By fostering AI competency, we will equip our students with the foundational knowledge and skills necessary to adapt to and thrive in an increasingly digital society. Early learning and exposure to AI concepts not only demystifies this powerful technology but also sparks curiosity and creativity, preparing students to become active and responsible participants in the workforce of the future and nurturing the next generation of American AI innovators to propel our Nation to new heights of scientific and economic achievement.
The edict established the Artificial Intelligence Education Task Force, five words that, when crammed together by this administration, create some sort of field that overloads and destroys any irony in the vicinity. The federal AI Initiative offers a page of "resources" that looks much like a "list of folks hoping to make money from AI." That goes with the part calling for public-private partnerships
A bunch of organizations and businesses and also more businesses have signed the presidential Pledge To America's Youth in which [Your Name Here] pledges to provide resources that foster early interest in AI technology, promote AI proficiency, and enable comprehensive AI training for parents and educators" all of which sounds much nicer than "We promise to hook customers as soon as they are born and do whatever we can to saturate the market. Ka-ching."
Specifically, over the next 4 years, we pledge to make available resources for youth, parents and teachers through funding and grants, educational materials and curricula, technology and tools, teacher professional development programs, workforce development resources, and/or technical expertise and mentorship.
Well, of course. Hey, did you hear the unsurprising discovery via internal documents that Google is using its education products to turn schools into a "pipeline of future users"? Is it any wonder that Dear Leader, our Grifter In Chief, wants to keep an eye on this new, promising money tree.
The initiative and task force are headed up by Michael Kratsios, whose previous gigs include Chief of Staff to Peter Thiel. He served in the first Trump administration in the Department of Defense, spent his interregnum as managing director of Scale AI and is now the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. In his current gig, he's calling to "demystify these amazing technologies" and figure out what AI is and is not good for, and then American families, students and educators "can fully take advantage of AI applications with confidence and responsibility." Perhaps he's unfamiliar with the research that shows that the more people know about AI, the less inclined they are to use it.
The task force has been meeting with folks to "discuss AI's impact in the classroom," which of course means everyone except people who actually work in classrooms. At their December confab, they heard from Chris Woolard of the Ohio Department of [Privatizing] Education, Adeel Khan of Magic School, and Tina Descovich, co-founder and current Big Cheese of Moms for Liberty.
M4L has some thoughts about AI in education. And, well, they aren't entirely terrible.
Along with tech companies acting responsibly, policymakers must do everything possible to make sure parents have full transparency into how AI systems operate, what data they collect, and how decisions or recommendations are made
By acting below, together we can ensure parents, not algorithms or activists, shape how AI is used in the education of our children.
Of course, they leave teachers out of the equation, perhaps because they can't quite figure out how to work "we think teachers are sometimes okay, but we hate their evil unions" into this equation. But their slogan for AI-- "Demand transparency, accountability, and boundaries" -- is not bad. And they do better by teachers elsewhere-- we'll get to that.
They've got a pledge to sign, and it hits all the usual M4L notes--
It's the usual "parents' fundamental right etc" song and dance, but that song and dance in the face of a plagiarism-driven data-mining monster makes some sense. It also suggests that M4L and its ilk are not quite ready to jump on the White House's grifty AI bandwagon. The M4L pledge certainly strikes a different tone than the White House's AI Pledge to America's Youth.
M4L also has a model school board policy and a model bill for legislatures. The school board policy lists four purposes:
1. Protect parental rights and student privacy;
2. Preserve the central role of teachers in instruction;
3. Maintain academic integrity; and
4. Ensure transparency and accountability in the use of emerging technologies.
The policy calls for no AI tools used without prior parental consent. The school should annually provide written notice of all AI tools approved for use.
There's a whole section on "instructional safeguards" that states as its first point
Artificial intelligence shall not replace a certified teacher in providing core academic instruction or assigning final grades.
Which doesn't go quite far enough (AI should assign no grades at all), but still is a more blunt defense of actual human teaching than anything the administration has offered.
M4L also seems to understand the AI threat to all manner of data that can be collected from young humans far better than plenty of other folks (for God's sake, stop inviting ChatGPT to scan all your social media content so it can make you a cute cartoon of yourself).
The M4L model legislation is much of the same stuff with more expansive lawmakery language, but again, they seem to understand the issues here:
While artificial intelligence may offer instructional benefits, its use also presents risks, including data privacy violations, diminished academic integrity, ideological bias, and inappropriate replacement of human educators.
Well, yeah.
It's an unusual day when we don't find M4L falling right in behind Dear Leader and nodding along with whatever his crew has to say, and I would love to think that this shows a bit of fissure between pro-any corporate entity that might enrich me MAGA and right-wing conspiracy crew MAGA. It almost smells a bit like that time a whole lot of Very Conservative Folks went rogue over Common Core.
But if the Moms want to join in the resistance to throwing AI into classrooms Right Away because if we don't OMG students won't be ready for the jobs of tomorrow because AI is inevitable and awesome and so much better than all those troublesome human meat widgets-- anyway, if the Moms want to stand up to all of that, I'm happy to see it. I am definitely staying tuned. Can AI make popcorn?
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