Will Again Be Subject to Restraint Used on George Floyd

• Youngkin Signs Order on ‘Cell Phone-Free Education’ in Virginia Public Schools

• Parents of Children with Special Needs Charge LAUSD Limiting Services, Holding Back Information

Emotional Support

I’m pleased to announce that Mika has joined the School (in)Security team after an exhaustive, nationwide search. I’m told that Mika — who was hired alongside The 74’s new editor-in-chief Nicole Ridgway — offers extensive experience and “sonar dish” ears that detect news leads with unrivaled precision. 

(Send Mika a news tip)

It’s time to identify, understand and discuss the under-the-radar issues that are hindering student success and revisit practices that could help solve four of the most critical. Addressing them now can help improve student outcomes for years to come.

There are learning barriers ed tech cannot break through. When children in historically marginalized and under-resourced communities walk into the classroom, many are already steps behind their peers. For families who struggled to meet basic needs before COVID, the pandemic only exacerbated the difficulties they faced, including homelessness, food insecurity and a lack of affordable child care. Four years later, many children have yet to feel physically and emotionally healthy and safe, which has increased academic disengagement, chronic absenteeism and learning loss, especially in economically challenged areas.

But when schools offer a learning environment that removes sensitivity triggers like bright lights and loud noises, and teachers focus on self-regulation, trust and empathy as much as they do on math and reading, children are better able to navigate their emotions and focus on learning. Even one stable and committed relationship with a trusted adult bolsters a child’s resilience to adversity. The more supportive the classroom, the less likely students are to show increased levels of cortisol, the primary stress hormone.

Professional development is failing to address a key factor in student success. Each year, school districts invest millions in professional development. However, most training doesn’t align with teachers’ needs, especially for educators working with English learners and students with disabilities. There’s also little evidence that professional development strongly correlates with student achievement.

Instead of focusing their training budgets on current trends, districts can offer professional learning and evidence-based coaching centered on fostering meaningful interactions to build the teacher-student bond and close achievement gaps. This is particularly critical in high-poverty areas where educators lack the support and resources to focus on interactions that build vital social-emotional learning skills.

When teachers’ powers of observation are strengthened, and they cultivate the skills to respond appropriately to each student’s needs, they build healthy bonds that help children feel safe and secure. For instance, a study by the U.S. Department of Education found that ongoing, evidence-based, one-to-one coaching helps educators boost student achievement. This is especially true for teachers with less than five years’ experience and those with weak instructional practices. These effective interactions promote gains in literacy, vocabulary and self-control.

Accountability systems aren’t measuring the most important elements of students’ experiences. One notable example comes from early childhood education, where almost every state has its own Quality Rating and Improvement System — and each measures success differently. Some look only at factors related to the learning environment, such as the number of books in a classroom or assurances that safety measures are in place.

Accountability systems can dig deeper by using interactions as the key indicator of whether the school is delivering the best outcomes. By classifying and measuring educator-child interactions across three domains — emotional support, instructional support and classroom organization — states can gain the information needed to guide focused, ongoing improvement that helps children thrive academically, cognitively and emotionally. 

In Louisiana, where 40% of pre-K students lacked critical kindergarten skills, the state set its sights on an interactions-based model that can both provide essential accountability data and identify areas for student improvement. Through the Classroom Assessment Scoring System, the state helped teachers identify where they struggled and provided personalized guidance and professional development aligned with their needs. As a result, Louisiana tripled the number of sites with the highest performance rating on its quality measurement scale.

Development of critical skills is sacrificed for standardized testing. While there continue to be calls to reform standardized testing, districts are under mounting pressure to demonstrate student progress post-pandemic. Clearly, a focus on math, science and reading is warranted, but educators must also make space for core skills needed for success in school and in life. These include the “Five C” foundational principles: critical thinking, creative thinking, collaboration, communication and citizenship. Equipped with these tools, students can think more deeply about their experiences, learn from others and engage in civil discourse with their peers.

Play-based, project-based and deep learning allows students to dive into different concepts and creatively apply their knowledge to real-world issues. In addition, educators are able to connect with curious students through their interests, observe their actions and formulate open-ended questions around them, helping build that critical educator-child bond. Countless studies demonstrate the long-term value of investment in these core skills as they return strong academic outcomes, attendance, school engagement and behavior.

Amid all the cutting-edge solutions that are capturing attention, it is important not to lose sight of the proven power of life-changing interactions between teachers and their students. Ed tech resources are powerful tools, but they can’t replace the impact of supportive relationships. Teachers must have the training and resources that make them possible.

It wasn’t until after 7 p.m. that evening when the boys, 5-year-old William and 8-year-old Joseph, arrived on a school bus unharmed.Their delayed return was the result of what officials at Kentucky’s Jefferson County Public Schools dubbed a “transportation disaster”: A tech-enabled bus routing system implemented to improve efficiency backfired and some kids didn’t make it home until nearly 10 p.m. 

“I was wondering, ‘Is my son safe?’ ” Bramel told The 74. “Are they safe? Are they OK? Did anything happen?”

Months later, Bramel is once again upset and concerned that his kids had been left vulnerable. Again, technology is the culprit. After the bus delay fiasco, school officials in Louisville signed up for a GPS tracking system offered by the Montana-based company Education Logistics, commonly known as Edulog. Through an app, the system gives parents real-time information about the location of their children’s school buses. 

The service offers parents valuable updates about bus arrivals and departures and tools like it have been embraced by families and heralded by school officials across the country, especially when there are busing snafus. Bramel said he now regularly relies on the Edulog service. Yet in Louisville and at districts nationwide, cybersecurity researchers found, vulnerabilities could have left sensitive data open to exploitation by bad actors. 

James Sebree, a senior staff research engineer at Maryland-based cybersecurity company Tenable, said his inquiry into Edulog’s Parent Portal began after a friend voiced security concerns as it was being rolled out at his child’s school. What he found was alarming. Because the Edulog apps lacked sufficient authentication and access controls, anybody could access a large swath of sensitive information about students and families with little more than a free account. Among the exposed records were the real-time location of school buses, pick-up and drop-off times, information about scheduled delays, logs of students who were assigned to specific routes and their parents’ contact information. 

“It was startling to see the extent to which we were able to access information by bypassing the client-side restrictions, particularly when that information involved minors,” Sebree said in an email to The 74. Sebree said his firm isn’t aware of any instances where the data was actually exploited by bad actors and that Edulog worked quickly to patch the vulnerabilities once Tenable alerted them to the issues in early September. But the bug while it existed, he said, was relatively easy to exploit. 

“GPS data in conjunction with parental contact information, if compromised,” he said, “ could lead to scary situations for parents and students.”

School districts nationwide have increasingly turned to GPS tracking systems to help keep parents in the loop about arrival and departure times, particularly amid a national school bus driver shortage that’s led to chaos in many places and education leaders having to rethink their transportation logistics. 

In Louisville, the school bus woes forced leaders to cancel classes for several days right at the beginning of the new academic year. Last March, Chicago Public Schools approved a $4 million contract with Edulog to address widespread transportation hurdles of its own, including canceled routes and unreliable service. In some instances, the district has called on taxis and paid $500 transportation stipends to parents to get kids to and from school. 

As school districts increasingly turn to thousands of third-party education technology vendors to streamline instruction and across all parts of their operations, the Edulog vulnerability highlights how such arrangements can introduce new privacy and security risks, especially when for-profit companies collect sensitive information like real-time location data involving students. 

Edulog claims more than 6 million students are transported on school buses equipped with its software. Recent customers include the school districts in Wichita, Kansas, Newport News, Virginia, and Greenwich, Connecticut, according to data from GovSpend, which tracks government procurement. 

In a Dec. 14 blog post on the Edulog website, the company acknowledged that it had been notified of “a potential vulnerability” and that they had “researched the issue and resolved it in the next build of the product.” Yet the company is not contractually obligated to notify their customer districts or parents that the weakness was uncovered, Lam Nguyen-Bull, Edulog’s chief experience officer and general counsel, told The 74 in an interview. At the same time, she recognized the student safety risks involved in the potential breach of real-time GPS data is “certainly a concern.” 

“That’s something that districts have to weigh, as it is any time you get into a service like this: What are you willing to risk and is it worth the cost?” she said. “You can take as many cautions as possible, but a creative and dedicated person will always be able to find a vulnerability.” 

Mark Hebert, the Jefferson County Public Schools spokesperson, said in an email the Louisville district relies on Edulog’s “Lite” version, which offers parents bus location information “but little else.” 

Yet for Bramel, news that the bus tracker that he found so handy carried privacy risks brought newfound anxiety. Bramel said that he had heard rumors about a Edulog security lapse but hadn’t received formal outreach from the district, leaving him to wonder about the types of information that could have been exposed. 

He said school transportation in Louisville remains so erratic that he’s considered moving out of the district boundaries altogether. Allowing anyone access to real-time school bus information, he said, could have been catastrophic. 

“That’s infuriating because that puts my child at risk, that’s their life in danger,” he said. “A perpetrator could be meeting up or something like that. Human trafficking is still going on.” 

The privacy implications of bus trackers

Edulog’s Nguyen-Bull noted that privacy issues have been present ever since GPS services were first introduced to consumers in the late 1980s. Such implications are perhaps amplified in the context of students and schools, but ultimately, she said, they take a back seat for most people.

“The truth is, we generally are lazy beings, right?” Nguyen-Bull said. “We go for convenience.” 

Edulog has been providing school districts with bus routing services since 1977, but Nguyen-Bull said it was consumers who ultimately began to push for real-time GPS tracking about a decade ago. 

Numerous companies now offer such services for school buses, including in big urban districts like New York City, which just launched its long-awaited tracker last week; Dallas and Los Angeles. The services, however, haven’t always lived up to the expectations of parents or school bus drivers, with both reporting accuracy concerns. The power of real-time information has also introduced new safety risks, Nguyen-Bull said. If the app says a bus is expected to arrive five minutes late, she said that “personal optimizers” will use that information to delay their trek to the bus stop. 

“That creates problems where kids are rushing across streets or they’re not being careful in how they approach the bus,” she said, adding that the issue is compounded in instances when the GPS information is inaccurate. “We’ve become so reliant on our phones that we don’t actually look up and see what the reality is.” 

Meanwhile, over the last year the federal government has placed a heightened emphasis on cybersecurity risks introduced to the education sector through third-party technology vendors like Edulog. In September, the federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency called on education technology vendors to sign a voluntary pledge and commit to building products with robust security protections. Companies that sign the pledge agree to “radical transparency” and to “take ownership of customer security outcomes.” 

In a December blog post, the federal cybersecurity agency noted that school districts should not be required to “bear the cybersecurity burden alone,” and advocated for shifting many responsibilities to vendors. 

“Cybersecurity issues facing K-12 could be much more effectively and cheaply dealt with earlier in the supply chain, by focusing on a relatively smaller number of linchpin companies serving very large numbers of students and educators instead of school district by school district, school by school,” the post noted. 

But Nguyen-Bull said her company was uninterested in signing the pledge, calling it meaningless without any clear cybersecurity standards. Yet she also balked at the idea of regulations that would set specific cybersecurity requirements. 

“We’re not just going to sign random pledges that ask for slightly different things if we don’t know if we can track those things,” she said. “As a small family-run business, we don’t have five compliance people tracking all of the different pledges and ensuring that we check all of the boxes.”

Sebree, of the cybersecurity firm Tenable, said that transparency about security lapses is key, telling The 74 in an email that vendors “have an ethical responsibility” to inform customers in a timely manner so they can make knowledgeable decisions. 

“Notifying their customers that a vulnerability had been discovered and fixed, even if no evidence of a breach was found, would have been the most transparent action here,” he said. “Customers deserve to know when their data has been at risk so they can make decisions in the future with all of the information in hand.” 

Louisville father Bramel said that he and other parents should also have been notified — either by the district or the company itself — about the extent that information had been exposed to preserve trust.

“When you’ve got to rely on this system to cover your kids and they can’t have open communication, what other issues are going on besides that issue?” Bramel asked. “I’m honestly shocked there aren’t lawsuits and stuff like that happening right now … because this is completely uncalled for.”

Since making its public debut last year, ChatGPT has profoundly impacted my perspective on generative AI in education. As a writer and former high school English teacher, I experienced an existential crisis watching the chatbot effortlessly generate lesson plans and rubrics — tasks that would have taken me hours to accomplish. 

Generative AI allows educators to move beyond traditional learning systems and provide a more responsive, personalized learning experience in which students demonstrate mastery, not just passing grades. 

“The future of AI in education is not just about adopting new technologies; it’s about reshaping our approach to teaching and learning in a way that is as dynamic and diverse as the students we serve,” XQ Institute Senior Advisor Laurence Holt said. He also formerly worked in the education, business and technology sectors. Through AI, we can also transcend the limitations of the Carnegie Unit — a century-old system in which a high school diploma is based on how much time students spend in specific subject classes. 

Changing that rigid system is our mission at XQ. We work with schools and communities to transform high school learning so it’s more relevant and engaging while also preparing students to succeed in college, career and real life. We recently co-convened a two-day summit with the Emerson Collective, in partnership with MeshEd and Betaworks, to bring educators and innovators together in a collaborative space — envisioning ways to use AI technology for transforming high school redesign. Those ideas and insights are available to explore on this beta wiki page.

After a year’s worth of conversations and observations with educators, our AI convening and EdTech Week 2023, there is much to share with educators to help them make the most of the rapidly evolving ecosystem of artificial intelligence. Here are seven AI in education trends to be aware of next year.

1. Professional Development 

Throughout 2023, demand for AI professional development for educators remained high. In 2024, we should see an avalanche of districts and schools providing their educators with AI professional development materials to integrate these tools into their teaching practices.

