Language Generating AI Still Lacks I

You may remember that last year, a piece of language simulation AI software appeared touted as the next big thing. OpenAI rolled out GPT-3. The claims were huge. It can write poetry. Various writers wrote pieces about how realistic it was. It can write computer programs--well, actually that was less unbelievable. But the other claims were looking somewhat shaky already, including some linguistic trips into a verbal uncanny valley. 

Unfortunately, turns out that it also makes racist jokes, and backs up white supremacy. OpenAI signaled some of those issues back in May of 2020.

Since then, more problems. GPT-3 was being used to create child porn. It was, as Wired recently put it, "foulmouthed and toxic." This is not a new problem; you may recall when Microsoft created an AI chatbot that had to be shut down because it turned racist and abusive.

There's an unsettling message in all of this that I have rarely seen acknowledged. AI language software works by sampling huge amounts of human language and imitating the patterns that it sees. If these language AI programs are essentially distilling all the human language that's fed them, what does that say about all of our human communications? When you boil down every sentence written in English, do you get a grimy ugly abusive residue of slime? And if so, does that mean that slime trail is the undercarriage of all our communication?

Computer whizzes aren't asking those questions--they're asking more immediate practical questions like "How do I get this bot to be less racist?" 

That's the subject of a recent Wired article--"The efforts to make text-based AI less racist and terrible," which is an article we should all be reading in education if for no other reason than to remember that, among its many shortcomings, language-generating AI is racist and terrible.

Here are some of the attempts being made according to that piece. 

OpenAI researchers are going to fix GPT-3 by "feeding the program roughly 100 encyclopedia-like samples of writing by human professionals on topics like history and technology but also abuse, violence, and injustice." So, a big diet of bland, boring writing, some focused on problem topics so that it's sample base is tilted toward boring stuff, I guess. That may work--it has been tried with some marginal success to offset GPT-3's anti-Muslim bias.

Another approach is to give GPT-3 more toxic text, and then when it spews it back, label the bad examples as "bad" so that it can learn.

All of this underlines the issue behind AI language generation, which is that there is no actual intelligence there--just a prodigious ability to fake language behavior based on a huge bank of samples. Every advance in this field, including GPT-3, is mostly about figure out how to get the software to handle more samples. Wired talked to UC Berkeley psychology professor Alison Gopnik who studies human language acquisition in order to apply lessons to computers.

Children, she said, are the best learners, and the way kids learn language stems largely from their knowledge of and interaction with the world around them. Conversely, large language models have no connection to the world, making their output less grounded in reality.

Wired also collected the most awesome quote on the subject from Gopnik:

The definition of bullshitting is you talk a lot and it kind of sounds plausible, but there's no common sense behind it.

This would include many of the folks trying to sell schools and teachers super-duper software "powered by" or "incorporating" or "driven by" AI. It's still a machine, it still doesn't actually know anything, and it still serves as a dark mirror for some of our worst linguistic behaviors. 

.

NC: Another Way For Charters To Hit Taxpayers

With all the CRT fooferraw and voting suppression and a world of other hurts coming from legislatures and courts, it would be easy to miss this latest wrinkle from North Carolina.

Durham is already awash in charter schools, but as we've seen many times, the wisdom of the invisible hand of market forces does not include charters looking at a saturated market and saying, "We might as well not" and certainly not "Adding more schools to this already over-saturated community will just cause a ton of disruption for the students." 

Anyway, Oak Grove Charter Academy, a new charter to be operated by for-profit CMO National Heritage Academies, set out to create a new charter school in Durham County. The two districts most likely to be hurt by the new charter opposed the application, and the city of Durham was none too keen on it, but since the state board of education can authorize charters no matter what local taxpayers want, Oak Grove Charter Academy was approved. 

The school, now called North Oak Academy, intended to incorporate its property into the city of Durham and then as to be hooked up to the city water and sewage supply. The city was not inclined to help out. From the News & Observer

“Let’s just say it’s no secret that I believe that charter schools have been detrimental to Durham Public Schools in many ways,” Mayor Steve Schewel said at the November meeting. “I think they have been re-segregating, and I think that they have also really taken so much of the good parental and professional energy out of our public schools.”

