Artificial Stupidity

Facebook absolutely insist on showing me "top stories." Every time I open the Facebook page, I have to manually switch back to "most recent," because even though the Facebook Artificial Smartitude Software thinks it knows what I most want to see, it can't figure out that I want to see the "most recent" feed. Mostly because the Facebook software is consistently wrong about what I will consider Top News.

Meanwhile, my Outlook mail software has decided that I should now have the option of Focused, an email listing that lists my emails according to... well, that's not clear, but it seems to think it is "helping" me. It is not. The Artificial Smartitude Software seems to work roughly as well as rolling dice to decide the ranking of each e-mail. This is not helpful.

I pay attention to these sorts of features because we can't afford to ignore new advances in artificial intelligence, because a whole lot of people think that AI is the future of education, that computerized artificial intelligence will do a super-duper job directing the education of tiny humans, eclipsing the lame performance of old-school meat-based biological intelligence.


Take, for instance, this recent profile in Smithsonian, which is basically a puff piece to promote a meat-based biological intelligence unit named Joseph Qualls. Now-Dr Qualls (because getting meat-based biological intelligence degrees is apparently not a waste of time just yet) started his AI business back when he was a lonely BS just out of college, and he has grown the business into.... well, I'm not sure, but apparently he used AI to help train soldiers in Afghanistan among other things.

To his credit, Qualls in his interview correctly notes one of the hugest issues of AI in education or anywhere else-- What if the AI's wrong? Yes, that's a big question. It's a "Other than that, how did you like the play, Mrs. Lincoln" question. It's such a big question that Quall notes that much AI research is not driven by academics, but by lawyers who want to know how the decisions are made so they can avoid lawsuits. So, hey, it's super-encouraging to know that lawyers are so involved in developing AI. Yikes.

Still, Qualls sees this rather huge question as just a bump in the road, particularly for education.

With education, what’s going to happen, you’re still going to have monitoring. You’re going to have teachers who will be monitoring data. They’ll become more data scientists who understand the AI and can evaluate the data about how students are learning.

You’re going to need someone who’s an expert watching the data and watching the student. There will need to be a human in the loop for some time, maybe for at least 20 years. But I could be completely wrong. Technology moves so fast these days.

So neither the sage on the stage or the guide on the side, but more of a stalker in the closet, watching the data run across the screen while also keeping an eye on the students, and checking everyone's work in the process. But only for the next couple of decades or so; after that, we'll be able to get the meat widgets completely out of education. College freshmen take note-- it's not too late to change your major to something other than education.

Where Qualls' confidence comes form is unsure, since a few paragraphs earlier, he said this:

One of the great engineering challenges now is reverse engineering the human brain. You get in and then you see just how complex the brain is. As engineers, when we look at the mechanics of it, we start to realize that there is no AI system that even comes close to the human brain and what it can do.

We’re looking at the human brain and asking why humans make the decisions they do to see if that can help us understand why AI makes a decision based on a probability matrix. And we’re still no closer.

I took my first computer programming course in 1978; our professor was exceedingly clear on one point-- computers are stupid. They are fast, and they are tireless, and if you tell them to do something stupid or wrong, they will do it swiftly and relentlessly, but they will not correct for your stupid mistake. They do not think; they only do what they're told, as long as you can translate what you want into a series of things they can do.

Much of what is pitched as AI is really the same old kind of stupid, but AI does not simply mean "anything done by a computer program." When a personalized learning advocate pitches an AI-driven program, they're just pitching a huge (or not so huge) library of exercises curated by a piece of software with a complex (or not so complex) set of rules for sequencing those exercises. There is nothing intelligent about it-- it is just as stupid as stupid can be but, but implemented by a stupid machine that is swift and relentless. But that software-driven machine is the opposite of intelligence. It is the bureaucratic clerk who insists that you can't have the material signed out because you left one line on the 188R-23/Q form unfilled.

There are huge issues in directing the education of a tiny human; that is why, historically, we have been careful about who gets to do it. And the issues are not just those of intelligence, but of morals and ethics as well.

