The Case Against Cheating (And AI)

As schools and teachers have tried to pressure their students to stay away from AI use, they have recapitulated many of the same old arguments against cheating in its traditional forms. 

We English teachers have railed against shortcuts since CliffsNotes first reared their "study guide" heads back in 1958. Then the internet begat SparkNotes and its ilk. And it was always a mistake to frame the argument as some sort of moral or ethical issue. "You're a bad person if you cheat on this assignment," is not a useful message for young humans for many reasons, not the least of which is that they hear variations on "You're a bad person if..." a lot.

As it turns out, the best arguments against old school cheating are equally valid against new school high tech cheating, or just plain AI "augmentation."

Anything worth doing is worth doing yourself

"I would really like to kiss this highly engaging and exciting human being in front of me, so I am going to get someone else to do it and tell me what it was like," said nobody, ever.

You get the most out of life's experiences by, you know, experiencing them. You could sit in a cave somewhere and let your tech feed you a regular summary of what is going on outside, but what would be the point? You find your best self, you learn how to be fully human in the world, by being in the world. 

Too many adults, and far too many adults who work in schools, feed the narrative that students are in some sort of holding pattern, that their real lives in the real world will start further down the road. That's just not true. Your life is going on right now, even if you are not yet an adult. So experience it first hand. And yes, that includes the work that you've been given to do in school. 

Of course, "anything worth doing" is doing some heavy lifting here. That part falls on the teachers. It's part of their job to make sure they are bringing students together with things that are, in fact, worth doing; then they have the task of making the "worth doing" case to students. 

Lying is corrosive

Everyone has seen the memo explaining that lying is wrong. But it's also important to understand that lying is corrosive and self-damaging. And it's nearly impossible to cheat without lying. And lying is corrosive.

Lying builds barriers in relationships; in particular, it ruins trust, and without trust as a foundation, it is difficult to build or sustain any sort of relationship with other human beings. Lying creates a brutal sort of isolation, in which you alone are the only person who knows the truth of your own story. That kind of isolation is the usual root of the whole existential angst thing anyway, but to add the barriers that come with lying just makes it so much worse. 

As I told my students a gazillion times, life is too short to put your name to a lie.

Protect your brain

You do not build muscles by hiring someone else to lift weights in your name. Students are developing their minds, strengthening their brains. There is a natural tendency to draw back from the friction and pain involved, but that's how you build things.

Your brain is the toolbox that will hold every tool you'll need to make your way through the world, both personally and professionally. The more, better tools you collect, the more choices you will have in life. We know that offloading cognitive work to AI is not good for people. It's not good for adults and degrades the tools in their mental toolboxes, but for young humans who are supposed to be accumulating those tools the effects could be even worse-- the absence of necessary tools as they enter the adult world.

It is becoming increasingly clear that AI is not for amateurs, that it is only useful for people who are already knowledgeable about the field in question. Students are not those people. 

You are going to need your brain your whole life, and your school years are the chance to pack it with as many bits of knowledge and skill you can get your mental mitts on. Do not use AI to shortchange that process.

This requires the kind of long term thinking that young humans does not always come easily to young humans. But we adults have to keep reminding them that the work is not to generate an assignment that you can hand in tomorrow, but to wrestle with the work in ways that will help them accumulate the knowledge and skills that will help them move through the world. Speedruns and shortcuts will not help with that. 

Don't avoid cheating or cutting corners or just getting a little extra help because it's Very Naughty. Avoid all of these with either AI or old school methods, because they get in the way of the work of building your self and your life. That should your measure in all things-- is this a tool for helping you grow and live, or a means of avoiding engaging with growth and life? Don't choose the latter. 

Can Schools Play Catch-Up?

From its launch as Campbell Brown's attempt to be a major education player in anti-public ed politics, The74 has become a very mixed bag. Sometimes they publish valuable journalism about education, and sometimes they roll out junk like this article about using AI to help schools get students caught up, an article mostly impressive in how it manages to get so much wrong in such a little space.

Everyone just run faster than that guy-- go catch up

The piece is by Daniel Weisberg. Weisberg has deep reformster credentials; the former lawyer was First Deputy Chancellor of schools in NYC under Joel Klein and David Banks and is a Broad Foundation fellow. He was CEO of TNTP, the sister organization for Teach for America, where he attacked teacher job protections and oversaw blog-posts-disguised-as-reports like The Widget Effect and The Opportunity Myth that lacked substance and accuracy, but which provided cover for reformsters to act like their ideas were grounded in something other their personal preferences. He's no stranger to controversy, having been implicated in a scandal under Banks/Adams. 