National Heritage Academies asked again. Council said no again. National Heritage Academies threatened a lawsuit and warned that this would make their charter a martyr to the cause. One council member tweeted "I just love bad faith arguments. Also threats."

Enter the North Carolina legislature. At the end of June, the House voted  to approve a bill that require municipalities to extend water and/or sewer service to charter schools that ask for it.

So if this makes it past the NC Senate, taxpayers in North Carolina will have to fund infrastructure for charter schools they never asked for, or even opposed. Just one more way that charter systems create private profit at public expense.

Okay, I missed a pertinent line in the most recent version of the bill (which, because the bill process is kind of hilarious, actually started life as a bill for putting carbon monoxide detectors in public school buildings and has since been amended) indicating that the property owner will have to pay the cost of extending the service. Of course, the charter funding comes from the taxpayers, so the taxpayers are still paying for all of this, as well as the cost of managing a that-much-larger system, but my original implications were incorrect. H/t to Kristopher Nordstrom for pointing me at the correct language.

One More Lens

I often talk about education as the work of acquiring more tools, but there's value (particularly right now) in framing education as a collection of lenses.

There's a scene in the counter-reality romp National Treasure in which our heroes have to use some fancy glasses to see secret messages on important documents. And that's a good simplified model--looking through different lenses allows you to see different things.

Studying literature is about finding different lenses through which to see a work.

Sometimes it's a chore--if you use the right set of lenses and squint, then you can convince yourself that the ending of Huckleberry Finn fits with the rest of the novel. Is it ironic? Is it a final twist on a search for identity? Is it a discouraging take on American oppression? Or is it just an author getting stuck and finally just writing his way out any way he could think of?

Sometimes it's exciting. One of my college professors would always talk about the ambiguity than enriches, and I think of works like Hamlet--every time you look with different lens, you see a different work, but each work is awesome. Is the play about death? Is it about depression? Is it about power? Is it about generational conflict? 

As society grows and changes and scholars push boundaries, new lenses are developed. 100 years reading through a lens of critiquing patriarchal power structures or theories about racist systems was not a thing. The rise and fall of certain authors in the canon often runs parallel to the rise and fall of certain lenses; the rosy glow of a Romantic lens is out of favor, and so some Romantic authors are no longer in favor.

The use of lenses is, of course, not just a literary thing. We bring our lenses to reading history, consuming pop culture, even reading the actions and character of the humans around us. 

But the important part--and I cannot say this hard enough--is to use more than one lens.

Literature, history, media, humans--all very complex, and the more lenses we use to filter our perception, the more details we can tease out and understand. The more lenses we use, the better we understand how our old views were incomplete, sometimes dramatically and dangerously so. A single lens always has blind spots.

Many of our issues are problems with one-lens people.

It's a reliable "there are two kinds of people" dichotomy. In any English department in any school, there are two types of teachers--those who believe there's just one way to read Literary Work X, and those that believe there are multiple ways to read. Right now you are probably remembering one of each. David Coleman and his Common Core reading ideas touched a nerve with so many of us because he is clearly a one-lens guy. His direction to read only within the four corners of the text is a call to throw out every other lens you use to view readings. Autocrats like Donald Trump sell the idea that their followers don't need other lenses (maybe even no lenses at all) except the lens of "Dear Leader always tells the truth." 

Where do one-lens people come from? 

Some folks just go through a stage. Like new converts to any previously unknown viewpoint, some folks just get excited. I am ashamed to admit there was a nine month period during which I Bechdel tested the hell out of everything in sight as if it was the only way to watch anything. You get excited about your new lens, and you kind of forget to consider anything else. 

But I think the big source on one-lenser is people who want the world to be clear and simple. The idea that you can use multiple lenses, the multiple things can be true at the same time. If there are conflicting of a person or an event, then either the problematic view must cancel out the good, or the good view must cancel out any negatives. 

