Title: AI Creeps Into the Classroom

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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Here's a story you might have missed. Earlier this month, parents, teachers, and elected officials rallied to demand that Mayor Zohran Mamdani impose a two-year moratorium on artificial intelligence in New York City public school classrooms. They delivered a petition with more than 2,200 signatures to the mayor's senior education advisor, First Deputy Mayor Dean Fuleihan, citing risks to "student privacy, cognitive development, creativity and the environment," according to the Daily News. An East Harlem parent told the reporter the mayor has mayoral control of public schools, so he can just say, "Slow your horses."

Now, that rally came after New York City's Department of Education unveiled its preliminary guidelines for using AI in schools, almost three years after a short-lived ban on ChatGPT. The Department of Education began soliciting public feedback on its preliminary guidelines, but declared up front, "The question is not whether AI belongs in schools. The question is whether we will collectively build a system that governs AI to serve every student and every stakeholder." Our next guest calls that statement quite the rhetorical suplex, opening a debate by declaring its central premise off limits.

There's one recent headline that you may have missed here in New York City, but AI tools are not waiting for education policy across the country to catch up. A February Pew Research Center survey found that 60% of teenagers say students at their school use chatbots to cheat very often or somewhat often. Parents, you may already be aware that AI tools come pre-installed in the Google Chromebooks that many children take home for remote learning. In a recent national survey, about 80% of teachers report having them in their K to 12 schools, those Chromebooks.

Jessica Winter's piece in The New Yorker takes a close look at AI tools in classrooms across the country and asks, "What Will It Take to Get AI Out of Schools?" That's the headline. Jessica, welcome to WNYC.

Jessica Winter: Thank you, Brian. It's great to be here.

Brian Lehrer: I'll tell listeners that you open your piece with these lines. "I don't like AI, and I am raising my children not to like it." Then you talk to your kids about AI the way you might warn them about a creepy neighbor to "avoid eye contact, cross the street when you walk past his house." Then your son comes home from third grade with a certificate of completion for a drag-and-drop computer game made by Amazon. Tell us about that moment, and when you realized that both of your own children were already being exposed to AI tools in their classrooms.

Jessica Winter: Right. My third grader, and I should say, I'm in Massachusetts, but until a couple of years ago, both of my kids were in New York City DOE schools. My third grader came home with this certificate of achievement. When I looked into it, he had just played a computer game. It didn't really have much to do with AI. It was a branding exercise for Code.org and Amazon Future Engineer. I was a little irritated by it, but I wasn't too concerned. When I got really dismayed was when my sixth grader came home from school with a new Chromebook, which was installed with a suite of Gemini AI tools. Google, in the past year, rolled out an all-ages version of Gemini.

As you mentioned in the introduction, Chromebooks are nearly ubiquitous in schools. Now they come installed with this suite of AI tools that is constantly giving kids prompts. Let the tool help you write, or beautify your slideshow, or whatever the case may be. I was really dismayed. As you mentioned, I've taught my kids to have, I think, a healthy wariness and caution around AI, and really around anything from the big tech companies in general. I just don't think that their childhoods need to be wrapped up in screens and gamified tech. I think that schools' reliance on Chromebooks and edtech, and now on AI, which we've now experienced in two school systems, really puts a strain on those kinds of values.

I just feel like parents are coming into conflict in ways that they don't want to be with AI policy and in schools because there's basic questions around AI, and whether AI should be in schools in the first place, that just aren't being answered or are being skipped over.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, do you have any story or you can ask a question, but I wonder if there are any more stories out there like the ones that Jessica Winter from The New Yorker was just telling us about her own kids and how schools themselves are feeding the kids to AI tools. 212-433-WNYC. Do you care, or do you think AI can be managed for the greater good in the context of education, or should just be booted out to the maximum extent possible? 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. You can call, or you can text with your stories, or comments, or questions.

I'll note that a Google vice president for education told you that Gemini's aim is to "empower the educators," and that Google is "not the pedagogical experts." Describe what the people who create these tools told you. What do they believe or claim they are doing that's in the public interest or a problem that they are trying to solve?