We can see these issues being played out on other AI fronts. One of the huge hurdles of self-driven cars are moral questions-- sooner or later a self-driven car is going to have to decide who lives and who dies. And as an AP story noted just last week, self-driven car software also struggles with how to interact with meat-based biological intelligence units. The car software wants a set of rules to follow all the time, every time, but meat units have their own sets of exceptions and rules for special occasions etc etc etc. But to understand and measure and deal and employ all those "rules," one has to have actual intelligence, not simply a slavish, tireless devotion to whatever rules someone programmed into you. And that remains a huge challenge for Artificial So-called-intelligence. Here are two quotes from the AP story:

"There's an endless list of these cases where we as humans know the context, we know when to bend the rules and when to break the rules," says Raj Rajkumar, a computer engineering professor at Carnegie Mellon University who leads the school's autonomous car research.

"Driverless cars are very rule-based, and they don't understand social graces," says Missy Cummings, director of Duke University's Humans and Autonomy Lab.

In other words, computers are stupid.

It makes sense that Personalized Learning mavens would champion the Artificial Stupidity approach to education, because what they call education is really training, and training of the simplest kind, in which a complicated task is broken down into a series of simper tasks and then executed in order without any attention to what sort of whole they add up to. Software-directed education is simply that exact same principle applied to the "task" of teaching. And like the self-driven car fans who talk about how we need to change the roads and the markings and the other cars on the highways so that the self-driven car can work, software-driven education ends up being a "This will work well if you change the task to what we can do instead of what you want to do." You may think you can't build a house with this stapler-- but what if you built the house out of paper! Huh?! Don't tell me you're so stuck in a rut with the status quo that you can't see how awesome it would be!

So, they don't really understand learning. they don't really understand teaching, and they don't really understand what computers can and cannot do-- outside of that, AI-directed Personalized Learning Fans are totally on to something.

And still, nobody is answering the question-- what if the AI is wrong?

What if, as Qualls posits, an AI decides that this budding artist is really supposed to be a math whiz? What if the AI completely mistakes what this tiny human is interested in or motivated by? What if the AI doesn't understand enough about the tiny human's emotional state and psychological well-being to avoid assigning tasks that are damaging? What if the AI encounters a child who is a smarter and more divergent thinker than the meat widget who wrote the software in the first place? What id we decide that we want education to involve deeper understanding and more complicated tasks, but we're stuck with AI that is unable to assess or respond intelligently to any sort of written expression (because, despite corporate assurances to the contrary, the industry has not produced essay-assessment software that is worth a dime, because assessing writing is hard, and computers are stupid)?

And what if it turns out (and how else could it turn out) that the AI is unable to establish the kind of personal relationship with a student that is central to education, particularly the education of tiny humans?

And what, as is no doubt the case with my Top Stories on Facebook, the AI is also tasked with following someone else's agenda, like an advertiser's or even political leader's?

All around us there are examples, demonstrations from the internet to the interstate of how hugely AI is not up to the task. True-believing technocrats keep insisting that any day now we will have the software that can accomplish all these magical things, and yet here I sit, still rebooting some piece of equipment in my house on an almost-daily basis because my computer and my router and my isp and various other devices are all too stupid to talk to each other consistently. My students don't know programming or intricacies of certain software that they use, but they all know that Step #1 with a computer problem is to reboot your device because that is the one computer activity that they all practice on a very regular basis.

Maybe someday actual AI will be a Thing, and then we can have a whole other conversation about what the virtues of replacing meat-based biological intelligence with machine-based intelligence may or may not be. But we are almost there in the sense that the moon landings put us one step closer to visiting Alpha Centauri. In the meantime, beware of vendors bearing AI, because what they are selling is a stupid, swift, relentless worker who is really not up to the task.

ICYMI: Mother's Day Edition (5/14)

Time for another batch of reading. I know I sound like a broken record, but when you read something you like, share it, pass it along, help add to its reach. 

How Google Took Over the Classroom

The New York Times takes a close look at how Google took over the classroom-- and what price we all may be paying.