At PSI High, an XQ school in Sanford, Florida, MIT’s STEP Lab’s Sarah Wharton visited to present interesting ways to think about AI in the context of the school. 

“We looked at ChatGPT as a possible tutor, personal assistant, creative tool and research assistant,” said PSI High School Coordinator Angela Daniel. “In our PD session, we considered how these cool applications could be used in classrooms as learning tools that accelerate learning and teach the tool simultaneously.”

Daniel explained that teaching students how to use AI is a first step that will change things for students going forward.“But to really get at the heart of that question, we need to understand how generative AI can change our processes and resources right now,” she added. For the team at PSI, that means learning how to use generative AI effectively with ongoing support as the application continues to evolve.

Workshops, online courses and collaborative learning communities are also increasingly popular for providing educators with hands-on experience in AI.

Want to stay on top of trends to help you rethink high school? Check out the XQ Xtra, a newsletter for educators that comes out twice a month. Sign up here.

2. Formal AI Policy 

Integrating AI in classrooms is no longer a matter of “if” but “how,” making it imperative for educators and policymakers to navigate this terrain with informed and responsible strategies. However, the landscape of AI policy development — especially regarding education — has been dynamic, if not lagging.

The Council of Europe has continued providing critical insights for equitable policy and practice, an area where U.S. schools have been seeking guidance. New York City Public Schools, after initially banning ChatGPT, is now collaborating with academics, experts and school districts in the AI Policy Lab, focusing on issues such as privacy and cybersecurity. Recently, the Biden administration issued an executive order to guide the U.S. in leveraging artificial intelligence. This directive emphasized AI safety, privacy, equity and responsible use, signaling a shift in how AI is integrated into sectors like education. However, it is likely that AI policy in education will develop on a location-by-location basis first.

3. Open-Source Tool Development

Concerns about AI’s ethical implications and biases are sure to shape policy goals. One way to alleviate those pressures is the expansion and increased use of open-sourced tools — programs where the code is accessible and can be modified. The potential for AI to perpetuate biases is significant, however, expect the conversation to focus less on the output of AI tools and more on the kind of data it’s trained on.

Ensuring AI tools are equitable and inclusive goes beyond technical challenges — it requires continuous dialogue among educators, technologists and policymakers. This conversation is essential for addressing data privacy, surveillance and ethical use of student data. With a democratized, open-source marketplace, we could see the market promote open-sourced tools as they grow in popularity.

4. Frameworks for Teaching AI

Before the start of the 2023-24 academic year, educators and schools were waiting for a framework to guide their integration of AI tools. As policy moves forward in 2024 and more institutions develop professional development materials to train and support educators, expect AI curricula frameworks to finally emerge. Frameworks like TeachAI are being developed to guide the integration of AI in education. These frameworks focus on aligning AI applications with educational goals and promoting equitable access to technology, ensuring that AI complements and enhances student learning experiences.

5. AI Literacy, Competencies and Standards

With AI becoming more prevalent in various sectors, including education, there’s a growing need to integrate AI literacy goals and specific learning outcomes into school curricula. This involves teaching students how to use AI tools and understand the basics of AI technology, its applications and its implications.

At the Purdue Polytechnic High School network, an XQ partner with three campuses in Indiana, CEO Keeanna Warren explained how equipping staff and students with the knowledge and skills to harness AI’s potential promotes effective and responsible use of AI to enhance learning experiences.

“We firmly believe that our students’ innate curiosity drives their desire to learn, and we trust their integrity,” she said. “If AI can be used for cheating, it reflects a flaw in the assessment, not in our students’ character.”

The challenge lies in integrating AI literacy into an already packed curriculum. However, the opportunity to foster critical thinking, problem-solving and ethical reasoning skills through AI education is entirely possible.

6. AI-Powered Adaptive Learning Systems 

One of the more exciting pathways with AI is that student learning experiences will become more uniquely adaptive and personalized with a quicker turnaround. But creating effective programs requires training these systems on some level of student data -– a delicate balance.

As policy formalizes how student data gets implemented into these programs, AI-driven adaptive learning systems will emerge to shift instructional practice. Expect these programs to appear prominently in assessments and curriculum packages before evolving into real-time feedback systems that can inform teachers even during a lesson.

7. Custom GPTs Built By Educators

While all these advancements are promising and exciting, the marketplace for AI-driven ed tech tools will become incredibly crowded quickly. Recently, OpenAI’s maker space for building and using custom GPTs, which both use and are built by ChatGPT, is guaranteed to be a massive disruptor.

Ty Boyland, school-based enterprise coordinator and music production teacher at Crosstown High, designed a custom GPT. (Crosstown High is another XQ school in Memphis, Tennessee.) Boyland’s students use Dall-E, an AI system for generating images, with GPT-4 to create designs and prints for student-driven projects. 

“But how do you create a project combining culinary and music production?” Boyland wondered. His customized GPT pairs XQ’s competencies with Tennessee State Standards to build a new project.

It will be interesting to see what educators create in this space to resolve pain points teachers and schools are intimately familiar with and what gets made to help schools achieve their vision and mission.  

The Bottom Line for Educators

From policy shifts emphasizing equity and privacy to the emergence of AI-driven curricula, the transformation is palpable. We’ve seen how AI can revolutionize and disrupt classroom practices, empower educators through professional development, and create inclusive, personalized student learning experiences. But the burgeoning AI ed tech market demands discernment. Educators must navigate this space wisely, choosing tools that genuinely enhance learning and align with ethical standards.

As we enter 2024, educators and stakeholders face a challenge: keeping pace with AI and engaging with it thoughtfully to catalyze educational excellence instead of just putting a new face on old practices. It’s the primary reason we at XQ convened so many educators and innovators into one space— to rethink high school by harnessing the potential of our AI-powered future. We look forward to sharing more with you in the coming year. 

Do you want to learn more about how to rethink high school? The XQ Xtra is a newsletter for educators that comes out twice a month. Sign up here.

Disclosure: The XQ Institute is a financial supporter of The 74.

1. Technology 

The first thing most teachers bring up is the improvement in technology. Not only has overall access gotten better, with many districts achieving a one-to-one ratio of devices to students, but both teachers and students have become more technologically fluent. This is especially true for educators and classrooms. According to one teacher I spoke to, schools took a five- to six-year technology jump in one year. Teachers had to adapt to online learning and were forced to learn modern instructional practices. The pandemic caused them to change their approaches to teaching in ways they might never have done if it had not been for the pandemic. Online platforms that were developed because of COVID have given teachers valuable tools for engaging students in instruction and evaluating their progress efficiently. One teacher highlighted the fact that online platforms allow educators to be more interactive with their students and more aware of their progress. 

2. Nurturing

Every school district, teacher and administrator knows that the pandemic has caused students to struggle with conflict resolution and appropriate social relationships. Students were isolated from their peers, and although they were interacting online, it was easy for them to turn the camera off, mute themselves and withdraw from interactions with others. But that same technology provided educators with a window into the homes of students and a glimpse into their lives. This gave teachers a new way to truly understand what students were going through and be cognizant of their family circumstances.

Because of this newfound understanding, teachers say they have become more nurturing. Teachers realized that they had to be more aware of students’ needs, be patient with them and seek ways to support them.

3. Mental Health Needs

COVID made clear how important it is to prioritize mental health needs for both students and adults. One teacher told me how, before the pandemic, she felt it was offensive to ask parents if their child was in counseling or if they were interested in services. But now, it isn’t taboo to ask. There is a shared understanding that it is okay to not be okay, and families are more open to resources to support their children’s social-emotional needs. One teacher said he incorporates social-emotional strategies in his classroom now that he didn’t think were necessary pre-pandemic. 

Another teacher said he was taking the practices he incorporates with his students and using them for himself. And as an assistant principal, I am aware of the social-emotional needs of my staff as well as the demands on them to develop each student. After the pandemic, my academic team has been more cognizant of teachers’ needs and has prioritized initiatives in order to focus on what is important.

4. Solutions-Oriented

The last significant theme that emerged is that schools have become more solutions-oriented. The teachers I spoke with agreed to stop putting the focus on the past. What is done is done. The question now needs to be, what are the solutions? The needs of students are evident, so schools must work on identifying resources to support them both academically and social-emotionally. It takes a collective effort to find solutions and make changes. Having a positive attitude and looking for good in circumstances is essential. The pandemic has given the world an opportunity to prove how resilient individuals can be. 

COVID-19 posed challenges that no one in this lifetime had experienced. Returning to in-person learning and getting back to normal has proved to be difficult; however, for all the darkness of the pandemic, there are some positive effects in the nation’s schools. 

The report, led by researchers at the University of Chicago and New York University, highlights how the scramble to adopt new technologies in schools has served to create an $85 billion industry with significant data security risks for teachers, parents and students. The issue has become particularly pervasive since the pandemic forced students nationwide into remote, online learning. 

Students’ sensitive information is increasingly leaked online following high-profile ransomware attacks and user data monetization is a key business strategy for tech companies, including those that serve the education market, like Google. Yet student privacy is rarely a top consideration when teachers adopt new digital tools, researchers learned in interviews with district technology officials. In fact, schools routinely lack the resources and know-how to assess potential vulnerabilities.

Such a reality could spell trouble: In an analysis of education technologies widely used or endorsed by districts nationwide, researchers discovered privacy risks abound. The analysis relied on Blacklight, a privacy inspector tool created by the nonprofit news website The Markup which scours websites to uncover data-sharing practices. Those include the use of cookies that track user behaviors to deliver personalized advertisements. Analyzed education tools, they found, make “extensive use of tracking technologies” with potential privacy implications. 

Most alarming to the researchers were the 7.4% that used “session recorders,” a type of tracker that documents a user’s every move. 

“Anyone visiting those sites would have their entire session captured which includes information such as which links they clicked on, what images they hovered over and even data entered into fields but not submitted,” the report notes. “This could include data that users might otherwise consider private such as the autofilling of saved user credentials or social network data.” 

The 74 caught up with report co-author Jake Chanenson, a University of Chicago Ph.D. student, to gain insight into the report’s findings and to understand why he believes that parents and students should be concerned about how ed tech companies collect, store and use their personal data. 

The conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

Why did remote learning pique your interest in digital privacy and what are the primary implications that worry you? 

Remote learning can be done well but we all had to get to it very quickly without a plan because we all suddenly got thrown at home because of the global pandemic. Suddenly schools had to scramble and find new solutions to reach their students, to educate their students, without being able to test the field, to think critically about it. They really were, with shoestring and gum, trying to keep their classes together. 

Whether you were in school, whether you were at work, whether you were at neither and still just trying to keep in touch with your friends, you were using anything that came your way because that’s what you had to do. I found that really interesting — and a bit concerning. It’s no one’s fault because we don’t understand the ramifications of these technologies and now that we’ve used them a lot of them are here to stay. 

I don’t want to sound like some sort of demonizing figure saying that all tech is bad — that is certainly not the case. It’s merely the fact that sometimes these promises are oversold, and now we have this added element of data privacy. 

When you interact with any of these platforms, tons and tons of student data — from how you interact with it, how well you do on their assignments, when you do it, if you’re a chronic procrastinator, if you’re always getting your work done, if you seem more interested in your art class than your math class. These are all data points collected by these companies and I wanted to know, ‘What is it they’re collecting? What are they doing with it,’ and, specifically for this study, ‘What are schools thinking about in this space if anything at all?’

This study took a two-pronged approach. You conducted surveys with experts in this space and then used technology to identify information that folks might not be aware of. Let’s discuss the surveys first. How did the school administrators and district technology officials you interviewed view privacy issues? 

Lots of them knew that something wasn’t quite up to snuff in their security and privacy practices. 

The best security and privacy practices that I saw in these school districts were entirely because someone, usually in the IT department, had an independent interest in student privacy. They were going above and beyond what their job descriptions required because they cared about the students. 

That’s not to imply that school officials don’t care about the kids —they care about them very much — but they’re so busy making sure the lights are on and making sure there are teachers for the classrooms, dealing with discipline issues, dealing with staffing concerns. They’re not necessarily focused on data privacy and security. 

Your research takes a unique approach to show the real-world impacts of education technology on student privacy. You identify that some of these tools raise significant privacy implications. How did you go about that?

We looked at the online websites of educational sites and tried to understand, what are the privacy risks here? What we found is that 7.4% of all these websites had a session recorder, which records everything you do when you’re interacting with a web page. How long you hovered over a certain element, how often you scrolled, what you clicked on and what you didn’t click on. 

That’s a scary amount of data collection for something that’s normally an education site. On top of that we found a high prevalence of cookies and other types of trackers that were being sent to third-parties, basically advertising networks, that were taking that data to track these students across the web. As a student, even while I’m doing my work, they’re creating an ad profile of me that not only encompasses who I am as a consumer in my spare time, but who I am as a student inside of school for this more comprehensive picture of who I am to sell me ads. 

That could be upsetting to somebody who thinks that what I’m doing in school is only the business of me and the teacher, my parents and the principal. 

Why would an education technology company use a session recorder? 

We were able to identify that these trackers, like session recorders, were running on these websites, but we don’t have any idea what they’re recording, which is a project that we’re currently working on and trying to understand. 

I can’t make any well-grounded assumptions to what this is being used for, whether it be nefarious or benign. It’s not uncommon for a session recorder to be used for diagnostic information for a technology company if they want to understand how their users use a site so they can improve it. That’s a legitimate use of one of these session recorders, but without knowing what data they collect, it could be that they’re collecting data that isn’t strictly relevant to improving the service or are over-collecting data in the guise of improving the service and retaining it for future use. 

There are, of course, malicious uses for these session recorders but I won’t speculate on that because I don’t have definitive proof that’s what’s happening. 