Jessica Winter: They will say that they're here to help educators do the best job that they can to help educators save time on the more tedious tasks of grading or coming up with lesson plans, and that they are trying to maximize the amount of time that educators have for one-on-one data-driven interactions with their students, so that they have the most information possible about each individual student, and give them bespoke instruction and bespoke interaction to speak to their strengths and find their areas of growth.

In the earlier grades, I was troubled by the extent to which there's this assumption that a child's piece of writing can be fed into an AI, or a child's drawing or artwork can be fed into AI to make something more impressive, or to make something that the child, him or herself, could not achieve. That is something that people in edtech and people in AI for education are excited about. Just speaking as a parent and a layperson, I am not excited about that. I don't think that a child needs to be told that technology is here to make their work more impressive.

Another issue that comes up a lot is that AI can save teachers time, that I can write emails to parents from teachers, that I can generate feedback for students on their papers or on their projects. One person I spoke with, I didn't quote this in the piece, but they said that they were working on a feedback tool where the feedback was just, it was too long, it was spitting out hundreds and hundreds of words of feedback, and they had to figure out a way for the feedback to be shorter, more concise, and also, so that the student receiving the feedback wouldn't realize it was AI. This was, again, very dismaying to me because it seems to mistake the whole purpose of a teacher's role in a student's life.

I don't think anyone wants to receive AI-generated emails about their child's progress in school. I don't see the point of a student receiving feedback from AI, especially when we're telling students not to write papers or to cheat with AI, and we get into a situation where just robots are talking to each other. I don't know what any of this has to do with education. I believe that these technologists believe in what they're doing, but I, personally, and a lot of the experts with whom I spoke, don't see a whole lot that's convincing here, certainly not in the earlier grades.

Brian Lehrer: On Chromebooks in particular, a Google product, I mentioned the stat in the intro that in a recent national survey, about 80% of teachers report having them in their K through 12 schools. The COVID pandemic drove sales up by 287% is the stat that I have in a single year. Because of all the remote learning, they wanted kids to have Chromebooks, and these Chromebooks, as you report, come with all these automatic AI prompts, in many cases, when kids open a page to write an essay, things like that. Listener writes, however, "In regular Chrome, it is still possible to turn off AI tools. Is that possible on Chromebooks?"

Jessica Winter: It depends on what the settings are. This again speaks to a lack of formal guidelines and a lack of universal standards that can be applied. Sometimes you can turn them off, sometimes you can't. There's no universal standard for whether or not a child-- I know, on my daughter's Chromebook, she can't turn it off, she just has to ignore it.

Brian Lehrer: I want to take a call from somebody who I think is going to push back on your premise.

Jessica Winter: Okay.

Brian Lehrer: Again, the title of your article, or let's say how far you go in your premise, if the title of the article is "What Will It Take to Get AI Out of Schools?" Jane on the Upper East Side has a thought about that. Jane, you're on WNYC. Hello.

Jane: Yes, hi. Yes, my name is Jane Hatterer. I am an AI literacy advocate. I've been working in the space for over three years, both in city, state, and national coalitions. My concern with the head-in-the-sand approach to this technology, which is ubiquitous beyond our education system but across industries, is that we're doing a disservice to our students in terms of their college career and civic readiness, which is what the state requires of our graduates of public education. To be AI literate is a comprehensive term and defined differently by different people, but it essentially will provide agency to our students to decide if, when, and how to use these tools in a manner that is pro-social, ethical, and responsible, with consideration for impact on the environment and their communities.

I think if we take-- The fact remains that we are way behind other countries in terms of AI literacy education. China, the UAE mandated throughout K12 that if we don't educate our students on how to use these tools in ways that will help them think critically, collaborate with others, create in ways that are effective, and protect intellectual copyrights, et cetera, we're going to make them more vulnerable and less prepared. I think we do need the guidance. New York City, finally, after three years, came out with guidance, which is still open for public comment, and will be an iterative process. We need guidance. We also need regulation.