Don't Put Efficiency in School Ahead of Other Goals

Andy Smarick in US News once again applying some thought to consideration of reformy policy ideas.

Attrition in Denver Charter Schools

Jersey Jazzman comes through once again with the data, researched and laid out in clear form. This time it's the Denver charter schools, recently held up as an example of charter "success." Let's see what the secret of their success is, shall we?

The War on Education as Public Good

Wendy Lecker with another great set of insights on the assault on Public Education

We Are Teaching Kids How To Write All Wrong and No Mr Miyagis Rote Lesson Won't Help a Bit

A great response to that piece from the previous week that made all of us who teach writing snap our pencils in half.

Remembering Benjamin Barber

I have a Barber quote sticky-noted to my monitor. Jan Ressenger with a look at why he's important to remember.

Explaining the Persistence of Inadequacy

Jack Schneider and Ethan Hutt take a look at the history of achievement testing, and why we keep doing it even though it doesn't work particularly well.

Eleven Ways Chicago Is the Beating Heart of the Disastrous Charter School Agenda

A good look at how Chicago is, well, the beating heart of the disastrous charter school agenda

99% of Students Handcuffed in School by NYPD Were Black or Hispanic

The headline tells you the bulk of the story, but there are more details in the reporting.

Dear Bethune-Cookman 2017 Grads, Thank You For Telling Betsy Devos “Nah”

There were many responses to Betsy DeVos's ill-considered commencement gig, but this was by far my favorite.

Rich, Clueless Reformsters Whine About Bloggers

All right, not the actual title of Sarah Lahm's piece, but it captures the gist. This is a well-documented look at what sorts of folks are determined to help themselves to money and power in Minnesota, and the masks they wear to do it.

Relay Graduate School, Librarians, and the Effort To Make Our Public Schools "Future Ready"

From Seattle, another look at how charterizing from within can work.

What School Policy Do Conservatives Really Want 

Adam Laats runs the awesomely-named I Love You But You're Going To Hell, where he interprets conservatives for those who don't speak the language. But he's also a historian in his day job-- here he is at the History News Network considering if conservatives are really getting what they want under Trump.

Progressive: The Trouble with Ranking Schools

For a while now I've been a "Progressive Fellow in Education" (which is different from being, say, a charming fellow in the low brass section) and I write regularly for them as part of a group of twelve education writers. If you aren't reading the Fellows regularly, you should be.

Anyway, I'm going to try to entice you over there by offering the lead to my latest piece, because I think it's important that we all keep our heads on straight every time some new List of Schools comes out. So here we go--

Every time U.S. News and World Report issues its Best High School Rankings Index, I think of basketball. Here’s why. If you look at the CBS Sports list of top-ranking high school basketball teams in Pennsylvania, of the top twelve ranking programs only one is a public school. The rest include charter schools, Catholic schools, one private academy, and a Quaker boarding school.

I see two possible explanations for the lack of public schools: either those private schools know some important secrets about coaching basketball, or they benefit from being able to recruit and select the best players for their teams. I’m betting it’s the latter.

So when U.S. News announces that charters are marching up the rankings list, it’s pretty important to take a peek at just how those schools are assessed.

The selection method is a curious one, based on a series of hurdles. First, the school must show that it performed “better than expected” on the Big Standardized Test for its state (e.g. PARCC or SBA). “Better than expected” is based on a statistical model developed to look at genetic trends in cattle. I kid you not. It compares actual test results with an ideal alternative universe. If the real universe student does better than what the model predicts, the model assumes that’s because the teacher and school did something right.The technique has been criticized by statisticians and educators alike, but it remains the first hurdle that a U.S. News Super School must jump. (There is one loophole—all schools that score in the top 10 percent for their state automatically qualify, whether they beat expectations or not.)

You can read the rest of the article here...

(Not) A New Conversation

Phyllis Lockett took to Huffington Post last week to call for a New Conversation, which-- okay, can we stop calling for new conversations? Because they're hardly ever new and often they are barely conversations, and we have had many of these calls and maybe we should just finish one of our old conversations instead of dropping them to start new ones like an easily-distracted party guest.