And because these folks have just one lens, they must view attempts to promote any other lenses as an attempt not to supplement, but to supplant. Pushing a new lens troubles them, alarms them, and they can't give an inch. An attempt to examine ways in which racism has affected US history and institutions will, for some folks, mean that we're going to throw out anything good the country has ever done. They get stuck in endless loops of this conversation:

Pat: I'm just saying there's another way to look at this.

Sam: So you're saying I'm wrong. But you're wrong.

And when one-lensers clash, when someone really is trying to completely replace one lens with another, then we have a conflict that cannot be resolved by anything other than a patch of scorched earth. 

If you have just one lens with which to view the world, that's part of who you are, and anything that challenges that lens challenges your identity. And there is almost nothing that people will fight harder to defend.

The tension between single and multiple lenses has always been part of our country, and it has certainly always been part of how we talk about and do education. For some folks, education is about giving students experience using that One True Lens and keeping it polished. You can see it in the people who have been complaining for the past several years that they don't students taught all that bias and stuff--just the facts. As if there's a set of objectively true historical facts that look exactly the same no matter what, because the only lens is the "facts" lens. Having just one lens means never having to say you're biased.

The other education approach is to, in effect, try to give students fluidity with the greatest possible number of lenses, as well as some skill in figuring out which ones work best when. This, for one lensers, is what indoctrination is all about--teaching students that there's more than one way to read the world. 

Multi-lens teaching isn't hard. I did it for most of my career without really thinking of it in those terms. I taught American literature, which meant that religion, race, gender, politics, wildly different views of the world were all on the table. My approach, whether it was Puritanism or 19th century critical realism, was to say, "I'm going to try to show you how these people viewed the world. I'm not here to say that they're right or wrong, and what you decide to think about them is up to you, but I want you to understand what they believed about how to be in the world." I never wanted them to answer the question "Who's right," but just "What would this group think about X?" If I could  teach just one thing in a year, I was hoping for, "People can see things differently for reasons other than stupidity or evil." 

I can't claim I always kept my own viewpoint out of my classroom, but I always labeled it as such, and I hope I ran a classroom where it was safe to disagree with me. 

The multilens view is, of course, its own kind of lens. But I've been using it to help unravel the current scramble over "divisive issues" in the classroom, and to think about what teaching really is, or should be. Some folks have been arguing that this massive argument is a sign that we need school choice, that public schools suck at uniting. I'm not sure that the ideas themselves are the real root of divisiveness as much as the single lens approach. Yes, it's a problem if some folks are racist, but it's an insoluble problem if they are incapable of imagining that real people could be any other way.

I hope that my children and grandchildren move through the world with as many lenses as they can carry. I hope our schools bring together people who use many different lenses and teach them about many more. I wear bifocals and have a pair of reading glasses for playing music. With two different eyes, that's a total of six different lenses; to really see the world I have to use some different combination of them all at various times. If I ever need more, that'll be fine, too.

The Importance of School Administrators

School administration jobs suck. Principals and superintendents have are responsible for everything and accountable to everybody while having little actual power. It's an aspect of the charter revolution is understandable--let's give the school CEO all the power and make him accountable to nobody--even if it is wrong.

But as little power as administrators seem to have, they still serve a critical function. Witness Jay Mathews' look (at the Washington Post) into Karin Chenoweth's new book Districts That Succeed. 

When she asked the teachers how long it would take for a bad principal to tear the school apart, she expected them to say they wouldn’t let that happen.

Instead, they frowned in despair and said about 20 minutes.

That sounds about right. It takes you one staff meeting to know that you've got a boss who's going to break things. 

Bad administrators implement their badness in a variety of ways, but they are all bad for the same fundamental reason--they have forgotten the actual purpose of their jobs. (Here's a Bad Administrator Field Guide)

If a school's job is to educate students, and that actual work is done by teachers, then an administrator's job is to make it possible for each teacher to do her best possible job of educating students.