I think it's twofold. I think we need to promote literacy and understand that there are data security concerns, there are privacy concerns, which, by the way, are accounted for by the school system, but there also needs to be--

Brian Lehrer: Let me jump in because you put a lot on the table here, and I think you two might have an interesting conversation. Jessica, talk to Jane.

Jessica Winter: Jane, at what age do you think that AI literacy should be introduced into schools? Which grade?

Jane: I think it can be introduced in elementary school in ways that are age-appropriate.

Jessica Winter: What would that look like?

Jane: There could be games that they could be engaging with that would be secure in terms of any-- which they would be, regardless if they're used in schools context, in terms of any kind of personal identification, et cetera.

Jessica Winter: What kinds of games?

Jane: In which they're taught concept-- Well, there was a woman who was an ELA instructor who used, and this had to do with visuals, who showed very young students pictures of different animals and asked them to create a story around them using some basic tools. With these tools, they were able to create their own story about a lizard, or a snake, or a frog. The point is, it was enhancing their ability to realize a narrative. I could promote some other examples.

Jessica Winter: Children have learned about narrative, and drawing pictures, and creating stories, and using their imaginations for untold generations. What makes the AI experience of creating a story about a lizard and a frog superior to children using their own hands and their own imaginations and paper and pencil to create that experience?

Jane: Well, they may have greater capacity with the tools.

Jessica Winter: Why do they need that greater capacity-

Jane: They could have used it--

Jessica Winter: -if they're in elementary school? Why do they need that? How does that benefit them in terms of motor skills, in terms of working memory, in terms of relying on themselves, their own creativity, their own inner resources, and not outsourcing those beautiful gifts to a machine that wants to extract their data and monetize them? Why is that a superior experience?

Jane: We're not talking about extracting data and monetizing their-- within the context of an elementary school classroom, because that's not going to happen because these tools will not be allowed in the use--

Jessica Winter: Well, it is happening.

Jane: Well, not in an elementary school classroom. They have to be compliant. Maybe at home, maybe outside the classroom, which is all the more reason to make students aware of various implications. I don't believe--

Jessica Winter: Well, let's take a real example. Amira. Let's take the example of Amira. Amira is a reading app that is used, I believe, from kindergarten to third grade. Amira came up over and over again in my reporting as a source of concern for parents. Children read to Amira, and Amira records the children's voices and offers feedback. There are a lot of self-evident concerns with this, and there isn't necessarily compliance in place, depending on the district and the school. For one thing, a child's voice is a form of data, biometric data that should not be collected without a parent's consent, or really, at all. That was happening.

Second, Amira does not necessarily account for different regional accents, for speech delays, for any number of factors that have nothing to do with reading comprehension. I think third and most important, a lot of parents simply don't want their kids talking to a robot. They want their kids interacting with other kids and with teachers. Again, the emphasis on these synthetic interactions and the potential harm that they have on social-emotional development is almost secondary to the question of why is this superior? Why is this what we have to be doing? How have we manufactured consent for this type of pedagogy over any other-- How did that happen? How did it happen so quickly? How did parents not even really know it was happening?

Jane: Can I respond?

Brian Lehrer: I'll give you one more response.

Jessica Winter: Yes, please.

Brian Lehrer: We really appreciate your call. Go ahead.

Jane: Just quickly. I don't think the proposition is that these tools should be in any way replacing other forms of instruction, of teacher-student relationships. The idea is to free up the teachers to actually have more time of personalized instruction. There are access issues, there are ways in which these tools can support in language, ESL, with other learners with IEPs. I agree that there should be foundational skills that are also imparted to young students, to all students. It's not a replacement. I think that's a false flag.

Brian Lehrer: Jane. I'm going to leave it there. I thank you very much for your call and engaging with our guest.

Jessica Winter: Thank you, Jane.

