PA: Cyber School Court-Ordered Crowded Clown Car

Pennsylvania has been a big, fat profitable garden of cyber schools, taking an early lead over even California in letting virtual education take root. And there are so many aspects of cyber-schooling in Pennsylvania that we could discuss. As always, I'll preface this by saying that there are students fro whom cyber-schooling is a useful option. But the modern cyber charter industry is not aimed at them. It is aimed at money-- as much money as they could cram into a crowded clown car. When we talk about cybers in PA, there is so uch to discuss.

We could talk about how some are linked through not-entirely-admirable means to Pearson, the great money-grabbing educorporation.

We could talk about the astonishing amount of profit generated by cybers like K12, the school founded by an ex-Goldman Sachs exec. Or that chain's rather loose association with ethical behavior and telling the truth.

We could talk about how cyber charters have performance so lousy that even other supporters of the charter industry talk smack on them and call for them to be more heavily regulated. We could talk about how the widespread failure of cyber schools is obvious enough to make it into even mainstream media.

We could talk about massive cyber-school fraud, like the case of Nicholas Trombetta of Pennsylvania Cyber School, who was convicted of siphoning off $8 million of the tax dollars funneled to him from PA taxpayers.

And while we're talking about Trombetta, we could also talk about the fact that Pennsylvania laws are so lax that Trombetta was finally brought down by federal authorities. The Commonwealth of PA would have let him go on indefinitely. That's probably one reason why PA State Auditor General Eugene A. DePasquale has called Pennsylvania's charter laws the worst in the nation. And yet, our legislature has consistently tried to make life even easier for charters and cyber-charters.

We could talk about the huge amount of charter lobbying money being spent in Harrisburg.In fact, K12 and Connections have spent more money on Harrisburg than on any other state in the union. That might fit in with the same discussion involving PA being the most cyber-friendly state in the union.

We could even talk about the problems of cyber schools accounting (or not) for students and the rare but horrifying issues that emerge from that gap.

We could even get out into rural areas like mine where folks can tell you (not that you'll ever read much actual coverage of this) about how an insane but hugely profitable cyber-charter reimbursement formula is gutting public school budgets.If you imagine that cyber schools are a money-saver for taxpayers because, obviously, their costs are far less than bricks-and-mortar schools-- well, think again. Cybers are reimbursed at a hefty rate based on the price-per-pupil of any other school. Ka-ching.

And if you want to believe that Big Standardized Test results mean anything (in PA, instead of the PARCC and SBA, we have PSSA and Keystone exams), then we could talk about this chart:

That's right-- not a single Pennsylvania cyber charter has ever achieved a "passing" grade. Not one.

And yet, somehow, they persist. The newest version of the charter sort-of kinda reform bill lets cybers sail on unhampered by things like rules and oversight.

And now, courts have sided with one more cyber-operator who wants to join Pennsylvania's virtual clown car. Well, sort of one more school, which is kind of the point. Insight PA Cyber Charter School has been battling its way forward over the last four years. The state department of education and the charter review board have both determined that Insight would basically be a sock puppet for K12, and so they rejected the application. In the process, Insight accused the state of engaging in an "effective moratorium" since 2012, which I think they mean to suggest is a bad thing-- but we've got fourteen cyber charter schools operating in the state, and they all stink. So a moratorium seems like a pretty mild response when the most appropriate response is to shut them all down.

Insight/K12 are proposing the oldest trick in the charter book. Insight will be non-profit, but it will buy its supplies, services, etc, from the very for-profit K12. It will, in effect, serve as a K12 money funnel.

The state's allegation was that, among other things, the relationship between Insight and K12 (which took in almost $1 billion-with-a-B dollars in 2014) would be so close that taxpayer dollars would be buying supplies and services from only K12, whether there were better, more competitive bids out there or not. Insight's counter-argument was that the state department of ed had been mean when they rejected previous application.

But when you're collecting a billion-with-a-b dollars a year, you can afford to keep throwing things against the wall until something sticks. What stuck was a lawsuit, and the wall was the Commonwealth Court, which decided "There is no evidence in the record of this case that Insight’s board lacks independence from K12."

The case could be bumped up to the state supreme court, where some sort of rational decision might be made. Because there's no evidence that Insight's plan would be a terrible idea except for K12's entire shabby history and the well-documented failure of their business.  Or-- and here's a crazy thought-- state legislators could start listening to something other than the sound of corporate money raining on the capital, and do the right thing, which is, at a minimum, slapping a strong leash on the education-flavored scam that is the cyber school industry.