All administrative duties are best understood through this lens. All that state and federal paperwork and reporting? Administrators handle that so that teachers can focus on teaching. Should an administrator be a visible and respected member of the community in which the school is located? Absolutely--so that the administrator is better positioned to advocate for the teachers and the school. Why does an administrator handle disciplinary issues? So that teachers can teach. Why do administrators make sure the school has a smoothly running schedule and program? So that teachers can teach. Why do administrators do observations of teachers? To help them do a better job of teaching.

Administration offices are often besieged. It is easy for busy, overworked administrators to start imagining that what goes on in their office suite is the "real" work of the district. But as soon as they start to think that way, the wheels start to come off. 

As Chenoweth's interviewees suggest, it is easy for district administration to kill a program, to poison a school culture. There's another step on the road to hell, when administrators move past the "we're doing the real work here and all this stuff is just getting in our way" and move on to the idea that the key to doing their job is not to empower teachers, but to strip power from them. 

This never ends well, ever (and that's why the charter visionary autocratic CEO model is a huge mistake). The country is littered with faux committees, convened to come up with the administrator's pre-selected idea. Uncountable PLC programs have been started and killed by administrators who were unwilling to let teachers have even a little power. Thousands of teachers do their best work in spite of their boss rather than because of him. 

When the weather gets really rough, the badly administered schools careen into the weeds. The most critical factor needed to get schools through the pandemic break was trust--trust between staff and administrators, school and parents--and many districts failed. 

Now we have new storm clouds whipping up around "critical race theory." Multiple states have passed vague, unclear laws even as real and faux parent groups come loudly demanding that the school stop doing, well, something. One of the big dangers of this uproar is that the lack of clarity in the laws is going to prompt a bunch of administrators to freak out and try to shut down anything that might possiblyattract trouble. "I can't sort all this out. I'm not sure what the law says and I don't want a mob of parents in my office, so as of this school year, just don't teach anything about race in your classroom, ever." Or nuisance rules like "Every single lesson you have mentioning race must be reviewed by my office before you teach it." 

When the education weather gets rough, it's an administrator's job to be a strong shelter, to make sure that teachers stay warm and dry so they can do their jobs. We're in the middle of a storm; here's hoping that your administrators understand what they're supposed to do.

ICYMI: Warming Way The Hell Up Edition (6/27)

The Institute is located right on the banks of the Allegheny River, which means while I'm sitting here baking I can at least look at water, but dang, it is unpleasant today. Not as unpleasant as it is out West. But I'm sure this is all just a momentary blip and nothing to be concerned about. In the meantime, here's a batch of reading from the week.

I oppose indoctrination, which is why I want schools to prove they are thinking acceptable things

Ordinarily I put the yuks at the end, but Alexandra Petri is a national treasure, and her take on Ron DeSantis new anti-wrongthink measure is exactly on point.

This critical race theory panic is a chip off the old block

Not sure how I missed this last week, but Gillian Frank and Friend of the Institute Adam Laats wrote a great piece for Slate showing the many times we have been here before.

Employers, don't blame the "skills gap" on workers

Or, for that matter, schools. Andre Perry and Anthony Barr write about a Philliy apprenticeship program that shows how it can be done.

PA should consolidate racetracks, not universities

Susan Spicka is the executive director of Education Voters of Pennsylvania. Here she takes a look at a plan to consolidate state universities and cut costs, even as legislators look to shore up horse racing. Because, for some reason, they think only one of those things has significant economic impact.

Platinum Equity Inks $4.5B Deal To Buy McGraw Hill

Your regular reminder that publishing is largely in the hands of people whose major interest is not publishing. 

Why Americans are so divided over teaching critical race theory

Better than average summation/overview of the current mess, from NPR. You can listen or read.

How mob attacks on social media are silencing UK teachers

It's not just here, if that's any consolation. The Guardian reports on how British Trumpism is making life miserable for teachers.

If Pittsburgh council really wants to help city schools, there's an obvious solution

Different cities have different local issues. In Pittsburgh, one issue is that the city has actually been taking a slice of the tax dollars that are supposed to go to schools. Steven Snyder explains. 