Brian Lehrer: Jessica, thank you for engaging that robustly with the caller. I guess if there's a bottom line to all the specifics that she was throwing out there, it's that your premise goes too far if what you want to do is get AI out of schools completely, rather than and maybe just acknowledging reality in the world today, figuring out how to most effectively and in the public interest deploy it.

Jessica Winter: The reason I asked Jane which grade when she thinks that AI literacy should begin, I do think that there are all kinds of use cases for AI at the high school level to organize data for transcription. I would love for my kids, once they reach the high school level, to have a module on the history of the development of artificial intelligence, AI literacy, digital and media literacy in general. I think it would be wonderful for children at some developmentally appropriate age to learn how this stuff works. I mean, we could almost approach it like sex education. Sex education usually starts around sixth, seventh, eighth grade, something like that.

I'm not an absolutist in the later grades, but I think in the earlier grades, I am. Just to speak to another point that Jane made that people make all the time, which is that we don't want to leave our students and our children behind in the job market, but the fact of the matter is, we don't know what AI is going to look like 15 or 20 years from now. Certainly, we couldn't have imagined what it's like now, a few years ago. Not a layperson, certainly. I think that the idea that a child is going to be left in the dust in the labor market because he's not talking to a chatbot in elementary school is frankly not a serious question.

Brian Lehrer: Jessica, we're coming near the end of what we told you was our scheduled time, but we have so many callers on our completely full board who have stories or questions. There are things that, because we let you and the caller, Jane, interact for a while, which I'm really glad we did.

Jessica Winter: Yes. Me, too.

Brian Lehrer: I haven't gotten to yet about the White House summit, with First Lady Melania Trump standing next to Figure 03, a humanoid robot who you wrote about. Can you stay the rest of the hour?

Jessica Winter: Sure.

Brian Lehrer: We'll continue with Jessica Winter, and many of your calls and texts, and those questions I cited right after this.

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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC, as we continue with Jessica Winter on her piece in The New Yorker called, "What Will It Take to Get AI Out of Schools?" We're going to talk to a caller next who has a story. I think the caller considers it a horror story about their daughter in first grade. Then to Mike in Nyack, who's an education student currently at community college and maybe has a nuanced take on how he wants to use AI as a high school teacher eventually. Damian in Irvington, you're on WNYC. Hello to Irvington on Hudson. Hi, Damian.

Damian: Hi, there. My first grader goes to a wonderful, wonderful elementary school. She came home from first grade a couple of weeks ago and announced that they'd been making storybooks for the kindergartners one level down from them, which is wonderful, and I love it, but she also announced that they were using "AI" to do it. She's six, so it's hard to get a handle on exactly how they were using it or whatever, but it wasn't really disclosed to us. I found it just a repulsive idea. Here they are using their growing powers of imagination, their very new literacy, they've just learned to write, and their drawing skills, and they're outsourcing this to AI?

It seems insane to me, and I have to push back so hard on that previous caller, Jane, because she was saying that this doesn't replace human interaction, blah, blah, blah, but I'm sorry, every minute she spends with a Chromebook or an AI chatbot displaces that amount of time she could be talking with a teacher or another student.

Brian Lehrer: Damian, did you interact with the school about this at all?

Damian: Not yet, but a bunch of us-- I've been talking to some other parents, and people are talking about not signing the technology consent form that we're asked to sign every year, talking about not signing that next year to opt out of all this Chromebook garbage, because I don't understand why would they even be using Chromebooks to begin with at this age.

Brian Lehrer: Jessica, any advice for Damian, or any other reaction?

Jessica Winter: Damian, I agree with everything you said. Your comments echo what I've heard from a lot of parents and educators. There's a wonderful group that I write about in my piece called Schools Beyond Screens, which started among some parents in Los Angeles. One of the concerns that they brought up, it's really nuanced and important, is that parents do sign this kind of blanket waiver at the beginning of school years, and they don't really know what they're signing necessarily. It really has to be itemized for each product, each app, so that you know that, "Okay, it's okay for my student to use this, but I'm not quite sure about that."