Why should people care about districts’ technology procurements? School districts are using a huge swath of digital tools, some from Google and some from tiny tech companies. If school leaders aren’t putting privacy at the forefront of deciding which tools to use, what concerning outcomes can come from that? 

There are several concerning outcomes, the first being that the data these companies collect don’t necessarily sit on their servers. They sometimes are sold to third parties. Some companies state third parties ambiguously and others list out who they are selling it to and why. 

Just on a normative basis, I think that what you do in the classroom shouldn’t be harvested and sold, especially when many of these companies are raking in somewhere between five- and seven-figure contracts to license this technology. It’s not like they don’t have other sources of income, but the things they can take from students can be incredibly alarming: Information about socioemotional behavior, so if I act out in school, if I am in trouble for something that’s happening at home or I’m bullying another student, that data is collected by a specific service and that data is held somewhere. And of course, when you hold data, it’s a security risk. 

There was a big breach in New York City where hundreds of thousands of students had their personal information leaked because a company was holding onto all of this data. It was leaked to hackers who got that data and can do who knows what with it. That’s a huge privacy violation. Some of the things they stole in that particular breach were names, birthdays and standard things you can use to commit identity fraud, which is a problem. But it can also be more sensitive stuff, such as [special education] accommodation lists or if you qualify for free lunch. There’s stuff about disability or your economic status, stuff that is all collected by these ed tech companies and held somewhere. 

Learning management systems have incredible amounts of metadata. ‘Are you someone who procrastinates and only finishes an assignment one minute before it’s due? Did you do it early? Are you someone who didn’t do the reading but showed up to class anyway? Are you someone who took 10 times to get this quiz right or did it only take you one time’ 

These data are recorded and are available for teachers to see, but because teachers can see it, it’s sitting on a server somewhere. 

Because they’re being stored somewhere and they are not being deleted regularly and these companies are not following data minimization principles, it’s a potential privacy risk for these students should another breach happen, which we’ve seen happen again and again and again. 

Breaches have affected sensitive student information. In her book The Fight for Privacy, Danielle Citron argues for federal rules that would protect intimate privacy as a civil right. Why are such rules needed and how would they work in an educational context? 

There are certain types of information, like nonconsensual disclosures of intimate images, so-called revenge porn. I think you can make a straight analogy for student data. Just as there should be a zone of intimate privacy around your personal intimate life, your sexuality, whatever else, we should have a similar zone around your educational life. 

Education is a space where students should be able to learn and make mistakes, and if you cannot make those mistakes without being recorded, then that can have repercussions for you later. If you’re not perfect on your first try and someone gets a hold of that, I could see that affecting your college admissions or that could affect an employment record. If I am someone who wants to hire you and I have a list of every student in a school that turns in their assignments early and all of these people were either habitually late or always procrastinating then obviously I’m going to be more interested in hiring the worker that turned stuff in early. But what that list might not tell you is that it was one data point in eighth grade and that one of those students when they were in high school finally got on top of their executive dysfunction and started turning things in on time. 

It’s ultimately nobody’s business how you do in the classroom. You have final grades, but those fine-grained data are nobody else’s business but yours and the teacher’s. You have a safe space to learn and grow and make mistakes in the educational environment and to not be penalized for them outside of that classroom.

UPchieve, an ed tech nonprofit, is bringing on volunteer tutors to offer free, on-demand academic and college application support to any U.S. middle or high school student attending a Title I school or living in a low-income neighborhood.

The platform is a game changer for students of color living in poverty, disproportionately impacted by the pandemic and unable to access costly individualized tutoring. Often working jobs or tending to family responsibilities, many are prevented from utilizing traditional offerings afterschool.

Through a mobile app or website, students are matched with one of 20,000 trained, volunteer tutors worldwide within five minutes. Sessions are typically 40 minutes, but can extend beyond an hour until students feel confident with the task at hand. 

“Right now in the United States, that sort of extra support is not available to the majority of low-income students,” said founder Aly Murray. “That’s where we come in. We think that every student, regardless of their family’s income, should be able to get support with their classes and applying to college when they need it.” 

Murray, who grew up low-income to an immigrant single mother, launched UPchieve in 2017 looking to build the platform she wished she had as a child. Of the more than 37,000 students who have completed over 100,000 sessions since, 64% are first-generation college-bound and 81% are students of color.

More than half are not enrolled in any other academic or college access program, and many start programming with very low motivation or in the lower third percentiles in terms of academic performance — sometimes grade levels behind. 

“We’re reaching kids — and this is exactly what we wanted,” Murray added. “UPchieve is especially valuable and high impact in cases where kids have nothing else,” especially those whose college and career trajectory could be changed by this level of support.

That was the case for Michael Lyons, a rising 11th grader who works at a Bloomington, Illinois grocery store three days a week and usually starts schoolwork at about 10 p.m. Having used the platform since finding it in an internet search for writing help in 7th grade, Lyons now has dreams of becoming an elementary school teacher. 

“I need help on demand,” Lyons said. “I think of [UPchieve] as a teacher away from school … I could participate more, because I know what I’m doing.” 

After just nine sessions, students scored an average of nine percentile points higher on the national Star math assessment, gains equivalent to 8 months of additional learning, according to policy research firm Mathematica, which studied 9th and 10th graders in the 2021-22 school year. Students also showed increased academic motivation, confidence, and engagement in class. 

Mathematica’s report was the first to show the effectiveness of on-demand tutoring — findings “useful for the field of math tutoring because they are examples of preliminary evidence that on-demand, online tutoring drawing on unpaid, volunteer tutors improves math achievement and motivation.”

Math, particularly algebra and geometry, is UPchieve’s most commonly requested subject, accounting for about 56% of 2022’s sessions, followed by humanities and writing support at 22%, science at 17% and college prep at 5%. 

Because the model draws on volunteer labor, the operational cost to provide one student with a year’s worth of unlimited tutoring is only $5. In comparison, other tutoring programs with similar impact can cost thousands per student. 

UPchieve’s international tutor base ranges from college students and retired teachers to business professionals looking to make an impact. The majority have prior tutor experience, but all have to complete an introductory training to learn best practices and demonstrate content mastery. 

David Seides, director of finance and customer experience at AT&T, began volunteering nearly three years ago, encouraged to put some hours in as a corporate sponsor. To date, he’s logged over 400 sessions. 

He sets the times he is available each week, and gets alerts when students request help. When he has an extra hour, Seides pops online to see if there’s any students waiting. The setup is ideal, he said, because his work schedule is unpredictable.

For students who are struggling in class but don’t want to let on to the teacher or their peers, UPchieve provides a level of needed distance, too.

“This online platform, it’s anonymous enough that I think we get people coming with the real problems that they can’t figure out how to solve,” Seides said. 

Confidence was a struggle for Stacy, a rising 11th grader from Ghana now in Worcester, Massachusetts. Her math grades pre-tutoring were in the 70s. Today, she regularly earns As and sees a future at one of the University of Massachusetts campuses. 

“I was surprised because I didn’t expect the tutors to help me so well. I started crying and screaming when I got it,” she told the nonprofit.

“They don’t just help me do [homework], but also make sure I understand,” Stacy said. “They also give me similar problems just like the ones on my homework or what I’m learning in school … My math teacher is really impressed with my grades and understanding in class now. I am very grateful for that.”

Like other programs, UPchieve is still working on how to get students to regularly return. While some students log on far above average, up to 400 hours in a single year, only about 12% of new students log 10 or more sessions — about 6 hours, the threshold for seeing large academic gains.

In comparison to the popular Khan Academy, UPchieve does seem to be striking a chord with students. Only about 7% of Khan’s new users complete two or more hours of sessions, according to a 2020 annual report.

Adding an audio or video connection would be a welcome change, or being able to “favorite” past tutors, students told The 74. 

The current text-based communication is preferred by most — especially because many use the platform late at night, or have slow or limited internet access. A predominantly text-based platform also streamlines student safety, Murray said, as chat logs are stored and reviewed, and filters in place prevent emails or social media accounts from being shared.

UPchieve does plan to develop voice capabilities, with safety measures, for students and tutors who both opt-in in future versions of the app, for times when a concept is particularly confusing. One of Seides student’s, for example, once had difficulty understanding which way to flip their paper to understand reflection and rotations on a quadrant plane.

Still, in its current iteration, the platform is filling a gap for students who need it most. 

“It has given me a support system in stressful times. Without the comfort of private tutors that my peers had, I knew I would have to work even harder,” Xin, a high school student in Queens, NY, told the nonprofit. “Having UPchieve meant that I wouldn’t have to work alone or live with the constant anxiety of falling behind.”

Disclosure: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Overdeck Family Foundation provide financial support to UPchieve and The 74.

SoundMind, a music therapy app created by founders Brian Femminella and Travis Chen, reduces students’ stress and anxiety through audio and visual beats tailored to the needs of each user.

The goal for Femminella, 23, and Chen, 24, is to use the healing effects of sound as an approach to help students combat pandemic-induced stress so they can focus in the classroom.

“We’re not a program, we’re a tool,” Chen told The 74. “We’re a tool that complements existing social-emotional learning curriculum and guides students along the way as they try to relax and improve their mental health.”

SoundMind launched in November 2021 and has gained over 100,000 users — in addition to reducing their stress and anxiety levels by 46%.

From districts in Los Angeles to New York City, SoundMind has partnered with schools nationwide to help teachers, counselors and administrators gauge their students’ mental health.

The science behind SoundMind centers around their music development team that utilize clinically-proven research.

“It’s rooted in thanatosonics…or the relationship between sound, violence and the human relationship,” Femminella told The 74. “That’s something we found very useful as we developed our binaural beats.”

Femminella noted as students’ use the app, the built-in artificial intelligence creates more personalized sounds.

Through SoundMind’s online platform, educators have the opportunity to check in on their students’ anxiety and depression levels.

The platform provides real-time data for educators to better understand trends between their students’ happiness and learning capacity.

“The response we hear is that it’s transparent and gives them more insights,” Femminella said. “We’re able to help admin feel like they can actually see what’s going on in their classrooms.”  

Chen added how schools particularly enjoy the suggestions page that provides strategies for educators to remedy their students’ specific mental health needs.

“Our platform is comprehensive, immersive and interactive,” Chen said. “And we’re really proud to be in this specific time where we can help schools with their students’ mental health journey.”

To increase the app’s accessibility, Femminella and Chen partnered with TruConnect to not only provide students with tablets and wireless service through the Affordable Connectivity Program but also a SoundMind membership.

“We recognize that 55% of students are on this program so there was a very big need for us to do this,” Chen said.

For Femminella and Chen, mental health advocacy stems from their personal stories.

Femminella and Chen originally met as randomly selected roommates when they interned for the U.S. Congress.

“Over time we really bonded and started going to dinners together and had brainstorming sessions later at night,” Femminella said.

As time progressed, Femminella and Chen discovered their mutual interest in mental health advocacy — which eventually led to the creation of SoundMind in their University of Southern California dorm rooms.

Femminella noted his LGBTQ and military background plays a large role in his understanding of social-emotional wellness.

“I joined the military at a young age and had a lot of political aspirations in regards to how I saw the mental health space and how soldiers were struggling,” Femminella said. “I’ve seen folks in these environments feel small so being able to give a voice to people who feel powerless is something really impactful for me.”

Chen said his Asian American roots reinforce his desire to destigmatize conversations around mental health.

“There’s a lot of competition in the AAPI community in regards to AP scores and SAT classes to name a few,” Chen said. “I remember personally struggling with my own mental health in high school and I knew I had to do something about it.”

Chen believes the power of social media has shaped the landscape of youth mental health.

“Nowadays students are hiding behind screens,” Chen said. “So instead of disciplining and telling them what not to do, how can we meet them where they’re at?”

As SoundMind continues to grow, Femminella regards their work with SoundMind as a testament to how impactful Gen Z leaders can be.

“We hope to be the pinnacle of what it means to push hard and be furious about how youth in our country are struggling,” Femminella said.

Among the goals of the recent LatinX Edtech Summit: Bridging the Digital Divide was to connect local educators and emerging technology entrepreneurs who could collaborate on an idea that could generate a long-term impact that would benefit underrepresented students and communities.

About 140 K-12 and higher education teachers, administrators, business leaders, technology investors and representatives from national organizations with vested interests in all levels of education gathered for the second annual summit on June 16, 2023, in the Region 19 Starlight Event Center, 6650 Continental Drive, near the El Paso International Airport.

Whether in the main hall or in the exhibit area, summit participants talked about technology and its application. Buzzing among the participants was Joseph Sapien, CEO and executive director of the STTE (Success Through Technology Education) Foundation, the event’s lead organizer.

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Sapien helped found STTE, an El Paso-based nonprofit that works to develop, deploy and advance educational programs to enhance the chances that tomorrow’s students are digitally literate and ready to join the 21st-century workforce.

“A year, two years, five years from now, because of those connections, education and technology are going to be exponentially advanced,” he said while exhibitors pitched their tech products in the background. “The technologies that are here are very fascinating. I’m looking forward to seeing what happens because of this event.”

Pew Research Center reports from 2021 and 2022 showed that while many Hispanics use smartphones, not as many own computers or have internet access to save money. This digital exclusion means that more than half of the Latino workforce is not ready to be part of the digital economy. The summit is among the ongoing efforts to enhance digital equity in Latino households, especially those in rural communities. These plans include access to affordable broadband, which experts believe will lead to the improved digital skills needed for today’s tech jobs.

Eddie Rodriguez, executive director of CREEED (Council on Regional Economic Expansion and Education Development), one of the summit’s sponsors, said the main thing his organization wanted to stress was a continuous commitment to higher education to achieve economic success.

Rodriguez said that a high-quality public education should provide students, regardless of their socio-economic background, with a launching point for a productive life.