So Now Failure Is Okay, Apparently

"Fail better," says Michael Q. McShane (Show-Me Institute, AEI) in a piece at US News, arguing to reformsters for the virtue of admitting failure and building upon it. Part of his point is vaid, part is hugely self-serving and part of it is just plain annoying.

Policy ideas like charter schools, teacher evaluation and high standards first exist in the abstract. When they are actually implemented, they look quite different from state to state or district to district. What one state calls "charter schooling" might look different from charter schooling in another state. So if charter schools struggle in one state, it isn't necessarily an indictment on the idea as a whole. It might just be that the particular manifestation didn't match the context of the specific environment where it was tried. In an ideal world, we'd learn from that, and do better.

In other words,even when a policy has been tested and it has failed, that doesn't mean it's not a great policy that we should keep trying in new and different markets. This is just a variation of that golden oldie that folks used to defend Common Core-- "The policy is brilliant; you're just implementing it wrong." The policy may look like an utter failure, even after over a decade of reforminess, but honest-- any day now it's finally going to work the way we imagined it would.

This is part of a valid idea. But his list of possible causes for failure is missing one critical possibility-- your policy idea is a bad policy idea, and that sad pig won't fly no matter what shade of lipstick you try smearing on it.

He does offer a good description of the process often involved with reformy policy failures:

When a new study comes out that says a policy has "failed," we man the ramparts. Opponents (who were against the policy before any data were available) come out and tut-tut at advocates, telling them to "follow the data" or not to "cling to ideology." Advocates circle the wagons. They spin the findings or pettifog the implications. They counter with personal stories or impugn the motives of critics. Rinse and repeat.

I sense that McShane is leaning toward the use of data to really determine whether a policy is a failure or not, but that's a self-defeating inclination because so many education policies are tangled up in the question of what data we'll use, how we'll collect it, what it actually shows, and whether or not the entire data set that we're dependent on is a heaping pile of junk (spoiler alert: in the education world, mostly we're looking at the heaping pile).

But the rightest thing McShane says is in the final paragraph:

Anyone who has spent more than a day in front a classroom knows that failure is an essential part of learning.

Yes-- that's absolutely true. Failure is a necessary part of exploration and exploration is a necessary part of education. One can't help but wonder, however, if learning offers a legitimate parallel with concocting, pushing and implementing policy.

But I don't want to pick at that-- it's absolutely correct and I'm only tempted to nitpick because of my huge irritation over McShane's reformy central point.

Failure is super-okay! It's how we get better! It's a necessary part of the process!

Which is all great-- but where the heck has tis attitude been for the last twenty years.

Reformers have stapled "failed" onto "public schools" relentlessly, occasionally swapping it with "failing" for variety's sake. Public schools are "failure factories." The public school system is a "dead end," a "failed model." Students are 'trapped" in these "failing" schools, and must be liberated ASAP, because the "failure" constitutes a state of emergency that must be rectified immediately because the Fail is just So Very Bad! Nothing to learn from-- just run away from the Fail.

Now, all of sudden, failure is cool? Failure is okay? Failure is to be not only tolerated, but embraced?

McShane and Jay Greene are going to have a whole conference, a day-long celebration of the fail,
which somehow still works on the premise that public schools are to be avoided and replaced, not embraced.

Once upon a time, reformers wanted to blow up the status quo, but now that they are the status quo, somehow it has to be massaged, embraced, studied, tweaked, and lovingly nursed to hoped-for health. I am ceaselessly amazed at how one of the defining characteristics of the education reform movement is a steady and repeated redefining of term, repeated changing of objectives, constant moving of the goal posts. It is useful only in that, as everything else changes, we can see more clearly what the true values and goals of some within the movement are.

But that's a discussion for another day. Right now I'm trying to wrap my head around the news that failure is now awesome. I will wait with bated breath for that new fail love to be extended to public schools.

The Geography of Reform

It's an oft-repeated reformster refrain.

Students trapped by zip code in failed schools. Paul Ryan offering a lifeline for trapped students.  And here's Betsy DeVos at a recent speech, explaining some of the fundamental flaws of our terrible awful no good very bad public education system:

The system assigns your child to a school based solely upon the street on which you live.

We get these repeated versions of the same question-- why can't students leave their zip code to attend a quality school?

I believe that's the wrong question. Here's the one we should be asking--

Why can't every single student attend a great school without leaving their own community?

Really. Why should a student have to leave her friends, neighbors, the familiar sights and sounds of her neighborhood? Why should she have to travel far from home to get a good education? Why shouldn't every community get the chance to create and support a great school that reflects the community and serves every child in it?