Lockett is listed as a CEO without indicating "of what,"  a piece of fairly critical information in this context. Lockett used to be CEO of New Schools for Chicago, which used to be Renaissance, a private turnaround charter school investment launch group. As NSFC chief, Lockett was pretty vocal about the awfulness of failing public schools. After NSFC, Lockett has moved on to be CEO of LEAP Innovations. LEAP's mission is to "discover, pilot and scale personalized learning technologies and innovation practices in the classroom." They claim to be a "national hub" for an "ecosystem" of "education innovators, digital entrepreneurs, and thought leaders."

So given that, can we guess what Lockett's "new conversation" is going to look like?

She opens by noting that reform is kind of stale, what with the standards movement and charters being old, and so we need something fresh, because, I guess, we're not so much interested in effectiveness as we are in freshness?

What we really need is a new conversation that begins with what our children want and need and empowers them to pursue their interests. There’s a name for it—personalized learning–and it’s based on the common sense idea that our schools should meet every child where they are and help them get where they want to go.

So, another pitch for personalized learning. Who would have expected that, from a woman who currently earns her living promoting personalized learning. But I support public education and that's where I make my (considerably more modest) living. Maybe she 's just in the field because she really believes it, and she's not just pushing a product. Maybe her argument really is new and not just the same old PL boilerplate. Or maybe by reading her new boilerplate, we can get a sense of what the new sales pitch is going to be. Let's see. Let's move down through her pitch and see if it's made out of valid points.

First, she notes that no two children enter a classroom at the same point, and that teachers have to teach to the middle in their classroom. Half-true-- students do enter at different points, but teachers with a good handle on instructional design can still meet students where those students are.

Next, this:

The personalization of learning allows students to demonstrate competency as soon as they’re ready – and once they do so, let them go on to achieve higher.

Bzzzt. Wrong. The notion that education is simply demonstrating a series of competencies is fundamental to Personalized Learning (I will use capital to distinguish between personalized learning the education idea and Personalized Learning the product for sale), and it is one of PL's fundamental flaws. Demonstrating a series of competencies is not education-- it's training. And it's not even good training, because it breaks down tasks into simple bits and then assumes that a quick assessment task (which may or may not actually reflect the competence it claims to measure) means that competency is now mastered. I earned my "multiply by six" badge last year, so clearly I never need to do any more work on multiplying by six ever again.

Gone are the days when it was enough for students to download information from a textbook into their brains.

Well, those days have been mostly gone for decades, if I understand what she means by "downloading" from a textbook into a brain. Of, course, maybe she just means "reading," in which case, yeah, we still do that. We think there's some utility to it. And all of this begs the question of what, exactly, is different about asking students to download information from a computer screen.

There's a Montessori quote. PL folks like Montessori even though their entire philosophy is anti-Montessori. The quote Pickett uses here is the one about "follow the child, they will show you what they need to do..." but PL's philosophy is "use computer software to tell the child what to do next." It is not child-centered; it is software centered. Do you want to argue that the software is child centered? How can that be-- the software was written by humans, and those humans have never even met the children who are now subject to the software's plans and limitations. There can be no child-centered system that does not take the time to meet the child.

But Pickett will continue on this idea of "let the child lead" which is manifestly not what a PL program does. It lets the software lead.

Of course, students can’t do it alone. They need teachers and mentors to co-design their learning experience so that it covers a range of topics and subject matter. Done well, personalized learning empowers great teachers to make dynamic adjustments based on each student’s skills, curiosity, and goals.

Nope. If the classroom is truly teacher-directed and child-centered, then your PL software is really just a computer bank of resources, which is fine, but don't hand me a hammer and tell me you have now taken a bold new step in architectural design. Pickett is of course being generous here-- many PL advocates believe the teacher's role is basic monitoring, and not anything resembling teaching at all.

Pickett nods to Individualized Education Programs (IEPs) which are a great example of how we can provide everything from a personalized learning experience for students all the way to a series of go-through-motions paperwork for teachers and parents.

