Google's Classroom AI Rage Bait

Nobody likes to train teachers like Google, who, like tobacco companies, understand that if you can lock those customers in while they're young, you'll get to keep them for life. Hence, Google's pre-eminence in training teachers to use whatever damn thing they've come up with. The "pipeline of future users" memo was turned up by NBC journalist Tyler Kingkade. Kingkade just came back from a free two-day Google training camp for pushing Gemini, Google's house brand of odious AI, and the resulting piece is exactly the sort of thing I'm not supposed to read unless I wash it down with a double order of blood pressure medication.

But here, in one place, we can find so much of what is wrong about the AI-in-the-classroom boosterism. I've read this so you don't have to, but it's going to be neither short nor sweet. God bless Kingkade for suffering through the whole thing.

Kingkade opens with a group of k-12 educators "sitting in an atrium on Google's campus" trying to imagine what pushback they'd get from some old fossil of a colleague, the kind who is upset that cursive is no longer taught. She might "yell" that AI is just another shiny fad. "What’s next, she might ask — robots teaching kids how to read?" Oh, that whacky old fossil.

Where do they turn to get help with this dinosaur? Why, they ask Gemini for tips, of course. 

They would win over this skeptical English teacher by explaining what generative AI could do for her: create classroom materials for phonics lessons, reducing what would normally be hours of work to just two minutes. The key, the educators agreed, was to avoid getting into an argument or letting this AI critic unload all her fears uninterrupted.

Got that? Don't listen to her-- don't even let her finish talking. Instead, act like a computer program, not a human colleague. And certainly don't treat her concerns as if they are legitimate. Focus on "pain points" says one leader, and how Gemini can take away your pain. And I have to tell you-- in my youth, I went through training for how to handle penitent peers who had answered an altar call, and some of this "training" seems very familiar.

“It’s not as scary if you’ve taken something off of my plate versus giving me a new thing that I have to then go out and learn,” Winston Roberts, director of an AI initiative at ISTE+ASCD, a nonprofit education group that worked with Google to develop the training, told educators from a stage.

When a non-profit is pushing a particular profit, you have to ask who is paying the bills. In this "partnership," somebody has invested a lot of their marketing budget. Teachers get way way wayyyyyy too much of this kind of "training" that is actually marketing masquerading as "help" for teachers.

Kingkade takes a moment to note the considerable growing backlash against AI in general and screens in classrooms in particular. Then we are back to the session.

We meet an English teacher from Hawaii who notes that AI is now part of student vocabulary; the example is that students use AI to call things fake, which ought to tell us a valuable lesson right there. And then she offers this comparison: 

“If a student’s running in the hallway, you don’t take away the hallway — you teach them the proper behavior for the hallway.”

With all due respect to my Hawaiian colleague, no. If a student is shooting at things with a gun, you take away the gun. You don't let them drive a car until they are 16 and have passed requisite tests of competence. 

Google rolled out it's "free" online training that includes "guidance about creating study guides, crafting lesson plans and analyzing where students are getting stuck," but not arguments for why AI might be a bad match for those tasks. Crafting lesson plans? That should be done by someone who knows the material and the students- AI knows neither. Analyzing where students get stuck? I'm unconvinced that AI can do that at all, but even if it could, the important question is WHY students get stuck. That is one of the most basic teacher functions-- working out what mistakes in thinking are taking the student into the weeds. Simple repeating, "Yeah, you are in the weeds again" is no help; students need help figuring out what wrong turn they took.

The training materials describe Gemini as “an engine for high-quality instruction” to do the “heavy lifting” for designing classroom lessons. “As an educator, this shift moves you into the role of a ‘learning conductor,’” one slide states.

Learning conductor? Learning conductor??!! Time for another blood pressure pill. Gemini is not an engine for high quality instruction because high quality instruction involves a human. Nor can Gemini design high quality lessons; it can only mimic and average the lessons it has input. And wait a minute-- isn't "learning conductor" a fancy update of "guide on the side," a version of teaching that is widely and justly mocked?

“It’s really, really important that we use it,” Joseph South, chief innovation officer for ISTE+ASCD, "because Google has bet a shit-ton of money on this, and we need these kids to grow up into paying customers." Okay, he didn't say that last part. “We can’t just ignore it, we can’t ban it, we can’t keep it out of our schools — that’s not gonna prepare us for the future.” That may be at least partly true, but "just lie back and let it roll over you" doesn't seem like great future prep, either.