“It’s going to take every shoulder to the wheel to effectively get us to that destination that will increase the trajectory of our economic opportunity,” Rodriguez said.

The CREEED official moderated one of the summit’s panel discussions about the importance of technology in rural areas. The panelists were Veronica Vijil, Rosy Vega-Barrio and Oscar Troncoso, who are superintendents of the Fabens, Tornillo and Anthony independent school districts, respectively. These small districts serve rural communities on the western and eastern edges of El Paso.

The trio noted how the pandemic sped up the use of technology at the K-12 level, and quickly raised the competency of teachers for virtual instruction, but it also revealed the need to expand internet access to allow greater communication between schools and students and their households.

Troncoso said that a side benefit was that parents, who often were Spanish speakers, could use their child’s laptop to access language applications to learn English. He also said that students who mastered the technology became eligible for more college scholarship opportunities to include some for competitive Esports at New Mexico State University.

The trio touted how artificial intelligence (AI) programs could be powerful tools to help their students to improve their English proficiency, especially in written communication, and to give a voice to students with disabilities by enhancing their social skills.

Jacob Fraire, president of the ECMC Foundation, another summit sponsor, said he expected to hear new ideas from Latino leaders in education, technology and entrepreneurship about how tech-enabled learning could benefit Latino students, which is a growing community across the state and the country and one that traditionally underperforms at the post-secondary level compared to white students.

According to recent U.S. Census Bureau data, the population of Texas passed 30 million in 2022. Of that, 49.3% of the population age 17 and younger are Hispanic. The same data showed that only 70% of Hispanic adults earned a high school diploma and only 18% received a college degree.

Fraire said ECMC, a Los Angeles-based organization, works to improve higher education and career opportunities for underserved populations throughout the country that do not traditionally graduate from colleges and universities.

“We’re hoping to bring to light those ideas of how we can do better,” Fraire said. “In order for us to serve the Latino community more effectively, we have to be intentional about our saying that in this community, we intend to serve explicitly. That’s why we’re here today.”

One of the event’s keynote speakers, Sarita E. Brown, co-founder and president of Excelencia in Education, said she was at the summit because Excelencia wants to work with institutions that reach Latino students, serve them well, and propel them into the workforce and society.

Brown said her organization is well aware of El Paso’s strengths and potential, and that the summit highlights the region’s ability to combine human capital with practical and tactical solutions. She lauded its residents, who for decades were underrepresented and underestimated, because they made the most of their bilingualism and biculturalism, especially as first-generation college students. Now the state, the nation and the world see the “vibrance” in the area because of UTEP being a top-level academic research university and the expansion of El Paso Community College. The student populations at both of those institutions are heavily Latino.

She said the summit was an opportunity for academic leaders to listen to entrepreneurs and technology developers about cutting-edge ideas that could benefit their students. She said that her question for every educator and tech person in the room was how they plan to efficiently connect with each other to benefit Latinos, who will make up a larger percentage of higher education students in the future.

“They’re definitely looking at challenges, but are rising to meet them,” she said.

This article first appeared on El Paso Matters and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

Three professors from Iowa’s public universities are working to raise awareness of the importance and contradictory nature of artificial intelligence in higher education, pointing to concerns about privacy, bias and academic integrity.

The professors, speaking to the Board of Regents on June 14, pointed to the benefits and detriments of AI use in classrooms, as it is necessary for the workforce in some occupations and hinders others.

“It’s important that we are, in all cases, educating our faculty, staff and students on the use of these technologies, both from the perspective of the opportunity they offer, but also the challenges and concerns that they present,” Barrett Thomas, professor and senior associate dean of the Tippie College of Business at the University of Iowa, said.

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Abram Anders, an associate professor of English and the interim associate director of the Student Innovation Center at Iowa State University, said the impact of AI is being witnessed by “pioneers” at higher education institutions across the world. He said the large language model technology, in which computers can learn and generate human languages, is raising the bar for what’s possible in the classroom, but it does come with limitations.

“Even though we can see magical-like performances of these tools, it’s really important to know they have limitations,” Anders said. “It’s not like they’re sentient; they don’t think and feel like a human does. They’re not objective, they are likely to have some of the same biases of the human language that they’re trained on. They are not authoritative. Like a human author, they cannot be responsible for the consequences of their texts and they are not ethical.”

Thomas agreed with Anders about the detriments of the newer AI generator technology, including bias.

“More broadly, all AI technologies have questions of bias and that bias comes in algorithmic design, it comes in how we sample the data that is used to train these models,” he said. “It comes from the way the data is generated. This is, in these cases, human-generated data and so the data you get depends on who has access to that human generation.”

He also pointed to AI responses that simply aren’t true when asking questions, which spreads misinformation and impacts individual users. Thomas pointed to a “now infamous case” of a lawyer using ChatGPT and citing case law that doesn’t exist.

Academic integrity questions and classroom needs

Jim O’Loughlin, professor and head of the University of Northern Iowa’s Languages and Literature Department, showed the regents several headlines about academic integrity and the use of ChatGPT. He said questions of plagiarism are not new and the universities in Iowa have policies on academic infringements.

“There’s already some mechanism for dealing with electronic text,” he said while showing the regents a copy of UNI’s Academi Ethics Violation policy. “But we are — in the section in red — working on what modest changes may need to be made to account for generative AI.”

O’Loughlin said that these policies must remain flexible to see proper use in different classroom settings, as some may encourage understanding AI for future occupational application. Some students will need extensive understanding of generative AI, he said, while others may just need a little knowledge on it.

He pointed to the job of prompt engineers, who develop, refine and optimize AI text prompts for accuracy and relevant responses. Some current students at Iowa’s universities will go into these jobs, he said, who will need several classes on how to use and better AI.

Those aren’t the only cases, though, O’Loughlin told the board.

“Clearly, there are going to be some circumstances and some classes where the use of AI would be detrimental and would need to be prohibited and faculty would need to have the leeway for that,” he said.

Another issue is the current infrastructure professors have to determine if student work is plagiarized or not, O’Loughlin said.

“There are some concerns that a lot of faculty have right now,” he said. “Electronic plagiarism checkers that are already in place, they’ve actually struggled to accurately identify AI-produced text, particularly a lot of false positives come up for students for whom English is not their first language.”

Needing new assignments

O’Loughlin said the assignments the regents and some current professors at UNI, ISU and the University of Iowa would have experienced in their educational journeys will likely be nullified because of generative AI.

“We are also finding, now, that some standard forms of assessments, things that we all would’ve done — the take-home exam, the annotated bibliography, the research paper — these are going to become less reliable indicators of student performance because ChatGPT can be used with them so easily,” he said.

Written communication, argumentation and basic computer coding skills are easily assisted or even fully written by generative AI, he said. Discernment and understanding if something is good, bad or argumentative is becoming more important in higher education, he said, which is taught in more humanities courses.

New courses are also being offered surrounding AI, Anders said, pointing to a class he’s teaching at ISU entitled “Artificial Intelligence and Writing.” He will teach literacy tools for students to understand and develop effective prompts and find accurate information using AI.

O’Loughlin pointed to an epidemiology class at UNI where students analyze what ChatGPT has to say on public health issues for accuracy. There are also creative writing courses that use AI to understand original story ideas.

Opportunities for AI use are everywhere and in every discipline, Thomas said, including classes at the UI in entrepreneurship and AI as well as providing hands-on experiences in the Commercializing New Technology Academy.

“It’s going to impact all of the research across campus and then also all of our students as they go into the workforce,” he said. “And it’s important that we’re preparing them for that space.”

Privacy concerns

Thomas said one of the major issues with using ChatGPT and similar software is that students may not realize it stores data.

Generative AI holds onto the information input by people to train its next version, which includes any sensitive data.

“There are changes that are coming, particularly in ChatGPT, to allow you to keep your data private but I think there are still concerns and it requires education to make sure that people understand these and, probably in certain circumstances, prohibition against using these technologies with certain data,” he said.”

The time is now

Anders said the disruption of AI is happening now.

“These technologies, unlike other technologies, are not emergent in the sense that we don’t have to wait five years to see what they can do,” he said. “They can already do it now and if we had no further progress they would already be transforming our world.”

AI won’t replace jobs, he said, but a human using AI will as the technology is focused on “ramping up” human talent.

“The last point, that I think we all three agree on, is the question is not to ban or not to ban,” Andes said. “That’s already gone. This is here for good. But how can we assume leadership for inventing ethical features, ones that mitigate harms in our learning communities and prepare our students to use these tools moving forward.”

Iowa Capital Dispatch is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Iowa Capital Dispatch maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Kathie Obradovich for questions: info@iowacapitaldispatch.com. Follow Iowa Capital Dispatch on Facebook and Twitter.

In a landscape of large-scale employment websites, EduOpenings offers an easy-to-use app focused specifically on education, designed to allow job seekers to promote their skills through resumes, videos and other media while giving employers direct access to a diverse group of candidates.

Marshaun Warren, director of human resources and director of diversity, equity and inclusion for the Belleville Township High School District, across the state line from St. Louis in Illinois, was drawn to EduOpenings because “I recognized an opportunity to execute not only a wider search for candidates, but also a specialized search that focused specifically on school personnel.”

Having used recruiting platforms for nearly two decades, “the inclusive architecture of EduOpenings also supports and encourages the engagement of diverse candidates,” Warren says.

EduOpenings’s origin story isn’t so much about creating a new business, but about two St. Louis education leaders working to solve problems in their own community. Founders Darryl Diggs, director of equity for the Special School District of St. Louis County, and Howard Fields, assistant superintendent of human resources in the St. Louis County School District, met at a leadership academy and discussed their experiences as Black men working in education. That connection led them to start The State of Black Educators Symposium, which provides networking opportunities.

Participants started asking Diggs and Fields to share job referrals with the group. “It was nothing to get 20 to 30 emails a week with this organization just started,” Fields says. 

“When we first started, it was more so a reflective piece of our own upbringings and trying to find a job,” Diggs says. “There are some platforms still around that look the same as they did 20 years ago, if not 40 or 45 years ago. What would it look like to take an old system and put the power and ownness on the job seeker, giving you an amazing first impression through video or audio? We were thinking about our own 314 area code, the St. Louis region. [EduOpenings] has quickly grown and is now across the country in a variety of states and school districts.” 

With the founders’ connections in Black education, the effort began with a focus on diversity, and grew quickly. From St. Louis, the company expanded to serve the five largest school districts in Missouri, including about 90% of the St. Louis area. Then, Black educators in Chicago, Philadelphia and other major cities started joining. 

Funding the year-old platform with no outside investment to date, Fields and Diggs made their first-ever pitch at the 2023 SXSW Edu Launch event. 

“There isn’t a one-stop shop for educators interested in jobs all across the country,” Fields says. “From a vision standpoint, we would like to get there.” 

By focusing solely on education, he says, the posts “live in a space where people find value.” Diggs says it benefits both the job seeker and the employer and adds a focus on pushing jobs out on social media, building advertisements and helping school districts manage inquiries. 

“Imagine if you are able to jump on a site and see all of those who fit qualifications looking for a job all in one swoop,” Diggs says. “You can be a recruiter. You can see everyone on the site and go after them. It is different than any other space.” 

“EduOpenings is unique because the vacancy postings are brief yet informative and attractive to view,” Warren says. “It is ideal for my situation because I do not have to input large amounts of information to utilize the platform. I can contact the team with the vacancy, and they take it from there. This helps tremendously when you work in a large district.” 

The service is attracting large and small districts alike. The larger ones can promote their openings to a greater, more diverse demographic as they try to keep up with a list of vacancies. The smaller districts use the platform to post their jobs to reach a wider audience. Site data allows employers to view how well their post performed and then make changes to gain more interest. For the job seeker, all posts are education-specific. 

“I know when my phone goes off with EduOpenings, it is a job I am interested in,” Fields says. 

The free service — add-ons come with a fee — continues to grow. What started around 100 job postings per month has grown to roughly 300, all without much promotion. Popular with K-12 districts, it also serves private and charter schools and higher education. Diggs and Field hope pitching the business at places such as SXSW will open the door to grants and funding, which could allow them to grow their team and push national.

“We haven’t been paid a dime in terms of the work we have done,” Fields says. “That is not our why. We are trying to build something responsive.”

He’s also a star in Ben Adler’s 8th-grade science unit on gravity and kinetic energy at Oakland, California’s Downtown Charter Academy, a middle school in the city’s East Peralta neighborhood. Students are designing, building and launching rockets on Macbook Air laptops around their classroom — and trying to keep their “Kerbonauts” on track (and intact) for various space missions.

It’s clever, engaging and far more typical in 2023 than it was before the pandemic. Lessons like these mark a genuine shift in American schools. Indeed, though many campuses reopened in part during the pandemic because they concluded that children were not learning enough using digital tools during virtual learning, late pandemic schooling today is positively saturated with these devices. 

Americans have spent huge chunks of the past three years thinking and talking about schools in binary terms — open or closed, in-person or virtual. But with schools all but universally open and back to a normal state (however imperfect), though, these dichotomies have gotten somewhat blurrier. 

Truth is, we didn’t reopen schools back to “normal” in-person learning over the past few years … so much as we brought daily virtual learning into real-world classrooms. 

It’s the new normal in U.S. public education — and it’s complicated. I’ve visited nearly 100 public school classrooms across three states in the past six months. I don’t recall seeing a single one without a computer screen projected onto the board at the front of the room. Lessons reliably include videos from curriculum vendors and/or the internet. On several occasions, I watched early elementary schoolers hold up badges hanging from lanyards around their necks to unlock laptops to play. Written assignments and quizzes — including Adler’s on rocketry — are often conducted on laptops and submitted online. As students type, teachers frequently project online timer videos with animated graphics and sound effects. 