Pickett winds up with a one-two punch of "Hey, the world is changing and we must adapt and change, too" leading right into "Shiny pretty future but sometimes the education system doesn't like to buy my product try new things and I hope this will be different."

Bottom line: Pickett is not offering a conversation. There's no "Let's hear from teachers what they think would be a good idea to pursue or not." And there is nothing new. This is just plain old "We have a new product that we would like you to believe will help educate students, so would you give us some money for it, please."

This is what to watch for when a Personalized Learning advocate comes your way-- not a new conversation about education, but an old sales pitch.

NC: Millions More for Vouchers

Just found this in the budget. Looks like the plan is to dramatically increase vouchers for private school over the next decade. pic.twitter.com/mTFUITob0u

— Sen. Jeff Jackson (@JeffJacksonNC) May 11, 2017

Jeff Jackson is a Democratic senator in North Carolina whose fifteen minutes came in 2015 when he was the only legislator to show up for work on a snow day. 

What he "just found" was not really a secret. Back in February, reporters were noting that the GOP legislature was planning to triple voucher money (NC calls them "opportunity scholarships" as in "the opportunity for people to make a ton of money pretending to educate students") from $45 million to $145 million.

The proposed increase is just one more point of contention between the new Democratic governor and the GOP's straight-out-of-the-19th-century legislature. Debate has highlighted some of the standard pro-voucher arguments that we can all expect to be hearing.

Expect, for instance, to hear about the 2002 Supreme Court ruling on Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, the case that found that voucher money going to private religious schools could be okee-dokee. That's good news in North Carolina, where over 90% of voucher money goes to private religious schools.

Expect, also, to hear voucher fans find new and fun ways to wiggle around the accountability issue. North Carolina charters are completely unaccountable to anyone. You'll be glad to now their students do have to take standardized tests kind of like the ones that public school students take-- they just don't have to report the results publicly. Here's an explanation from UNC-Chapel Hill professor Eric Houck on the governor's claim that voucher schools have no accountability:

"Accountability is a big word," Houck said. "If the governor is talking about accountability in the way that the General Assembly has been talking about accountability since the 1980s, he's right. But there are other ways of defining accountability."

So, big words can mean many different things. Right.

While all of that may seem a little fuzzy, one thing is clear-- unless someone derails the GOP budget, voucher schools in North Carolina are about to enter a decades's long Christmas, with an ever-growing gift of taxpayer money coming their way. Public schools? As always, North Carolina's GOP remains committed to making public schools go away as anything but a holding pen for Those People's Children.

OK: "Let's Deport Students"

There's a lot to unpack in the news from Oklahoma's GOP legislators, but let's just skip straight to the most awful. From this special caucus of conservatives, looking for ways to close a budget hole:

The caucus said there are 82,000 non-English speaking students in the state.

“Identify them and then turn them over to ICE to see if they truly are citizens, and do we really have to educate non-citizens?” [Rep. Mike] Ritze asked.

The caucus thinks that could save $60 million.

 

OK: Have you ever noticed that our state looks like a clumsy hatchet?

What the hell? I mean, what the absolute you-have-got-to-be-freaking-kidding-me hell??!! Let's profile possible undocumented immigrants based strictly on what their primary language is??!!

The rest of their proposal only seems less stupid because the target-non-English-speakers sets the stupid bar so very high. But there's still a lot of stupid here.

The 22-member platform caucus has also decided they can save $328 million by eliminating "all non-essential, non-instructional employees in higher education." So... what? All administration? Can the janitors. Make the students cook and serve their own meals? What exactly do they think this third-of-a-billion dollar unnecessary payroll consists of?

They also want to cut the film tax credit, because encouraging the film industry to take its jobs and money elsewhere is smart financing.

Oh, and swag! No more slapping a government logo on pens to hand out to folks who could, you know, provide their own damn logo-less pens. $39 million savings right there.

The caucus asked the new station not to reveal every detail of their plan because they're still negotiating with legislative leadership. If legislative leadership has any molecule of sense at all, they are negotiating by saying things like "Wouldn't you guys like to go sit in the cornet with these little balls? See how shiny they are?"