Take this job and shove it. Or change it.

Nancy Flanagan looks at the great post-pandemic employment reshuffle and considers what it means to teachers.

Supreme Court rules that Arkansas teachers pension were suckers to trust Goldman Sachs

Among SCOTUS decisions this round was one declaring that the Arkansas teacher pension system had no reason to trust the integrity of Goldman Sachs. Seriously. Fred Klonsky blogs about the story.

A new look at cyber charter balances

Public Citizens for Children and Youth just released a report about data showing that Pennsylvania's cyber charters are sitting in $74 million in reserves. Just some extra money they're banking for, well, because they can.

Religious freedom in America is protected for some more than others

As SCOTUS considers the right of religious folks to express their religion through state-funded discrimination, this op-ed from the LA Times points out some inconsistencies in how religious freedom tends to play out.

Why GPA tells us so much

In Psychology Today, an argument for why GPA is so much more valid a predictor of college success than SAT or ACT.

America's school teachers aren't the Marxist cabal Foix News keeps depicting

Anne Lutz Fernandez writes an op-ed for NBC THINK explaining just how radical US teachers really are.

The pandemic showed remote proctoring to be worse than useless

Cory Doctorow breaks down the abuses and more abuses of remote proctoring.

Never let a good crisis go to waste: Michigan Ed Reform edition

At Eclectablog, Mitchell Robinson looks at the same old problem of reformsters who may fail, but who never go away.

Illinois legislature begins to repair the damage of Chicago school reform.

Jan Ressefer has been tracking this stuff for a long time. Here's a capsule history of ed reform in Chicago, and what might happen to fix at least some of the damage.

The End of Friedmanomics

If only. But this piece in the New Republic made several conservatives sad, and it captures just how much damage Friedman has done, and why his ideas about education are toxic.

Literally, Seriously, and Institutional Integrity

I think Andy Smarick is wrong on a lot of education policy, but I also find him to be thoughtful and often a classic conservative, as opposed to whatever it is that conservatism has been replaced with. This piece is not short, but it's an attempt to explicate a whole world of truthfulness in rhetoric. 

CRT Warriors Are Coming For Individual Teachers

Anti-Critical Race Theory warriors are coming for schools, and for the teachers in them.

In New York City, the group Free To Learn is spending millions of dollars on ad buys to target NYC schools (including some private ones) who are accused of indoctrinating children. The group says it supports the basic principle that students should be free to ask questions, develop individual thoughts and opinions, and think critically--but not about that race stuff, apparently. It's not obvious whose deep pockets are involved in funding this group, but it's led by Alleigh Marre, who's been in politics for a while, working on campaigns for Scott Walker and Scott Brown, as well as serving on Donald Trump's transition team.

But Free To Learn is just targeting schools. Others are targeting individual teachers. I do believe there are people with reasonable, reasoned concerns about CRT and its influence on education, but they're a small group, and their voices have been pretty much drowned out by the mob (and the GOP politicians trying hard to draw power from it).

Amy Donofrio found herself re-assigned and then held up as a target by Florida's education commissioner. Misty Cromptom found she was being used as a campaign talking point in New Hampshire. On Twitter, a teacher reported to me that in her area, the No Left Turn group had taken screen shots of posts by teachers and administrators and used them in a presentation of evidence of indoctrination, with names highlighted and schools listed.

No Left Turn is another one of these culture warrior groups, this one spearheaded by Dr. Elana Yaron Fishbein, who pulled her children from school in Gladwyne PA because of a Cultural Proficiency Committee formed in the wake of the murder (she says "death") of George Floyd. They set up lessons that were unlike "the wholesome teaching of MLK, Jr. The group wants to "revive" education's fundamental discipline of "critical and active thinking which is based on facts, investigation, logic and sound reasoning," but they also include on their list of objectives, "Restore American patriotism in the classroom, including presenting our nations as consistently forward-thinking in its elevation of individual liberty and democratizing traditional Liberalism." 