There’s no question that the pandemic shifted schools’ digital infrastructure. The extraordinary pressures of the past three years of crises forced significant new public investments in closing digital divides. Policymakers and schools poured emergency funding into purchasing devices like laptops, tablets, Chromebooks and internet hotspots so that all students would be able to access online lessons — so much so that supply chains couldn’t keep up. This made a real dent in longstanding digital divides, even if it didn’t wholly close them. Indeed, in January 2021, a survey of teachers still found 35% reporting that few of their English-learning students had reliable internet access. 

It’s far from clear what this means for the present and future of U.S. public education. Teachers I’ve spoken with express ambivalence about the degree to which digital technology has permeated campus. Most say that it’s created both exciting skills and pernicious challenges. 

When Downtown Charter Academy closed on March 13, 2020, it sent students home with two weeks of assigned work. As it became clear that the crisis was serious, DCA acquired digital devices and hotspots to ensure that all families could access distance learning. Within a few weeks, the school had moved its pre-pandemic schedule online. “It was 20 hours per day at first,” says Director Claudia Lee. “But it got easier.” 

But closing device and internet access gaps was just a first step. Many DCA students and families lacked the digital literacy to use and manage these new tools. This was also true across the state. A fall 2020 survey of linguistically diverse California families found that nearly one-third of participants did not understand the pandemic learning instructions they received from their children’s schools. Further, fully one-third of participants responded that they did not have email accounts they could use. 

DCA teachers say that the logistics of the transition were relatively smooth. They also confirmed that they faced many of the problems that plagued virtual learning across the country. Student engagement was a struggle, with some students attending only sporadically and others switching off their cameras under the pretense that their connection was too slow to bear the video. “We visited some homes,” says Lee, “and found some situations that were hard. Kids were trying to learn in kitchens, for example, or other places with lots of noise and distractions around. So we brought a small number of kids back to campus to log on virtually — but socially distanced.”

The school reopened for full-time in-person learning in fall 2021, but it was hardly a return to normalcy. By the end of that school year, DCA students’ academic outcomes were significantly stronger than peers in the surrounding school district, but that was only part of the story. In discussions during a daylong professional development session this January, many teachers noted that students were prone to online distractions and — worse yet — had become increasingly adept at using digital tools and resources to avoid doing their classwork themselves. Students brought these virtual learning habits back to their in-person classrooms. 

“We need to help them understand that your choices become your identity,” said one teacher who asked not to be quoted by name. “Like, ‘If you always lie, you’re gonna eventually be known as a liar. If you always cheat, you’re gonna eventually be known as a cheater.’ George Santos is a great example of why you shouldn’t make lying a habit.” 

And yet, these costs have attached benefits. Teachers are wrangling with new digitally infused questions around academic integrity, yes, but that’s also because they have continued to use Google Classroom and other platforms as part of their courses. These streamline student assignments, teacher grading and subsequent data analysis — and offer the potential for more effective and timely communication with students’ families. Indeed, teachers reported that, at this stage of the pandemic, many more of their families have and can use online communication tools like email, school communication apps (for example), and video conferencing to stay linked up to what’s happening on campus. In particular, Zoom parent-teacher conferences are much easier and more equitable than the old in-person-only model. 

As such, teachers spent much of the family engagement part of the January professional development session discussing how to unlock families’ new digital literacy abilities. Members of the 8th-grade team admit to one another that they aren’t meeting their initial goal of reaching out to at least five families each week through the school’s official communication app — and brainstorm ways to reset and hold one another accountable to that expectation. The 7th-grade team agrees that they could do more to engage students’ families, and devises a process for making and sending a two-minute Friday video explaining what 7th graders will learn in the coming week. Almost everyone agrees that the school needs a meeting to help get families familiar with — and logged on to — the school’s different digital platforms. 

As for the little green Kerbals in their spaceships, Adler emails, “Across all three days, no students were caught running any other program or browsing. A notoriously disengaged student became enraptured, and even turned in good marks on the follow-up assessment.” Students scored reasonably well on a subsequent quiz, with — for example — majorities of the 8th graders correctly identifying “apoapsis” as “the highest point in an orbit,” even though the term did not appear in any of the instructional materials other than the Kerbal Space Program missions. 

So: is digital literacy a key skill (or a skill set)? Or are digital tools a crutch for students? Or some murky mixture of both? These are potent questions for this moment, as worsened teenage mental health, public launches of artificial intelligence tools and concerns about the state of the humanities are creating a national discussion about technology and education. 

I truly don’t know. But I think we’re long overdue for a collective rethinking of just what we want from education technology. As we clamber out of three years of pandemic-steeped K–12 education, it presently feels like we’re drifting to a sleepy acquiescence of any and all digital learning tools without regard for their actual purpose. It’s time for educators, policymakers and families to adopt a more intentional, active stance when making education technology choices — with an eye to avoiding unreflective reliance on these tools.

An unexpected Sunday night resignation just two weeks into the 2022-23 school year left rural Newcastle High School, in eastern Wyoming, without a math teacher to handle three classes each of Algebra 1 and Algebra 2. District curriculum director Sonya Tysdal stepped in as a substitute, but after a couple of fruitless weeks searching for a qualified long-term substitute or replacement, Newcastle needed a sustainable option. That’s how Carnegie Learning’s ClearMath Classroom was born. 

Newcastle already used the company’s High School Math Solution curriculum, so Tysdal asked if Carnegie had a way to help. What emerged was an expansion of an established tutoring service into a full-time classroom provider that now serves students in the Weston County School District and beyond.

“We emphasize small-group instruction and small-group software whenever we can,” says Barry Malkin, Carnegie Learning CEO. “The small-group instruction, together with the tutoring work we are doing, really led to the epiphany there is a needed solution in the market to address the teacher shortage problem. We brought all these elements together into ClearMath Classroom.”

Newcastle’s 90 or so algebra students connect with certified teachers employed by Carnegie Learning through an online portal while in class. Each class is divided between two educators, to keep the small-group mindset going. Students work in pairs to promote collaboration and spend 60 minutes with their teacher virtually, referencing textbooks, taking notes and interacting via the portal. The remaining half-hour of class time is devoted to individually paced independent work. 

A full-time paraprofessional serves as manager and facilitator in the classroom, monitoring student behavior and engagement, communicating with the virtual teachers when needed and troubleshooting technology.

As with any new effort, it wasn’t wrinkle-free. There were technical issues to troubleshoot — such as ensuring students stayed connected to the portal and microphones always worked — and communications snags to work out. For example, Newcastle needed to make sure the teachers provided by Carnegie Learning were in tune with each student’s individualized education program and were aware of logistical changes, such as snow days. But because the school already used the company’s math curriculum and students were already using computers in the classroom, the only new component was constructing an approach that mixed small-group instruction and one-on-one assistance. That was done within a few weeks.

“I’m not sure how we would have provided a quality education for our students without it,” Tysdal says. “It has been very beneficial. It has been imperative to do.” 

Carnegie Learning, born out of Carnegie Mellon University 30 years ago, is an independent company but still relies on the university for research and data. Created with a math focus, the company launched a K-5 math program in February and has recently expanded into literacy and world languages. Malkin says the virtual solutions fit the company’s goal of “producing better educational outcomes across the country.” 

With its success at Newcastle, Carnegie Learning has expanded to a few additional districts around the country, providing a stopgap solution that could eventually evolve into a long-term in-classroom alternative. “I do see the current construct as solving a nationwide crisis today, but I see the product evolving to support differentiating in the classroom tomorrow,” Malkin says. “There is a role for virtual support in the classroom to augment long term.” 

Newcastle recently hired a new math teacher for next school year but will finish out the current year with ClearMath Classroom. “It will always be nice to know that there is an option,” Tysdal says. “If we are in a tight pinch again, this would be something we would definitely look into.” 

She adds, “It is good to know this service is there. It has helped us immensely.”

Digital equity has gained much attention over the last three years of the pandemic. But it’s more than setting a device in front of a child or improving access to broadband. Though skilled educators are the key to unlocking the potential of technology in the classroom, 50% of schools say the steep learning curve for teachers regarding the use of technology is a moderate or large challenge, and half of teachers say a lack of training is a huge obstacle.

Truly delivering on the promise of digital equity means equipping teachers with the tools and training to confidently and effectively use technology. Here’s a roadmap to achieving that, based on what we at Digital Promise have learned through our research and close work with school and district leaders.

School staff need support in using available technology effectively. Leaders set the vision for their school, and that includes how technology is used to enhance teaching and learning. Long before the pandemic, there was a need to better integrate technology into education, especially for students in underserved communities; the pandemic only accelerated that shift. Now, principals must be able to set a vision for their school’s use of technology, identify gaps in digital skills among their faculty and work with teachers to close those gaps. 

At Brooks College Prep, my team and I communicated the rationale behind the focus on technology and created a committee to give teachers an opportunity to learn from and with their peers. Once the vision and expectation around technology were set, and teachers successfully deployed technology in their classrooms, student outcomes soared. Not only did we see a 21% increase in students reaching all four ACT College Readiness Benchmarks, we were also recognized for having the highest year-to-year growth on the average ACT composite score (21.8 to 23.2) in the city of Chicago. In 2018, the school was given Blue Ribbon distinction by the U.S. Department of Education, the first high school on the South Side to earn such an award.

School and district leaders must provide high-quality professional development. Strategies for designing personalized professional development can include micro credentials — digital badges that teachers can earn to demonstrate their abilities in a particular digital skill, such as creating digitally inclusive and accessible learning experiences. Micro-credentialing allows educators to focus their professional development on the skills they need or want to improve and then validates their growth in that area.

Digital Promise worked with the Kettle Moraine School District in Wisconsin to reframe how professional learning happens in the district. Teachers assessed their own strengths and gaps in their technology proficiency, using the results to set goals and benchmarks for their learning. They then demonstrated their competencies through samples of their own work, student assignments and personal reflection, all evaluated by their peers. This kind of district-level commitment to high-quality professional development can help educators at any level of proficiency feel supported through personalized, meaningful learning.

School and district leaders can share with teacher preparation programs what they need from graduates. Here’s an ideal scenario: A teacher enters the classroom on Day 1 having already experienced how technology can be used effectively for learning. The teacher has prepared a clear plan for implementing those practices with students and can hit the ground running. Educator prep programs can make that a reality for their graduates. This matters particularly for schools that struggle to attract and retain teachers, such as those with high numbers of children of color and students living in poverty, and schools in rural districts. 

School and district leaders can advocate for educator prep programs to redesign their curriculum to meet the needs of students and districts in the digital age and to consider adopting teacher educator technology competencies. The University of Michigan, for example, now uses a competency-based curriculum that reflects the International Society for Technology in Education’s standards for teachers. To receive the certification, teachers must demonstrate mastery of digital skills through projects such as planning and executing a 30-minute webinar for parents and students. The university’s graduates have skills and practice in engaging students and school communities using technology even before they enter the classroom. 

Prepare students to be the workforce of the future. When students are taught effectively using technology and their teachers model how to leverage it in meaningful and impactful ways, they are better prepared to deploy it themselves. This matters because there is a strong correlation between digital skills and earnings. The National Skills Coalition reports that only 10% of workers with limited to no digital skills are in the top 20% of earnings. Future job opportunities, economic mobility and, perhaps most importantly, personal fulfillment are on the line here when it comes to helping students become digitally proficient.Teachers are key to getting them there. As I learned when I was a principal, an investment in teachers’ powerful use of technology is just as much of an investment in student learning as providing them with the latest technology. From prep programs to the classroom to the district office, there are opportunities at multiple points in teachers’ careers where they can gain the training and professional development needed to equip them with the knowledge, ability, and confidence to create technology-supported, personalized learning for all their students.

OMAHA — On his first trip to Nebraska, U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona held a turtle named Oogway in an urban agricultural lab. He rapped a bit in Spanish with teenagers in a construction-focused academy.

And he left Wednesday’s tour of Omaha Bryan High School saying that its career-connected technical academies, which prepare students for college or direct entry into a job, represented what the Biden administration wants to see more of across the country.

“We chose this school today, the day after the State of the Union, because I want to lift up what we’re seeing here,” Cardona said.

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High-paying jobs

What he said he saw in Bryan students — and programs featuring Urban Agriculture; Design & Construction; and Transportation, Distribution and Logistics — are examples of how the country can better meet future demand for “high-skilled, high-paying” jobs expected through the CHIPS and Science Act, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act.

Locally, there’s a movement to pave the way for some of those jobs in Nebraska. A bill before the Nebraska Legislature would authorize a state match for any federal funds a manufacturer locating in the state would obtain under the CHIPS Act, which the president signed into law in August. The act allocates $54 billion to help rebuild an industry that had fled overseas.

Cardona was escorted through Bryan’s 1,800-student “Bear” territory by students who led him to the urban ag academy’s greenhouse (that’s where he met Oogway the turtle), the logistics warehouse and the hall where students work on framing small houses and other construction projects.

Along his route to different classrooms, he chatted with kids in the hallways, and on a few instances, the former teacher with Puerto Rican heritage threw out some Spanish phrases. Though located in Bellevue, Bryan is part of Omaha Public Schools and prides itself on cultural diversity, as students from more than 30 countries who speak 33 languages are represented in its classrooms.

‘Raise the Bar’

The education secretary has underscored the benefit of speaking more than one language. In his recently announced “Raise the Bar: Lead the World” initiative, he said that learning multiple languages should be expected of U.S. students. And he spoke of administration goals for 2023 that included the need for “reimagining college and career pathways” and to challenge the view that “it’s four-year college or bust.”

Dual enrollment courses for local colleges, Cardona has said, should start at 11th grade and allow ambitious high schoolers to graduate with an associate’s degree or a credential “without paying a penny.”