If Oklahoma keeps their swag, I might suggest some new slogans like "Oklahoma-- striving to be as ignorant and hateful as North Carolina" or just "Oklahoma-- speak English or get the hell out."

SAT Test Preppery

You may recall that one of the awesome parts of David Coleman's shiny new SAT test was going to be how impervious it was to any kind of test prep. Coleman's singular vision (because in Coleman's world, he's the only one with a vision) was a new SAT that would fix inequality in America. Because being able to afford expensive test prep would no longer matter.

Flexibility in viewing tomorrow's self-owned widgets

Well, okay. Maybe it will matter a little.

After a few years of declaring that your Jedi test prep mind powers won't work on the SAT, the College Board (which is totally a for-profit business and not some sort of service-oriented board of college representatives) has announced that test prep from their business partners at Khan Academy totally works! Totally! As proven by their own in-house self-produced research.

Just a couple of thoughts.

1) In house self-produced research conducted by a business to show how well its product works is... dubious? How about some tobacco institute research showing that smoking is healthy. Also, why did the College Board only "study" the results of their own business partner without looking at any other test prep vendors.

2) Correlation and causation, for the love of God! College Board's research shows a correlation between high scores and using Khan. That's it. Was Khan just part of other strategies employed by the kinds of students who are so desperate to shine on the SAT that they do all the things, and are likely to score well anyway because they are smart, committed, and from the right background.

Here-- look at some of these charts of spurious correlations while I calm down. Meet you in the next paragraph.

Bob Schaeffer (Fairtest) in an email to Valerie Strauss at the Washington Post pretty well captures the dissonance of this moment in SAT history:

The College Board’s admission that SAT coaching can boost scores significantly once again demonstrates the hypocrisy of the testing industry. After six decades of aggressively claiming that SAT prep courses do not have a  major impact, the College Board has suddenly reversed its position. Of course, the program they now assert can make a big difference is the only one the College Board partners with. Not surprisingly, they did not study the offerings from any test-prep firm, many of which advertise even larger score gains.

But the College Board has apparently pushed back by reaching out to other media outlets. Today, Famous Pretend Smart Guy Thomas Friedman let fly an eruption of smartitude in the New York Times ostensibly about owning your own future, talking about how we must all be limber and adaptable and flexible in the future, because it's nobody's fault but ours if we're not ready for the future, which somehow led him to this non-sequitor:

Some are up for that: some not; and many want to but don't know how, which is why the College Board has reshaped the PSAT and SAT exams to encourage lifelong learning.

1) You might think that Friedman goobered up by adding "exam" when the T in SAT already means test, but as it turns out, as of 1997, SAT doesn't stand for anything. Make of that whatever you metaphorically wish.

2) How in the name of anything does the SAT encourage lifelong learning?

Here's how Coleman explained the officially sanctioned test preppery to Friedman:

Students who took advantage of their PSAT results to launch their own free personalized improvement practice through Khan Academy advanced dramatically: 20 hours of practice was associated with an average 115-point increase from the PSAT to the SAT-- double the average gain among students who did not... Our aim is to transform the SAT into an invitation for students to own their future."

The language suggests that Friedman concocted the whole piece just so he could plug Coleman's Cash Cow. Because you may own your own future, but the College Board would like you to pay them for a chunk of it. And "own your own future" sounds uncomfortably like the current rhetoric that says, "Your health care, education, safety, housing and general well being are your own problem, so don't come crying to anyone else when they take a bad turn."

Understand-- I am a huge fan of internet-enhanced intelligence. The moment a question pops into my brain, I have pulled up a search and tracked down the answer. But I cannot imagine that living my whole professional or personal life on a foundation of reactive intelligence, of "flexibility" that is really just a tech-enhanced response specific to whatever problem I have been posed-- that can't be good. Particularly when the problem is a standardized test with a shallow measure of isolated tasks. "Own your own future" makes a nice piece of PR fluffery, but it hardly seems like a real description of what the SAT can do. Particularly not if just twenty minutes with a canned prep program, a piece of software that literally teaches to the test, is the secret to doing well.