Weisberg has never shown a particularly strong grasp of teaching or education, and this article doesn't break his streak. 

"America's schools are terrible at catching kids up" Weisberg says, a sentence he puts in its very own paragraph to help make it pop.

This is just so dumb. The whole discourse around "catching kids up" is just dumb.

What's the hope here? Let's take a student who is behind by, say, three months of material. So to catch that student up, the teacher needs to get that student through three months' worth of material in one month. 

If the teacher could do that, wouldn't she be doing it already?

Do catch-up fans imagine teachers are sitting there thinking, "Well, I could teach this material a lot faster, but I think I'll just poke along instead." Do catch-up fans imagine that teachers aren't already moving as quickly as they can? 

Guys like Weisberg believe in "intervention programs designed to catch kids up," but if educators knew a swifter, more efficient way to teach that material, why would it be an "intervention program" and not a "regular program"?

But Weisberg never has shown much understanding of actual classroom teaching. He argues that schools are bad at catch-up because teachers are being asked to do the impossible-- but he has the wrong idea about what the impossible is.

In a classroom of 25 to 30 students, teachers must determine who is on grade level, who is behind (and why), how to modify instruction for each struggling child and how to extend learning for advanced students — all while delivering grade-level content.

Diagnostic exams, designed to give educators information on how students are progressing, are infrequent and often test different subject matter than what is used in the classroom. Intervention programs designed to catch kids up are purchased but poorly implemented. Students needing intensive help are sometimes segregated into programs with low expectations and weak outcomes.

Sigh. Not exactly untrue, but all beside the point. Weisberg assumes that a great intervention program and intensive help could somehow cause struggling learners to learn material faster than any other students in the system. He talks about a "roadmap to acceleration," but if we had such a roadmap, why wouldn't we have all students on it (and is it possible we already do). He also connects these problems, somehow, to grade inflation. 

Weisberg thinks he know how to do achieve the great catch up miracle. Let's see. First, this:

TNTP’s study identified 1,400 schools where students consistently learned more than a year’s worth of material annually, enabling those who started behind to reach grade level.

No, they did not. They identified some schools where students scored well on the standardized test of math and reading. When someone starts talking about "1.3 years of learning" they are talking about a certain amount of a standard deviation on a test score. Can intensive test prep bring test scores up? Probably. Do we have a shred of evidence that raising that test score will improve the student's life outcomes? We do not.

Weisberg continues with his bold vision:

In other words, the Catch-up Crisis is reversible. But first. we need a bold, shared goal: that students who fall behind grade level will catch up to — or exceed — grade-level standards within two school years, and without fail by high school graduation.

This is lake Woebegone talk-- we can get all students to be above average. You know what happens when all students are at or above grade level? We start talking about "grade level inflation" and how the standards are too low. 

But Weisberg sees three obstacles to implementing his bold vision: "limited real-time insight into student learning, little evidence-based guidance on how to address specific learning gaps and minimal job-embedded coaching."

Part of Weisberg's issue is a definite lack of faith in professional educators. "Students generate enormous amounts of work daily — assignments, quizzes, writing, projects," he says, as if human children are some sort of assembly line machine and the work they do descends from nowhere. "No human can analyze all of it for 25 students every day." He should meet secondary teachers who do it for 150-200 students. Is it hard? Sure. Do you find ways to manage it without doing it every single day? Maybe. 

But you know what he thinks the solution is-- magical AI that "can surface patterns quickly and provide teachers with usable, digestible insights." Which can also "generate evidence-informed strategies for specific challenges." Here's his example:

Imagine a fifth grader who is struggling with fractions. His teacher knows he earned a C- on the last test but doesn’t know why or what to do to help. AI can analyze the student’s work in real time and discovers he tends to invert numerators and denominators; it draws on data from thousands of similar children to see what worked best to help those with the same misconceptions and recommends content for a 15-minute tutoring block for the teacher to review and revise.

I'm stuck trying to imagine a fifth grade teacher who can't spot a student who tends to invert numerator and denominator (while doing what, exactly?) Where is this data from thousands of similar children? And how would AI know what worked best? And on what planet do you find a fifth grader who can be retaught successfully in a fifteen-minute block of time? 