He has said that the U.S. Education Department will expand opportunities for technical assistance and use of federal funding, and that if the department’s recommended pathways are forged, students could compete better on a global stage.

Highlighting Cardona’s visit to Bryan was a roundtable conversation with about a dozen students who spoke to him about their academic journeys and related job internships — Bryan pairs its students with up to 90 employers that offer job experience.

Making sure he heard from each teen, Cardona said he measured success in part by how the young people viewed the programs. After hearing from the students, he said he was impressed with the “options” the career-connected academies seemed to offer the budding workforce.

“You’re getting valuable skills that are transferable,” Cardona said.

Connection to outside world

For example, Leslie Lopez is in the transportation and logistics academy, where, as part of the curriculum, students pack up boxes filled with food for a pantry. Lopez plans to go into the medical field but said she gained appreciation in the academy for service and “helping people” that she expects to carry over to her future as a doctor.

Also at the roundtable was Bryan Benitez, a senior who already has racked up 38 college credits while in high school. He saw his time in the Advanced Academics academy as a “starting point” for his dream career: neurosurgery.

Cardona said he was impressed with the internship partnership Bryan has with employers, saying internships could lead to a lifelong job. “It gives us that connection to the outside world,” he  said.

Senior Arian Gomez said he chose the transportation and logistics pathway because it aligned with the trade his dad works in. As part of the program, he has an internship with a car dealership.

When he graduates, he hopes to get an associate’s degree to work as an automotive technician and get a commercial driver’s license to drive a truck. Ultimately, he intends to work on a bachelor’s degree so he can move up into the management side of a business.

“You could take your father’s business to another level,” Cardona said. “That’s exciting.”

‘We see you, we see you’

Of Cardona’s visit, Gomez and Benitez said they were proud to be able to showcase their school and teachers.

Dr. Rony Ortega, Bryan’s principal, said that while the technical academies were available in the past at Bryan, this was the first year for “wall-to-wall” academies, meaning that all students must participate in one. Among other officials at the secretary’s visit were OPS superintendent Cheryl Logan. Ortega said he appreciated the Nebraska stop, which marked Cardona’s 38th state he’s visited.

Said Ortega: “Having the education secretary come to Bryan tells our kids, ‘We see you, we see you.’”

For Gomez, the visit by the Latino cabinet member — who told the students he used to earn money by fixing cars — was particularly meaningful because of the auto connection.

“We got to express ourselves with someone recognizable in this country,” said Gomez. “It felt really good.”

After Bryan, Cardona went to La Vista’s Educational Service Unit #3, where he participated in another roundtable conversation — that time with principals, superintendents and therapists to discuss the mental health services provided to students.

Nebraska Examiner is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Nebraska Examiner maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Cate Folsom for questions: info@nebraskaexaminer.com. Follow Nebraska Examiner on Facebook and Twitter.

ChatGPT has been in the headlines for months.  At the University of Texas at El Paso, professors and students are not sure if it is a tool or a threat – or both.

Since its launch in November, the artificial intelligence program has generated concerns over its ability to produce essays, research papers and other written material that appear natural sounding based on someone’s prompts and how it could affect higher education. Instructors appreciate ChatGPT’s abilities, but are leery of how students could misuse the program’s work and submit it as their own.

Those who have tried the free instrument praise its ability to prepare straight-forward responses that are error free in terms of spelling, grammar and punctuation. However, they also noted that the writings often lack higher order thinking and sometimes provided factually incorrect information.

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Greg Beam, associate professor of practice in the Department of Communication, said he plans to use it in his introduction to the Art of the Motion Picture course this spring. He called ChatGPT’s responses to his prompts “mechanically immaculate,” but bland in word choice, and lacking context and insights.

A UTEP instructor for more than five years, Beam characterized the program as an academic tool that could be abused so he and other educators will need to explain and demonstrate its proper use. He plans to let students use it to augment course instruction and brainstorm ideas. Additionally, he may assign the program’s writings to students as a critiquing exercise.

“Rather than allowing it to be this forbidden fruit that’s hanging out there that they’re told not to take a bite of, I’m going to say here’s how to use it responsibly because I think it could actually be a very useful resource,” Beam said.

Andrew Fleck, associate professor of English and president of the university’s Faculty Senate, is more cautious. He does not plan to use ChatGPT in his spring classes. Instead, he has asked the Faculty Senate’s academic policy committee to review the university’s statement of academic integrity, which should be in every course syllabus, to determine if it needs to be updated regarding students’ reliance on artificial intelligence to produce their work.

UTEP officials did not respond to a request for comment on any steps the university planned to take regarding ChatGPT.

Fleck, a higher education faculty member for 30 years, recalled how colleagues raised similar concerns as internet search engines became popular in the 1990s. He said some students used technology to cheat, while faculty used it to catch offenders. Since ChatGPT started, other programs have popped up with claims that they can detect AI-generated writings.

“I’ll be curious how it kind of plays itself out in the next year or so,” Fleck said. “It certainly does pose certain kinds of risks, but I guess the question is how effective will ChatGPT be eventually in replicating human thought and human communication.”

UTEP Provost John Wiebe said advances in the accessibility of artificial intelligence (AI) have triggered faculty conversations at higher education institutions around the world to include UTEP. He said that after consultations with Faculty Senate leaders about the opportunities and challenges that faculty and students face because of ChatGPT, several faculty committees will work on the topic.

“AI is a tool that can be used to enhance learning, but can also be used in ways that violate UTEP’s Academic Dishonesty policy,” Wiebe said. “We will work to help faculty understand the issues and how their colleagues in other places are responding.”

Deki Peltshog, a sophomore computer science major, said she learned about the new artificial intelligence program through friends and social media, and used it during the winter break. ChatGPT amazed and amused her with its ability to respond to her requests for a song about cats and a poem about eating pizza at night.

The Bhutan native also tested the program’s grasp of languages. ChatGPT has a multilingual vocabulary of more than a billion words. She asked it to translate a simple question into her native language of Dzongkha. She said ChatGPT apologized after she informed it that it gave the wrong answer.

Peltshog, whose spring courses are in math, coding and engineering, said she does not plan to use ChatGPT this semester because she does not trust its grasp of facts. However, she sees its potential as a more direct search engine after it becomes more reliable and updates its content beyond 2021.

“It could become a personalized tutor,” she said. “It would make studying more efficient.”

While some educators see the new program as a threat to academic honesty, others point out that it is just the latest method in a line that includes ghostwriters, research paper mills, exam banks and professional test takers. Critics also point out that such programs could limit a student’s growth as a critical thinker and problem solver.

Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, the San Francisco-based company that developed ChatGPT, seemed to concur in a Dec. 10, 2022, tweet. He said that the company’s new program is “good enough at some things to create a misleading impression of greatness. It’s a mistake to be relying on it for anything important right now. It’s a preview in progress.”

José de Piérola, professor of creative writing at UTEP and director of the department’s graduate studies program, said that colleagues might be giving ChatGPT too much credit.

De Piérola, a computer programmer and consultant for 20 years before he started on a literary path, said there are 20 to 25 artificial intelligence programs like ChatGPT. While the new program is superior, it mostly produces generic information about the subject. His point was that you cannot replace human skills when creativity is needed.

The human element was key to Jess Stahl, vice president of data science and analytics at the Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities in Redmond, Washington. She participated in a Dec. 19 Zoom conversation about ChatGPT that attracted more than 250 participants from around the world.

Stahl, whose research focuses on initiatives that will enable academic institutions to benefit from innovations in technology, data science and artificial intelligence, said instructors should humanize their relationships with students and not try to compete with AI in terms of content. She also advised institutions to build their social and professional networks, and other resources that students could not access elsewhere.

Stahl said that faculty must rethink what they do professionally in and out of the classroom and decide what they can do better than the most advanced technology.

“It won’t be imparting facts, and it won’t be presenting curriculum, and it won’t be evaluating learning, and it won’t be preventing cheating, and all those things,” Stahl said. “What it is going to be is how human and important and valuable can you make your relationships with the learners so that you are doing that skill better than an advanced technology like ChatGPT that can mimic a very fake relationship.”

As a personal aside, de Piérola encouraged students who will see ChatGPT as an academic shortcut to not lose sight of the true goal of a college education and that is to become the best version of yourself.

“That’s why you go to a university,” he said. “If you do that right, then you will get good grades, and a degree, but if you don’t do those things, the rest really doesn’t matter. You’ll just be the same person you were before you went to the university and that would be sad in most cases.”

This article first appeared on El Paso Matters and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

ChatGPT is a natural language chatbot powered by a new type of artificial intelligence. It has been trained on billions of words of text, from books, articles and the Internet, and uses this information to generate human-like responses to user queries. But unlike humans, its writing is lightning-fast and grammatically flawless — and is improving at an order of magnitude per year. With a quick Google search, anyone can access ChatGPT. 

As founder at Kaleidoscope, an organization developing modern liberal arts courses for high schools, I’m deep in thought about how ChatGPT will change the education landscape. In the history unit of our Social Sciences for Social Problems class, for example, students write a review of Erika Lee’s book America for Americans. It’s a complex assignment that requires distilling core concepts, coming to a judgment and making a persuasive argument. Here’s what ChatGPT returns, almost instantaneously:

While no one would confuse this with a New York Times book review, it would earn an ‘A’ in many classrooms. And in a nation where just 29% of eighth graders scored proficient on the National Assessment of Education Progress in reading this year, ChatGPT’s output far exceeds the writing of many high schoolers. 

The book review is only a glimpse of what ChatGPT can create. It can transform a poorly worded text message into a professional-grade email and adjust that email’s tone to be warmer or more formal. It can expand a list of bullet points into an essay or contract an essay into a bulleted list. It can generate dialogue between Socrates and Donald Trump as he considers running for president in 2024; it can compose a song about cows in Spanish set to the tune of “Twinkle Twinkle”; and it can write a pitch for a Hallmark Christmas movie where you are the star of the meet cute.

For educators, ChatGPT can help generate curriculum, lecture notes, test questions and classroom rubrics — and use those rubrics to grade student work.

With capabilities like these, workers are already embracing ChatGPT. An Ivy League-educated friend tells me that with the tool’s help, “I’m finally able to express myself in prose. I’ve always had a strong perspective, but I struggle to articulate it in writing. Now I can give a list of bullets to ChatGPT, and it says what I mean better than I can. It’s a 100% improvement in my writing.” 

The obvious fear of many educators is that ChatGPT will lead to a raft of plagiarism, especially since the tool is currently free, the output is unique — asking the same question twice yields two different replies — and it does not record previous answers in any searchable way. Already, a high school English teacher tweeted to me that when he took ChatGPT to his department chair, she immediately set out to get the website blocked. 

But banning ChatGPT is a bit like mandating abstinence-only sex education: It may be well-intentioned, but it’s not going to be effective, and it’s certainly not going to prepare students for the real world. 

Educators face a choice: They can dig in their heels, attempting to lock down assignments and assessments, or use this opportunity to imagine what comes next. 

ChatGPT will change the relative value of human skills, and therefore what students should know and be able to do. Now that anyone can easily generate a five-paragraph essay that hews to standards, student perspective and voice — not often emphasized in schools — will matter more. And in a world where written words are cheap, verbal communication — again, often not emphasized in schools — will become a more salient signal of competence. It will also become even more important to develop students’ capacity to discern what’s true from what’s merely polished and authoritative-sounding, as more and more ChatGPT-generated text appears online, often without factual vetting. 

Revising classwork to include ChatGPT could involve students collaborating with the chatbot throughout. In the book review assignment, for example, they could critique ChatGPT’s output and write a reflection on how and why they used the tool and where its capabilities worked and fell short. The key is that the students, rather than ChatGPT, are still in control of the assignment.

ChatGPT has the potential to unlock powerful new learning capabilities. While before, a student could only read other people’s writing, draw conclusions about their techniques and try to apply them to her own work, she can now watch her own thoughts be transformed into prose. This direct translation has the potential to teach students to be better writers. 

ChatGPT can summarize complex passages for struggling readers, giving them enough of a toehold to read the original text; rephrase difficult concepts in ways that can help students relate them to their own experiences; and provide a second opinion to students on their written work. With capabilities like these, ChatGPT has the potential to be a tool that finally enables robust personalized learning at scale.

Given the changes ChatGPT will bring and its potential to aid student learning, our team at Kaleidoscope will be revising our materials, including updating our assessments to either withstand ChatGPT or to include it as part of the process. 

If schools ban ChatGPT and the tools that will follow it, they’ll be tightening the screws on old ideas about what education should be. If, instead, they find ways to harness its capabilities, they’ll be preparing students to navigate a world in which artificial intelligence is the warp and human ingenuity the weft of a bold new tapestry of human achievement.

This year’s list, publishing amid new calls for mask mandates and yet another spike in hospitalizations, powerfully frames our surreal new normal: mounting concerns about historic test score declines; intensifying political divides that would challenge school systems even if there weren’t simultaneous health, staffing and learning crises to manage; broader economic stresses that are making it harder to manage school systems; and a sustained push by many educators and families to embrace innovations and out-of-the-box thinking to help kids accelerate their learning by any means necessary.

Now, 2½ years into one of the most turbulent periods in the history of American education, these were our 22 most discussed articles of 2022: 

The COVID School Years: 700 Days Since Lockdown 

Learning Loss: 700 days. As we reported Feb. 14, that’s how long it had been since more than half the nation’s schools crossed into the pandemic era. On March 16, 2020, districts in 27 states, encompassing almost 80,000 schools, closed their doors for the first long educational lockdown. Since then, schools have reopened, closed and reopened again. The effects have been immediate — students lost parents, teachers mourned fallen colleagues — and hopelessly abstract as educators weighed “pandemic learning loss,” the sometimes crude measure of COVID’s impact on students’ academic performance. 