Kingkade reminds us about the "pipeline" memo and reminds us that Google is company that convinced every that schools needed Chromebooks ("What if a laptop, but broken") which we're now thinking, maybe not. Kingkade has watched a 2018 presentation about keep Google atop education mountain includes this great quote

“Educators are sitting on a growing goldmine of data,” the presentation said, but they needed help organizing and making sense of it. If Google designed ways for schools to use student data, it would set “the stage for us to reinvent the education system through data.”

Goldmine of data indeed. Also, shades of our data overlords, who used to be so sure that if they had all the data, they could control the world. Remember the claim that given access to all the data, the company could tell the student what to eat for breakfast on test day? Or that students wouldn't have to take the SAT because we'd already know what they were going to get? Yeah, that company is now toast, but the notion that a "data-driven" ed system would be awesome (and profitable and provide a digital profile of future meat widgets that corporations would love)-- apparently that kind of creepy Big Brother thinking still has a home.

Speakers at the training emphasized that humans should always stay involved with any AI use and that technology shouldn’t replace teachers [or, you know, learning conductors]. They focused instead on how a teacher could use Gemini to create a comic strip that explains how greenhouse gases trap heat, for example, or how elementary school children could use AI to generate more realistic depictions of their ideas than they are capable of drawing.

What the hell is wrong with these people??! Yes, the most important part of a third grade project is how realistic the rendering of the art is! After these last few years, Google, with all of its millions, is still struggling to come up with a non-stupid use case for AI in a classroom. But hey-- let's have a heavy dose of irony  --

Casey Cuny, a high school English teacher in a Los Angeles suburb, described asking his students to debate their takeaways from readings — like the concept of “doublethink” from “1984” by George Orwell — with Gemini before discussing them in class.

“It’s the best discourse I’ve seen in years on some of these Socratic seminars I’ve been running in my classes,” he said. “It does push the thinking when used intentionally and strategically. And remember that I’m still using teaching methods — I’m not just putting it on the AI and walking away.”

Yes, class, turn and talk to your surveillance plagiarism machine about themes in 1984. Time for another blood pressure pill. You know what else is good for pushing thinking intentionally and strategically?? Human teachers and students! But it's good to know that when he turns on the AI, he still stands right there. Many of these AI boosters remind me of the Common Core days when teachers would self-own with variations of "I couldn't do my damned job until I had the Common Core Standards to tell me what to do." Sigh. I'm sorry. Cuny is probably a lovely human being and maybe a fine teacher, but I cannot begin to describe the rage I would feel if I found out that this was what was happening in my child's classroom.

Kingkade notes that the indoctrinees knew they'd be facing "challenges in evangelizing for AI." But one tech teacher said the training equipped him to "show skeptics how AI could be beneficial to learning-- not just for cheating." And “They may not like it, but I don’t think that’s going to change things,” he said. “The naysayers are not going to stop it.”

Yeah, you can't do AI marketing without just insisting that it's inevitable, which is admittedly so much easier than trying to provide compelling reasons that a teacher with a free will and professional conscience should choose to incorporate it. 

Google and ISTE+ASCD are planning a host of these trainings across the country so that teachers can learn that using Gemini is awesome and great, also, how to roll over those terrible old-timey teachers who want to question whether there's any actual good reason to hand the class reins to Gemini while they become learning conductors. Because "training" here means not teacher training, but unpaid field sales evangelist training. I'm going to go do some deep breathing exercises now. 

 

Another Bad NCLB Apologia

At FiveThirtyEight, economics writer Ben Casselman has concocted one of the saddest revisionary apologias for No Child Left Behind.

Even the headline/subhead combo signal that this is going to be a tough ride. "No Child Left Behind Worked: At Least in One Important Way." And then Casselman goes on to explain how NCLB really didn't work.

Casselman buries the lede about four paragraphs down:

Nearly a decade and a half later, No Child Left Behind is often described as a failure, and there is no question that the law fell short of many of its most ambitious goals. Most schools didn’t come close to achieving the 100-percent-proficiency mandate, which experts never considered a realistic target. Subsequent research found that the law’s penalties did little to improve student performance, and may have done more harm than good in some schools. Large achievement gaps remain, in part because Congress didn’t provide all of the billions of dollars in additional education funding that the law’s backers envisioned.