Weisberg's working with a manufacturing model here. The assembly line is turning out a flawed product, so we examine all the data from the equipment and figure out how to correct the problem. But there are so many steps in this process that raise huge questions. How did the AI collect data from thousands of students-- did they agree to have every step of their classroom work monitored and recorded, and why is this data available all across the country? Also, given that AI does not actually think or understand in any human sense of the word, how was the instruction modified and shaped so that the AI could spot patterns in a useful way? 

Also, I love that AI-in-education folks always turn to math for examples (even though chatbots are notoriously bad at math). What if the student is having trouble analyzing figurative language in Shakespearean sonnets? What if the student is behind because they were supposed to read The Great Gatsby and they just, you know, didn't? 

Weisberg also wants to deploy AI to coach teachers. "AI-supported coaching tools, used responsibly, could provide timely, standards-aligned feedback on recorded lessons, supplementing human coaching rather than replacing it." Never mind "Teach like a pirate"-- now you can teach like a robot. This dovetails nicely with the suggestions for students, all of which add to the offloading of professional cognitive work for teachers. I wonder how long it would take the AI to deskill the actual human teacher.

Weisberg name-checks some companies doing some pilot work and claims some of these are seeing significant progress, but he only links to corporate sites-- not any "evidence-informed" support.

Weisberg nods to the ideas that teachers should still make final choices and also maybe the district better figure out how badly this adds to their too-much-screen-time problems. So he gets a half a point for that.

But mostly this is one more case of over-promising that AI can do something it can't actually do and maybe we shouldn't be trying to get it to do in the first place and, most of all, that can't really be done. He makes the mistake of imagining that teaching is engineering (read Russell Barkley on being a shepherd rather than an engineer), a view that is doubly problematic as it treats students like pieces of sheet metal waiting to be fashioned into a shape of management's choosing. Students get no agency or choice in his vision.

And all of that in service of the notion that if a runner is lagging in a race, they just need to be properly directed to run faster (faster even than those in the front of the pack) so that they can catch up. No, thank you. 

How You Made Them Feel

They may forget what you said — but they will never forget how you made them feel.

There have been variations on this quote, including one from Maya Angelou. But according to The Quote Investigator, its earliest appearance was in 1971 in Richard Evans's Quote Book in which the quote was attributed to Carl W. Buehner (a muckity muck of the Latter Day Saints). 

Sometimes it is used for speakers in general, but sometimes it is thrown at teachers-- and that's how I've seen it pop up in the past week. And it rubs me the wrong way.

I understand the intent, the idea of saying that teaching is more than just pouring content into young brains, that there is an emotional element to education. But I resist the notion, often attached to this quote, that trying to impart an emotional effect is a teacher's primary job, or that it is somehow separate from teaching actual content and skills. (I'm also not a fan of the idion of "making" someone feel something, but let's let that sit for today.)

One of the feelings that a teacher can give students to remember is the feeling of having mastered the content of the course. What I wanted my students to feel was that they were smart and capable of writing and reading well. In other words, most of my "feelings" teaching was conveyed directly through my content teaching. As my youngest kids work their way through school, I want them to feel good about themselves, and my expectation is that their teachers will not simply teach them to feel good about themselves, but teach them to read and write and math and other stuff so that the boys have something to feel good about. 

The feelings teaching and the content teaching are inextricably linked. If you hammer a student with the message that they are stupid and incapable of learning, it will be hard to teach them. If you give them simple work that teaches nothing and expects little of them, they will understand that you have low expectations and a corresponding low opinion of their abilities, it will be hard to teach them.  If you give them challenge-free puffballs in hopes of building their self-esteem, that will also fail; they are young, but they aren't stupid. They know when they've met a challenge and when they haven't.

But give them a real challenge and the support and encouragement to meet it, and they will both learn and feel like someone who is smart and tough. 

It is one the challenges of teaching--maybe one of the most important ones. To hit that sweet spot between Too Easy To Keep Students Awake and Too Difficult For Students To Bear. But between boredom and frustration levels is an energizing valley from which students emerge feeling pretty damned good.

Nobody ever mistook me for a particularly warm and fuzzy teacher, but when they came out of my course, most of them had accomplished something and also (important to me) knew they had accomplished something. My job was to chart a path up the mountain, walk with them up the mountain, and offer some combination of words of encouragement and the kind of kick in the ass that says "You can do this" rather than "You suck." 

Help your students feel smart and capable, and do it by helping them actually be well-educated. The best way to make a student feel like a reader is to teach them to read. I bet they'll remember that.