With spring approaching, there were reasons to be hopeful. More children had been vaccinated. Mask mandates were ending. But even if the pandemic recedes and a “new normal” emerges, there are clear signs that the issues surfaced during this period will linger. COVID heightened inequities that have long been baked into the American educational system. The social contract between parents and schools has frayed. And teachers are burning out. To mark a third spring of educational disruption, Linda Jacobson interviewed educators, parents, students and researchers who spoke movingly, often unsparingly, about what Marguerite Roza, director of Georgetown University’s Edunomics Lab, called “a seismic interruption to education unlike anything we’ve ever seen.” Read her full report. 

Related:

• A 700-Day Parental Awakening: Marguerite Roza, of Georgetown’s Edunomics Lab, reflects on the past years
  
• 700 Days of Missed Opportunities — and Lingering Inequities: Robin Lake, of the Center on Reinventing Public Education, looks back (and forwards)
  
• 700 Days of Balancing Student Safety Against Keeping Classrooms Open: Superintendent Pedro Martinez reflects
  
• 700 Days in Pictures: 24 months inside one resilient school district
  
• The COVID School Years: See our special report, looking back on 700 days of the pandemic

Threatened & Trolled, School Board Members Quit in Record Numbers

School Leadership: By the time we published this report in May, the chaos and violence at big city school board meetings had dominated headlines for months, as protesters, spurred by ideological interest groups and social media campaigns, railed about race, gender and a host of other hot-button issues. But what does it look like when the boardroom is located in a small community, where the elected officials under fire often have lifelong ties to the people doing the shouting? Over the last 18 months, Minnesota K-12 districts have seen a record number of board members resign before the end of their term. As one said in a tearful explanation to her constituents, “The hate is just too much.” Beth Hawkins takes a look at the possible ramifications.  

Related:

• Million-Dollar Records Request: From COVID and critical race theory to teachers’ names & schools, districts flooded with freedom of information document demands

Nation’s Report Card Shows Largest Drops Ever Recorded in 4th and 8th Grade Math

Student Achievement: In a moment the education world had anxiously awaited, the latest round of scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress were released in October — and the news was harsh. Math scores saw the largest drops in the history of the exam, while reading performance also fell in a majority of states. National Center for Education Statistics Commissioner Peggy Carr said the “decline that we’re seeing in the math data is stark. It is troubling. It is significant.” Even as some state-level data has shown evidence of a rebound this year, federal officials warned COVID-19’s lost learning won’t be easily restored. The 74’s Kevin Mahnken breaks down the results.

Related:

• Lost Decades: ‘Nation’s Report Card’ shows 20 years of growth wiped out by two years of pandemic
  
• Economic Toll: Damage from NAEP math losses could total nearly $1 trillion
  
• COVID Recovery: Can districts rise to the challenge of new NAEP results? Outlook’s not so good 

Virtual Nightmare: One Student’s Journey Through the Pandemic

Mental Health: As the debate over the lingering effects of school closures continues, the term “pandemic recovery” can often lose its meaning. For Jason Finuliar, a California teen whose Bay Area school district was among those shuttered the longest, the journey has been painful and slow. Once a happy, high-achieving student, he descended into academic failure and a depression so severe that he spent 10 days in a residential mental health facility. “I felt so worthless,” he said. It’s taking compassionate counselors, professional help and parents determined to save their son for Jason to regain hope for the future. Linda Jacobson reports. 

16 Under 16: Meet The 74’s 2022 Class of STEM Achievers

This spring, we asked for the country’s help identifying some of the most impressive students, age 16 or younger, who have shown extraordinary achievement in the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics. After an extensive and comprehensive selection process, we’re thrilled to introduce this year’s class of 16 Under 16 in STEM. The honorees range in age from 12 to 16, specialize in fields from medicine to agriculture to invention and represent the country from coast to coast. We hope these incredible youngsters can inspire others — and offer reassurance that our future can be in pretty good hands. Emmeline Zhao offers a closeup of the 2022 class of 16 Under 16 in STEM — click here to read and watch more about them.

A ‘National Teacher Shortage’? New Research Reveals Vastly Different Realities Between States & Regions

School Staffing: Adding to efforts to understand America’s teacher shortages, a new report and website maps the K-12 teaching vacancy data. Nationally, an estimated 36,504 full-time teacher positions are unfilled, with shortages currently localized in nine states. “There are substantial vacant teacher positions in the United States. And for some states, this is much higher than for other states. … It’s just a question of how severe it is,” said author Tuan Nguyen. Marianna McMurdock reports on America’s uneven crisis. 

Meet the Gatekeepers of Students’ Private Lives

School Surveillance: Megan Waskiewicz used to sit at the top of the bleachers and hide her face behind the glow of a laptop monitor. While watching one of her five children play basketball on the court below, the Pittsburgh mother didn’t want other parents in the crowd to know she was also looking at child porn. Waskiewicz worked on contract as a content moderator for Gaggle, a surveillance company that monitors the online behaviors of some 5 million students across the U.S. on their school-issued Google and Microsoft accounts in an effort to prevent youth violence and self-harm. As a result, kids’ deepest secrets — like nude selfies and suicide notes — regularly flashed onto Waskiewicz’s screen. Waskiewicz and other former moderators at Gaggle believe the company helped protect kids, but they also surfaced significant questions about its efficacy, employment practices and effect on students’ civil rights. Eight former moderators shared their experiences at Gaggle with The 74, describing insufficient safeguards to protect students’ sensitive data, a work culture that prioritized speed over quality, scheduling issues that sent them scrambling to get hours and frequent exposure to explicit content that left some traumatized. Read the latest investigation by The 74’s Mark Keierleber. 

Students Continue to Flee Urban Districts as Boom Towns, Virtual Schools Thrive

Exclusive Data: A year after the nation’s schools experienced a historic decline in enrollment, data shows many urban districts are still losing students, and those that rebounded this year typically haven’t returned to pre-pandemic levels. Of 40 states and the District of Columbia, few have seen more than a 1% increase compared with 2020-21, when some states experienced declines as high as 5%, according to data from Burbio, a company that tracks COVID-related education trends. Flat enrollment this year “means those kids did not come back,” said Thomas Dee, an education professor at Stanford University. While many urban districts were already losing students before the pandemic, COVID “accelerated” movement into outlying areas and to states with stronger job markets. Experts say that means many districts will have to make some tough decisions in the coming years. Linda Jacobson reports. 

‘Hybrid’ Homeschooling Making Inroads as Families Seek New Models

School Choice: As public school enrollments dip to historic lows, researchers are beginning to track families to hybrid homeschooling arrangements that meet in person a few days per week and send students home for the rest of the time. More formal than learning pods or microschools, many still rely on parents for varying levels of instruction and grading. About 60% to 70% are private, according to a new research center on hybrid schools based at Kennesaw State University, northwest of Atlanta. Greg Toppo reports.

Educators’ ‘Careless’ Child Abuse Reports Devastate Thousands of NYC Families

Student Safety: Thousands of times every year, New York City school staff report what they fear may be child abuse or neglect to a state hotline. But the vast majority of the resulting investigations yield no evidence of maltreatment while plunging the families, most of them Black, Hispanic and low income, into fear and lasting trauma. Teachers are at the heart of the problem: From August 2019 to January 2022, two-thirds of their allegations were false alarms, data obtained by The 74 show. “Teachers, out of fear that they’re going to get in trouble, will report even if they’re just like, ‘Well, it could be abuse.’ … It also could be 10 million other things,” one Bronx teacher said. Read Asher Lehrer-Small’s report. 

The Contagion Effect: From Buffalo to Uvalde, 16 Mass Shootings in Just 10 Days

Gun Violence: May’s mass school shooting in Texas — the deadliest campus attack in about a decade — has refocused attention on the frequency of such devastating carnage on American victims. The tragedy unfolded just 10 days after a mass shooting at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York. It could be more than a coincidence: A growing body of research suggests these assaults have a tendency to spread like a viral disease. In fact, The U.S. has experienced 16 mass shootings with at least four victims in just 10 days. Read Mark Keierleber’s report. 

Teachers Leaving Jobs During Pandemic Find ‘Fertile’ Ground in New School Models

Microschools: Feeling that she could no longer effectively meet children’s needs in a traditional school, former counselor Heather Long is among those who left district jobs this year to teach in an alternative model — a microschool based in her New Hampshire home. “For the first time in their lives, they have options,” Jennifer Carolan of Reach Capital, an investment firm supporting online programs and ed tech ventures, told reporter Linda Jacobson. Some experts wonder if microschools are sustainable, but others say the ground is “fertile.” Read our full report. 

Facing Pandemic Learning Crisis, Districts Spend Relief Funds at a Snail’s Pace

School Funding: Schools that were closed the longest due to COVID have spent just a fraction of the billions in federal relief funds targeted to students who suffered the most academically, according to an analysis by The 74. The delay is significant, experts say, because research points to a direct correlation between the closures and lost learning. Of the 25 largest districts, the 12 that were in remote learning for at least half the 2020-21 school year have spent on average roughly 15% of their American Rescue Plan funds — and districts are increasing pressure on the Education Department for more time. Linda Jacobson reports.

Slave Money Paved the Streets. Now, This Posh Rhode Island City Strives to Teach Its Past 

Teaching History: Every year, millions of tourists marvel at Newport, Rhode Island’s colonial architecture, savor lobster rolls on the wharf and gaze at waters that — many don’t realize — launched more slave trading voyages than anywhere else in North America. But after years of invisibility, that obscured chapter is becoming better known, partly because the Ocean State passed a law in 2021 requiring schools to teach Rhode Island’s “African Heritage History.” Amid recent headlines that the state’s capital city is now moving forward with a $10 million reparations program, read Asher Lehrer-Small’s examination of how Newport is looking to empower schools to confront the city’s difficult past. 

Harvard Economist Thomas Kane on Learning Loss, and Why Many Schools Aren’t Prepared to Combat It 

74 Interview: This spring, Harvard economist Thomas Kane co-authored one of the biggest — and most pessimistic — studies yet of COVID learning loss, revealing that school closures massively set back achievement for low-income students. The effects appear so large that, by his estimates, many schools will need to spend 100% of their COVID relief to counteract them. Perversely, though, many in the education world don’t realize that yet. “Once that sinks in,” he said, “I think people will realize that more aggressive action is necessary.” Read Kevin Mahnken’s full interview. 

In White, Wealthy Douglas County, Colorado, a Conservative School Board Majority Fires the Superintendent, and Fierce Backlash Ensues

Politics: The 2021 election of four conservative members to Colorado’s Douglas County school board led to the firing in February of schools Superintendent Corey Wise, who had served the district in various capacities for 26 years. The decision, which came at a meeting where public comment was barred, swiftly mobilized teachers, students and community members in opposition. Wise’s ouster came one day after a 1,500-employee sickout forced the shutdown of the state’s third-largest school district . A few days later, students walked out of school en masse, followed by litigation and talk of a school board recall effort. The battle mirrors those being fought in numerous districts throughout the country, with conservative parents, newly organized during the pandemic, championing one agenda and more moderate and liberal parent groups beginning to rise up to counter those views. Jo Napolitano reports.

Weaving Stronger School Communities: Nebraska’s Teacher of the Year Challenges Her Rural Community to Wrestle With the World 

Inspiring: Residents of tiny Taylor, Nebraska, call Megan Helberg a “returner” — one of the few kids to grow up in the town of 190 residents, leave to attend college in the big city and then return as an adult to rejoin this rural community in the Sandhills. Honored as the state’s 2020 Teacher of the Year, Helberg says she sees her role as going well beyond classroom lessons and academics. She teaches her students to value their deep roots in this close-knit circle. She advocates on behalf of her school — the same school she attended as a child — which is always threatened with closure due to small class sizes. She has also launched travel clubs through her schools, which Helberg says has strengthened her community by breaking students, parents and other community members out of their comfort zone and helping them gain a better view of the world outside Nebraska while also seeing their friends and neighbors in a whole new light. This past winter, as part of a broader two-month series on educators weaving community, a team from The 74 made multiple visits to Taylor to meet Helberg and see her in action with her students. Watch the full documentary by Jim Fields, and read our full story about Helberg’s background and inspiration by Laura Fay. 

Other profiles from this year’s Weaver series: 

• Texas’s Alejandro Salazar: The band teacher who kept his school community connected through COVID’s chaos
  
• Hawaii’s Heidi Maxie: How an island teacher builds community bridges through her Hawaii school
  
• Georgia’s Allie Reeser: Living and learning among refugees in the ‘Ellis Island of the South’
  
• See the full series: Meet 12 educators strengthening school communities amid the pandemic

Research: Babies Born During COVID Talk Less with Caregivers, Slower to Develop Critical Language Skills

Big Picture: Independent studies by Brown University and a national nonprofit focused on early language development found infants born during the pandemic produced significantly fewer vocalizations and had less verbal back-and-forth with their caretakers compared with those born before COVID. Both used the nonprofit LENA’s “talk pedometer” technology, which delivers detailed information on what children hear throughout the day, including the number of words spoken near the child and the child’s own language-related vocalizations. It also counts child-adult interactions, called “conversational turns,” which are critical to language acquisition. The joint finding is the latest troubling evidence of developmental delays discovered when comparing babies born before and after COVID. “I’m worried about how we set things up going forward such that our early childhood teachers and early childhood interventionalists are prepared for what is potentially a set of children who maybe aren’t performing as we expect them to,” Brown’s Sean Deoni tells The 74’s Jo Napolitano. Read our full report. 