The Central Virginia chapter, the one that went Twitter hunting, has a Facebook page headed by an MLK Jr. quote. Facebook is apparently a nexus for many of these groups, and while this may seem like it's coming together quickly, many of the connections were already in place. The woman leading the Virginia No Left Turn crusade against CRT was, just a short while ago, leading the charge against masking and school closures. 

Fox stories about these Courageous Moms often highlight a baseless fear of personal risk for standing up, but it's teachers who are being targeted. The Daily Wire just ran a piece about the Zinn Project pledge to Teach the Truth, now up to 4600 signers. Someone at Daily Wire took the time to sort through all the signatures and sort them by state and city, so that culture warriors can look up and hunt down any local teachers that are an indoctrination threat (I will not link to the DW piece, but here's the Zinn pledge). And yes, those signatures are public, but making it easy to target your local indoctrinatin' teacher just goes a scary extra mile.

And of course no movement to stamp out Plus Double Bad Wrongthink would be complete without a chance to turn in some naughty teacher or school. Free To Learn offers such an opportunity. Likewise Parents Defending Education (who run an Indoctrination Map), and even the Lt. Governor of Idaho (with her Education Indoctrination Task Force).

It's getting ugly, and it's getting ugly quickly, and schools and teachers may be wary that we're very close to the pitchforks and torches stage. The fact that many of these groups are ill-informed and spectacularly hypocritical ("They want to make this like Communist China," say the activists trying to implement a Cultural Revolution style purge of people with Bad Thoughts) is not going to matter a whit. Nor is "we don't teach CRT" a defense, because just about anything, from "equity" to "social emotional learning" is a sign you're Up To Something. It remains to be seen how many schools are going to be razed over this. Maybe , just maybe, these mobs are going to turn out to be reasonable people who just want to talk and who understand that serious, responsible people can have many views of CRT, and who understand that teachers want what's best for their students. I really don't like to be an alarmist. But right now it's not looking good.

NY: Buffalo's New (Probably) Mayor Knows About Charter Pushout

Buffalo, NY, primary voters tossed out a four-year incumbent in favor of India Walton, a nurse and self-identified socialist (as oppose to someone targeted with the S-word by cranky conservatives). 

Buffalo is a busy city for charter schools. It is where Carl Paladino put on a master class in how to use charter schools to make a profitable real estate empire. At one point he got himself elected to the school board where he was a vocal advocate for charters. He was never particularly shy about making a mint from the charter biz. ""If I didn't, I'd be a friggin' idiot," is a thing he actually said out loud to the Buffalo City News. The board often tried to shut him up (he was not just a charter fan, but racist, sexist and loud about it), but it was eventually the state that removed him from the board during his second term. In 2017, Commissioner Mary Ellen Elia removed him for disclosing sensitive information from a closed-door board session.

But you did notice that was his second term. Because Buffalo voters re-elected him. Buffalo has around 20 charter schools operating, and there is concern that Walton would be an anti-charter mayor.

The Buffalo News broached the subject with her back at the beginning of June. I'll include the audio, which is brief, but here are the highlights.

Walton has a charter push-out story of her own. Her son requires an IEP. The charter in which she enrolled him set the condition that he could not be enrolled unless she waived that IEP. After a few months, she was brought in by the school, which told her he wasn't performing well enough and she could either pull him out or they would expel him (which, they apparently suggested, would go on his "permanent record"). 

Asked by the newspaper if she had heard that this was a widespread issue or just her own personal experience (a fair question) she noted that as a school nurse, every October and November she would have to process a large number of students returning to public schools from the charter schools. That's not an uncommon experience; in many states, charter enrollment is counted in the fall, and afterwards, even if the student leaves, the charter keeps the money that "followed" the student there, so there is no penalty for the charter pushing out students that are too difficult or costly to educate.

So Walton may not be actually anti-charter, but she is familiar with one brand of charter shenanigans. She still has to defeat whatever sacrificial lamb the GOP puts up for the general election, and defeated incumbent Byron Brown is hinting at a write-in campaign, but India Walton could be sign of interesting times ahead in Buffalo.

You can listen to the audio here.