The Chromebook ubiquity, the inevitability of the Chromebook in students' educations, is really, really troubling. My sixth grader, a little older than Damian's child, but I couldn't opt her out if I wanted to. She uses the Chromebook for every single class. She uses it for homework. To opt them out of the Chromebook, in some cases, is like opting them out of school itself. I think that's especially tragic given that the Chromebooks are a vestige of the pandemic in many schools. The reason why students spend so much time on Chromebooks in a lot of cases is because they were habituated to do so during the pandemic, during remote learning.

I don't think anyone thinks back fondly to remote learning. I think a lot of people found it incredibly painful and difficult. Somehow, this vestige, this machine that doesn't even really work very well, it's just cheap and easy to obtain, has remained with us and gained so much power over our students' experience of school and of learning. The question of AI is really knitted up in this larger question of edtech, and this larger question of why we are so wedded to the Chromebooks, and can we get away from the Chromebooks? Is that even possible? I think it is. I have to believe it is because I think that our children's education would be better if we could get free of it.

Brian Lehrer: Damian, let us know how this goes between you and the other parents in the school. It'd be interesting to follow up.

Damian: I will. I think people are organizing around it, so I'll keep you guys posted. Thank you so much.

Brian Lehrer: Damian, thank you for your call. From Irvington, we go up one town and across the Tappan Zee Bridge to Mike in Nyack. Mike, you're on WNYC. Thank you for calling in.

Mike: Hey. Thanks, Brian. This is just an incredible topic that you guys are talking about, and I just want to say that the speaker you have today is just-- she has such a common-sense approach to this issue that I think a lot of parents are just so happy, and it's so refreshing to hear. As I said when I called in, I'm currently a education major in CUNY. I'm doing a late-stage career change, and my goal is to teach high school social studies. CUNY is a great school. That's a plug for CUNY. I love it. This is my first semester, but I haven't seen anything yet to like approaching AI or stuff or anything like that in the curriculum.

I think it's just because it's moving so fast that the school hasn't caught up to it, but I think that's a necessity that needs to happen. One thing I have seen now that I'm into this world of education is with the Common Core Standard, there is such a push to cover as much material as possible. My fear with AI, from my perspective, and I am a parent of three kids, is if educators or people are so pressed to cover so much material, and they think that there's an opportunity in AI, they're going to rush to it. As we see in society today, whenever there's some kind of new technology, we rush to it, not thinking that what we're giving up has more value than what we're rushing into. That's my biggest fear.

I think that the other caller, Jane, brought up good points. At some point, we can't stick our head in the sand when we have to address this and educate kids on how to approach a workforce knowing about AI, but to think that this is going to be introduced at the elementary level? Just a quick example, I have a daughter in sixth grade. I have three kids. Two in a private school that doesn't use screens, Blue Rock School, and then one in the public school. We constantly have to keep the one in the public school who's in third grade off his Chromebook when he's home.

My daughter, who's in sixth grade, she draws these amazing cartoons. They're beautiful. She'll sit there on a table and draw for two, three hours, these very witty, anime-themed cartoons. She was introduced to AI recently, and she was on a computer screen, and it was just horrible. Watching her-- these skills and abilities that she has, like the other caller said, being commandeered, it just puts these skills that kids need in atrophy. Not to mention, like your guest brought up about the interpersonal skills. As a parent, not just as a person going to education field, but as a parent, it is frightening how fast we rush into this, not thinking about the consequence of what's going to happen.

Brian Lehrer: You just used the word atrophy. Jessica's article cites an MIT study from just last year warning that integration of large language models into learning environments "may inadvertently contribute to cognitive atrophy." What a thing to be facing, right? In the context of something that's supposed to be an advancement. Cognitive atrophy. Mike, for you, as preparing to be a high school social studies teacher, as I understand it, and thinking that you do need AI literacy in that context, how do you envision using it as a high school social studies teacher when you get to that point, if you've thought it through it all yet?