Minneapolis Teacher Strike Lasted 3 Weeks. The Fallout Will Be Felt for Years

Two days after Minneapolis teachers ended their first strike in 50 years this past May, Superintendent Ed Graff walked out of a school board meeting, ostensibly because a student protester had used profanity. The next morning, he resigned. The swearing might have been the last straw, but the kit-bag of problems left unresolved by the district’s agreement with the striking unions is backbreaking indeed. Four-fifths of the district’s federal pandemic aid is now committed to staving off layoffs and giving classroom assistants and teachers bonuses and raises, leaving little for academic recovery at a moment when the percentage of disadvantaged students performing at grade level has dipped into the single digits. From potential school closures and misinformation about how much money the district actually has to layoffs of Black teachers, a lack of diversity in the workforce and how to make up for lost instructional time, Beth Hawkins reports on the aftermath. 

After Steering Mississippi’s Unlikely Learning Miracle, Carey Wright Steps Down

Profile: Mississippi, one of America’s poorest and least educated states, emerged in 2019 as a fast-rising exemplar in math and reading growth. The transformation of the state’s long-derided school system came about through intense work — in the classroom and the statehouse — to raise learning standards, overhaul reading instruction and reinvent professional development. And with longtime State Superintendent Carey Wright retiring at the end of June, The 74’s Kevin Mahnken looked at what comes next.

As Schools Push for More Tutoring, New Research Points to Its Effectiveness — and the Challenge of Scaling it to Combat Learning Loss

Learning Acceleration: In the two years that COVID-19 has upended schooling for millions of families, experts and education leaders have increasingly touted one tool as a means for coping with learning loss: personalized tutors. In February, just days after the secretary of education declared that every struggling student should receive 90 minutes of tutoring each week, a newly released study offers more evidence of the strategy’s potential — and perhaps its limitations. An online tutoring pilot launched last spring did yield modest, if positive, learning benefits for the hundreds of middle schoolers who participated. But those gains were considerably smaller than the impressive results from some previous studies, perhaps because of the project’s design: It relied on lightly trained volunteers, rather than professional educators, and held its sessions online instead of in person. “There is a tradeoff in navigating the current climate where what is possible might not be scalable,” the study’s co-author, Matthew Kraft, told The 74’s Kevin Mahnken. “So instead of just saying, ‘Come hell or high water, I’m going to build a huge tutoring program,’ we might be better off starting off with a small program and building it over time.” Read our full report. 

Florida Teen Invents World’s First Sustainable Electric Vehicle Motor

STEM: Robert Sansone was born to invent. His STEM creations range from springy leg extensions for sprinting to a go-kart that can reach speeds of 70 mph. But his latest project aims to solve a global problem: the unsustainability of electric car motors that use rare earth materials that are nonrenewable, expensive and pollute the environment during the mining and refining process. In Video Director James Field’s video profile, the Florida high schooler talks about his creation, inspiration and what he plans to do with his $75,000 prize from the 2022 Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair. Learn more right here, and watch our full portrait below: 

At the Silicon Schools Fund, a nonprofit foundation supporting transformative K-12 schools, we have seen educators working on creative solutions to this problem, and the innovations they have come up with are worth paying attention to. 

For example, the National Summer School Initiative, a fund grantee, built a partnership where teachers from across the country work virtually with expert mentor educators to deliver high-quality summer school courses. Teachers meet with their mentors and colleagues via videoconference to discuss lesson plans and the best ways to deliver instruction to their students. The initiative served over 30,000 students this summer, from New York City to Texas, showing a unique way to expand the reach and impact of some truly excellent teachers. Similar approaches could be used during the regular academic year, particularly in hard-to-staff areas like science, math and foreign languages, and in rural settings where specialized teachers are hard to come by, or to broaden the electives a school can offer. Stepmojo is working on such an approach to remotely deliver high-quality classes with pilots in Tulsa, Cleveland and Denver. This allows great teachers to reach more kids and students to have access to more opportunities.

A clear finding has emerged from education research that high-dosage tutoring from a consistent tutor with a proven curriculum offers some of the best results of any intervention studied so far. There is also consensus around the science of reading and how to best teach literacy to young students. Ignite! Reading (also a fund grantee), BookNook and On Your Mark have brought these two practices together by training a cadre of remote tutors to deliver literacy curriculum based on the science of reading to students via Zoom. In Oakland, California, KIPP Bridge Rising Academy used remote reading tutors from Ignite! to help struggling readers get back on track.  The result? Students gained 2.4 weeks of reading progress for every week they were in the program.

I’ve seen firsthand the relationships tutors develop with kids and the progress on reading that students can make in just 15 minutes per day of one-on-one instruction. This is a strategy that should be greatly expanded. Doing so gives students access to caring tutors using high-quality curriculum, and creates a pathway for remote tutors to enter into the teaching profession.  

In addition, ed tech products have shown they can truly improve classrooms by increasing student learning and lightening the load on teachers. Math software like ST Math and Zearn, science software like Amplify and language arts software like ReadWorks (to name a few) have demonstrated real impact — allowing students to focus their time each day by working on exactly what they need, exactly when they need it. Such blended learning models allow teachers to, in effect, lower their class sizes by having some students working online while others meet in small groups with the teacher. I know that many parents, like me, are reluctant to add more screen time to their children’s lives. But thoughtful use of technology in classrooms can free teachers from lecturing at the front of the room, create new opportunities for one-on-one instruction and increase collaboration and discussion as students spend more time working with their teacher individually or with their classmates.

All these examples demonstrate solutions that make the teacher’s job more sustainable, expand the number of students great educators can reach and enable students to drive their own learning. In the 75 high-performing schools that our foundation has helped launch over the last 10 years, we are consistently struck by how the combination of excellent teachers plus increased student voice and choice in learning creates the building blocks for a great school culture and positive student outcomes.

After three school years disrupted by the pandemic, making classrooms great is both harder and more important than ever. If we, as a country, don’t help our schools thrive, we will cement the inequality of outcomes in our schools for generations to come. The school staffing dilemma cannot be solved by just spending more money or trying to hire more teachers when there already are not enough high-quality applicants. Instead, this is the time to adopt innovative programs, focus more attention on each student, expand the impact of the best educators and reshape the role of the teacher. Doing so helps both teachers and students, which is the only kind of solution that has a chance to succeed.

So, it follows that Scratch’s approach to summer learning loss is a multi-week online camp in July and August that invites all students to build interaction, with both coding and one another. 

Created 15 years ago as part of a MIT project to introduce less clunky software for kids to learn coding, Scratch has over 42 million active users across 200 countries, with an average age of 12. The original program, designed for kids 8 to 16, was intended for use outside of school, but the software — which teaches coding but has plenty of academic skills built in — has been heavily adopted by schools and educators. For ages 5 to 7, Scratch Junior can be used even by children who may not be able to read. With simple-to-use block-style coding, users — dubbed Scratchers — can create their own projects, whether digital stories, games or animations, and share that within the community. 

“Kids just enjoy it, it is fun,” says Shawna Young, the Scratch Foundation’s executive director. “They are able to create these projects. It is based on this idea of yes, you are learning, developing computational skills, but at the heart of the work you are really having fun and creating something you care about.” 

The nonprofit foundation operates the online platform with the goal of opening coding opportunities to a more diverse demographic. 

“We want kids to have this learning experience that is highly accessible and engaging and not limited to certain socioeconomic backgrounds,” says Young. “If you want to address inequity, start by not having barriers that are financial.” 

Scratch is free, supported by funders including the LEGO Foundation, AT&T and Google. The nonprofit also partners with community organizations around the world in the Scratch Education Collaborative, to make learning available to students in traditionally underrepresented communities. From 40 organizations the first year, there are now 91, with representation from over 20 countries. Scratch also did a recent outreach to kids with an American Sign Language tutorial to expand creative opportunities in coding for children who are deaf or hard of hearing. 

“We recognize how children learn is important, and it is not equitable,” Young says, noting that teachers tend to focus on the “what” — the reading, writing and arithmetic — rather than on how that impacts children’s enthusiasm, interest areas and potential career paths. By creating a free tool and partnering with organizations that can incorporate it into their own education-focused programs, Scratch aims to create excitement and bolster when it comes to critical thinking, problem solving and collaboration.

Christan Balch, the foundation’s community engagement manager, helps operate the online summer Scratch Camp. Open to anyone on the platform, the camp is free. “At the heart of the camp, you will find it is a shared journey toward project creation,” Balch says. “It is an open invitation for Scratchers to create around a theme they might not have thought about otherwise and do so in a kind, caring and collaborative community with others from around the world.” 

This summer’s theme is “fantastical fantasies,” with each week offering a new theme and project prompts (the Aug. 15 week theme is “mythical worlds”). Scratchers can get as involved as they like — some come and go weekly, while others dive in daily — and Balch says she enjoys seeing children take on leadership roles and get tapped as camp counselors. “I love that part,” she says. “Counselors are Scratchers in the online community who are helpful, kind and encouraging. We are seeing leaders forming in the online community and acting as resources and mentors for others.” 

The goal of the camp is to “keep kids (academically) engaged while teaching them skills,” Balch says. But they also get to explore concepts they are truly interested in, and that opens doors for all sorts of projects. Balch says she recently logged into a camp day and saw an animated piece of artwork of a unicorn-dragon-cat that a young person had invented, a story about discovering a trail of glitter and a game that placed the world’s slowest tree in a race. 

“I see these wide range of things and get excited,” she says. “Scratchers are the most creative, funny, kind, most expressive kids I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with, and Scratch camp is an example of that.” 

Employing artificial intelligence, CK-12 engineers programmed Flexi to act as a tutor, responding to math and science questions, testing students’ knowledge, helping with homework and providing real-world examples of hard-to-grasp concepts. 

“Our ambition is to create a private tutor equivalent for every child,” says Miral Shah, chief technology officer for the Palo Alto, California company. “The majority of students could never afford a private tutor, so we wanted to build a private tutor that mimics all the qualities of a tutor. We can help personalize the attention and assess a student’s knowledge continually.”

Flexi can start simple, with a student asking a basic science question within CK-12’s online system, such as: “Does photosynthesis happen at night?” or “Define photosynthesis.” Flexi answers the question and backs it up with content, such as video simulations or real-world examples, Shah says. 

“Ask any question to the Flexi chatbot and it will help answer the question in a way a private tutor will,” Shah says. 

Beyond just doling out answers, Shah says Flexi, which launched in May 2020, assesses a student’s understanding of a concept and suggests next steps, whether a next lesson or flashcards to review. 

Tutoring has emerged as a key strategy for helping students rebound from COVID learning loss, but tutoring resources remain in short supply. President Joe Biden used his recent State of the Union address to urge his fellow citizens to volunteer as tutors. Providing a digital solution to that problem has become a potential growth point for education tech companies. But while CK-12 and others, such as Amira Learning, offer AI-driven tutoring, the concept of online tutoring itself remains relatively new and lacks research to prove its effectiveness. That hasn’t stopped the experimenting. 

Cheryl Hullihen, a special education science teacher at Absegami High School in Galloway, New Jersey, says Flexi has helped her students become more independent in finding answers to questions, while also teaching them how to formulate questions to find both general and specific information about a topic or concept. 

“I think that this is an important life skill for students,” she says. “I always explain to students that I don’t expect them to memorize definitions and equations, but that I want them to be able to find the information that they need to answer a question or investigate a problem. Students are able to see how the way that they ask a question, and the wording of their question, can produce different results.” 

Shah says Flexi’s goal is to support students. That’s why AI is needed. “If a student is struggling, we give them multiple hints,” he says. “If they are still struggling, we show them some flashcards because they are probably getting deterred by vocabulary items. Sometimes they just forget about a concept. The whole idea is to give personalized help to each student. Each student gets different and personalized support.” 

If a student still doesn’t get it, Flexi will alert their teacher.

CK-12 is a nonprofit formed in 2007 with a focus on digitizing education in a way that wasn’t just about turning analog education into accessible online content, but about using the full power of digital, such as with artificial intelligence. CK-12 says 218 million people have used its free learning tools worldwide, including FlexBooks digital textbooks. 

Starting with math and science because of its universal language, CK-12 content mixes text, multimedia videos, interactive simulations and adaptive quizzes. “That is how we started challenging ourselves in terms of what can digitization do for education,” Shah says. The content remains flexible so teachers can customize it to fit their needs.

The AI-powered student tutor Flexi takes FlexBooks a step further, providing more interaction for the students and additional insight for educators. 

Hullihen says students in her classes use Flexi when working on an assignment in FlexBooks, but they also turn to it for activities outside of that. For example, students were working on a lab investigating potential energy and used Flexi as a resource to find equations and answer the analysis and conclusion questions. Shah says the goal is to provide enough support to get students to the correct answer, but there is no roadblock if a student wants to jump straight to the finished product.   

A byproduct of the constant interaction between the student and the system is feedback for the teachers, a tool that’s become a mainstay of modern ed tech and personalized learning. FlexBooks was designed to allow educators to add it to their curriculum, allowing assignments via FlexBooks through popular online content learning systems such as Canvas. The Teacher Assistant product, designed for educators to work with FlexBooks, tracks student understanding of assignments and delivers data to the teacher on their progress. 

For example, if a bulk of students miss a particular question on an assignment, CK-12 flags that for the teacher, letting them know students didn’t understand the concept. This can help teachers see a deficiency in student comprehension, while potentially helping educators rework curriculum so the same issue doesn’t happen in the future.

“Teachers are excited about the insight piece, getting a chance to see how students are doing in a lesson,” says Kaite Harmon, CK-12’s senior program manager.  

Shah says as students continue to learn digitally, he wants to make the process more relevant. “We have this unique opportunity that nobody has ever had before,” he says. “As a community, I hope we can all pitch into this to get the learning outcomes students deserve.”