And that's why Casselman's "at least" is also a fail. It's worth talking about, because it is the same "at least" that many folks like to tack on NCLB, as in, "Well, at least it accomplished this one great thing."

The "at least" is "at least NCLB made schools disagregate data so that they would discover the little previously-ignored pockets of failure." Casselman even opens with the story of an affluent suburban Massachusetts school that was shocked to "discover" through test results that they were a failure (who knows-- maybe this neighborhood was the home of Arne Duncan's storied white moms)

This is the narrative that helps maintain support for test-and-punish as education policy. But there are several problems with it.

First of all-- nobody is surprised by test results. No local school district in this country has ever, in the last decade-plus of NCLB and NCLB Jr., gotten test results back and said, "Holy smokes! We had no idea that this batch of students was doing poorly!!" Not once. The Big Standardized Tests have told us nothing we didn't know, unless it was that we occasionally discovered that some otherwise great students were lousy test takers.

Second of all-- and Casselman acknowledges this one-- test-and-punish was definitely not test-and-rescue or test-and-assist. NCLB told districts, "Hey, you have a problem right here. Good luck fixing it!" And where test-and-punish turned into test-and-send-students-off-to-charters, the message was "Fix your problems with fewer resources than you had when you got into them in the first place."

Casselman has read up on this-- he devotes a few paragraphs to the research showing that the penalties of NCLB made it harder for schools to get better. Economist-researcher Jacob Vigdor compared the ever-ratcheting punishments to yelling at a failing kid: "You might succeed in scaring the Dickens out of the kid, but you’re not going to help them pass algebra."

So, in other words, NCLB's "success" was to tell districts what they already knew and to offer punishment without assistance.

Casselman also wants to make a case for the "success" of transparent data.

But for all its failures, No Child Left Behind had at least one significant — and, experts say, lasting — success: It changed the way the American educational system collects and uses data. The law may not have achieved the promise of its title, but it did force schools across the country to figure out which students were being left behind, and to make that information public. 

Well, the "collect and use" data is true-- schools now collect a bunch of test data that is useful for doing test prep so that we can collect more data. It's a change in the sense that professional baseball would be changed if, between each inning, one team dug holes on the field and then the other team filled them in. It's a waste of everybody's time, but boy are they busy Doing Something (and the shovel companies make a mint).

And no school in the country needed help finding out who was left behind, but then, that's not really the point, is it. It's the "make the information public," because test-and-punish also includes test-and-shame. Because a premise of both NCLB and NCLB 2.0 (Duncan-Obama) was always that schools are big fat lying liars who lie. And it would only be natural that Casselman would pick up that idea, because now many paragraphs in, we discover who one of his his "experts" is. CAP.

“There’s a very long history of states and school districts and schools essentially hiding behind the average performance of their students,” said Scott Sargrad, a former Education Department official in the Obama administration who is now a researcher at the left-leaning Center for American Progress. “That masks really significant differences between kids who are more affluent, who are white, who don’t have disabilities, whatever it is, and their peers who are more disadvantaged.”

What a swell quote. First, of districts were "hiding," one might ask what they were hiding from and why (I'm going with "dumb, punitive federal and state policies that get in the way of doing the actual work of educating students"). Second, please notice that even this CAP tool doesn't talk about this in terms of achievement or education or learning or skill and ability levels, but in terms of affluence, race and disabilities. Even he doesn't think that test-and-punish has an educational purpose or reveal educational results. Testing is all about race and class, and nothing about actual education. Which evokes a hilarious scene in a district office somewhere with administrators poring over test results and exclaiming, "Hey, I think some of these kids might be poor-- in fact, I think some of them are poor and black! man, I'm glad we got these test results so we could figure this out."

Ultimately, Casselman is left with "we handle data differently" and that, by the end of the article, is whittled down to "we can track individual student data year to year" (not everyone's idea of a Good Thing) and "we use specific figures instead of averages." I'm pretty sure we could have moved away from averages on our government reports without up-ending the entire education system with untested, unproven educational malpractice baloney. If that's the best we can offer, I think we can keep right on saying that No Child Left Behind was a complete and utter failure.