Mike: I haven't thought of it too much, but talking to people who are in academia, I have one of the parents at my school, he works in Vassar College, he talks about how they're trying to wrestle with AI in terms of being sure that students are competent enough in their field to go forward and their own abilities are not being replaced by an AI when it comes to papers and things like that. For me, honestly, I don't even know what it's going to look like three years from now. My goal is, I think, the current political situation we have is because a lack of understanding on social studies and history, where those topics can be so easily commandeered by political parties or figures.

I think that's very important, and I'm happy to go into this field. I think there's a critical skill set that is really necessary that can't be replaced by computers. I don't know what it's going to look like when I get to a school, and I don't know what freedom I'm going to have as a teacher to be able to reject it and say, "I don't want to do that," because like I said, there's such a push to cover material over a course of a school year. I feel like if administrators feel that they can do it with AI, they're not going to ask questions. They're just going to want to cover it.

Brian Lehrer: Mike, I really appreciate your call. Sounds like education-

Mike: Yes, thank you so much.

Brian Lehrer: -is going to be lucky to have you as a teacher when you get to that point, so good luck with that and the kids. Any quick reaction to that caller, Jessica?

Jessica Winter: Yes. I think the phrase head in the sand comes up a lot when people are pushing against AI use in schools, but I think that we also risk putting our heads in the sand, as Mike was acknowledging, about the harms and the risks of these tools at any age. The study that you just cited, Brian, that was among adults, that use of LLMs, use of generative AI, causes cognitive atrophy because people are not doing the contemplative work of thinking through questions on their own, whether it's questions of history and civics and the kinds of topics in a social studies classroom that the caller will be teaching soon, or any number of social emotional interactions that people are having, or just thinking through a math problem.

All of these little things really add up. If you are over-relying on an LLM, we really do have a lot of evidence to show that you're simply not doing cognitive muscle maintenance, social-emotional muscle maintenance. If you extrapolate that, if you imagine the effects on a brain that is still developing, that still has a long way to go, it's hard to even imagine what the harmful effects might be. We can only imagine it because we have very little research on the effects of AI in education at the K through 12 or the K through 8 level. Again, people who trumpet the inevitability of AI in education, it's here, there's nothing we can do about it. Well, we don't really know what we're working with yet.

I think for a lot of other people, the first question is not how do we use these tools, but why, and should we be in the first place? I'm also grateful that people like Mike are entering education and grappling with these questions in a really thoughtful way.

Brian Lehrer: Before we run out of time, I did say I would ask you about that Melania Trump event with a humanoid robot where she asked the audience to imagine it as a teacher who is "always patient and always available." What was that? Was that a tech industry sales pitch that they got her involved with, or a policy thing? What was that?

Jessica Winter: What a great question. What was that, Brian? I was horrified. It almost felt like a prank, didn't it? This slow-moving, slow-speaking robot. It didn't really have a face. It just had a blank screen. I don't think anyone would sleep well at night imagining that Figure 03 would be teaching their children much of anything. Yes, I can't really speculate on who thought that that was a good idea, but it certainly was the opposite of an advertisement or an endorsement for the androidification of American education.

Brian Lehrer: In our last 30 seconds, the title of your article was a question. "What Will It Take to Get AI Out of Schools?" Assuming that's the goal of you and some others, in 30 seconds, do you have a list of things?

Jessica Winter: I think that we can look to the parents in New York City and the parents in Los Angeles and elsewhere who are organizing on these issues, who are rallying, and who are appealing to elected officials for a change. Actually, the parents in Los Angeles did get the Los Angeles Unified School District Board to sign on to some limitations on screen use in those schools. It wasn't an AI-specific resolution, but less-

Brian Lehrer: Screens, generally.

Jessica Winter: -screen time means less AI time.

Brian Lehrer: All right. We'll leave it there with Jessica Winter, staff writer at The New Yorker, covering family and education. Thank you very much for sharing your article with us today and engaging so interestingly with callers. Thank you very much.

Jessica Winter: Thank you for having me.

 

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