That's the promise of public education-- that every community will get to create its own school to serve all of its students, even as it strengthens the ties that bind that community together.

But why not give non-wealthy students the choice that wealthier families get? Sure-- but when those families get to choose, what do they choose? They choose to attend a good school in their own community. So I agree-- let's give that choice to everyone.

I know the counterarguments. My ideas is great, but we already know that many communities are not living up to that promise. Reformsters used to say, "Children can't wait for us to fix those schools." They stopped saying that so much about the same time they started saying that charters should have three or five or ten years to get their acts together. They stopped saying it about the time they started arguing that regardless of education quality, choice is its own excuse for being. Choice for choice's sake is good enough. Except that people don't choose choice; they choose a good school in their own community.

And we're past the point of arguing that a charter school Somewhere Else knows a secret about education that couldn't possibly be implemented in the community's own public school. There is no secret sauce-- just lots of money, plenty of resources, and a carefully selective student body.

Which brings us back to another flaw of choice. Nobody in the choice camp ever says, "Let's rescue ALL of the students who are trapped in that failing zip code." No, we're just going to liberate some trapped students, leaving the rest still trapped there while we let the failing school keep failing, or even failing harder as resources are stripped from it.

And while not all reformsters are guilty, we have to acknowledge the ugliest idea behind the geography of reform-- some reformsters believe that some communities deserve their crappy schools, and that while there may be a few worthwhile strivers worth liberating that zip code, by getting them the hell out of there, we certainly don't want our tax dollars going to improve the community for Those (brown, black, and/or poor) People.

None of this really answers my question-- why can't every child attend a good school in her own community? Too expensive? Too hard? Nobody actually knows how to do it? Some communities don't deserve it? We don't want to? Those all seem like lousy, particularly for a nation that put a man on the moon and an army in Afghanistan.

Why can't every child have a good school in her own community?

Why can't every child have a good school in her own community?

I'll keep asking till I hear a good answer.

Petrilli Pokes Personalized Processing

Mike Petrilli, head honcho of the ever-reformy Thomas B. Fordham Institute, has taken a look at the future of Personalized Learning, and he has some concerns. He's read the PR, and he knows about the appeal of super-flexible differentiation, the varied student-customized pathways to excellence. However:

Hooray for all that. But after seeing a version of personalized learning in action recently, I’m worried that it may be reinforcing some of the worst aspects of standards-based, data-driven instruction. Namely: It might be encouraging a reductionist type of education that breaks learning into little bits and scraps and bytes of disparate skills, disconnected from an inspiring, coherent whole.

What he's noting here is the ways in which Personalized Learning has become the cojoined twin of Competency Based Education. Saying that PL/CBE "might be" encouraging reductionist, list-based, disjointed education is like saying that Betsy DeVos "might be" leaning toward school choice as a policy approach to education.

We have had versions of this conversation before. Back in the day when folks bothered to talk about Common Core, defenders frequently countered the real-life problems of CCSS with explanations of how it was "supposed" to be. Even people who wrote it would argue that people were misusing their beautiful creation and that's not how it was supposed to look at all. It wasn't supposed to be top-down or prescriptive or rigid or a straightjacket on both curriculum and instruction. And yet, in the real world, it was absolutely all those things.

Over the past years, I have had multiple conversations with CBE fans who direct me to things like the CBE work in Chugach, Alaska, as a sign that CBE doesn't have to be an Outcome-Based Education retread with lists to check off and "outcomes" reduced to simple, easily measured mini-tasks. Yet, that is exactly what's being sold-- often with the additional phrase "in any environment" because part of the pitch is that competencies can be acquired at any time, which means they competencies will be taught and assessed by computer software, which means that the competencies must be assessed with an instrument that computer software can do, which means no writing and no critical thinking. This fits nicely with choice on steroids, the a la carte choice system where students just select particular competencies from an online supermarket.

Likewise, Personalized Learning is sold as just an extension of the IEPs that students with special needs already get. Just super-differentiation, which doesn't sound scary at all, and yet it always turns into a discussion of how AI software will chart an individualized path for each student.

Folks all the way up to our Secretary of Education see the CBE/PL system as tied to technology. iNACOL sees both as a wide-open market opportunity for techsters. Petrilli already knows this.

Picture an elementary school. Yes, there’s a long list of skills that kids need to master and for which an individualized approach would work fine: decoding; spelling; writing letters and numbers; counting to one hundred; keyboarding; and so forth. Measuring children’s progress in learning these skills is the sort of thing that assessments like iReady’s can readily do, and then point teachers and parents toward learning modules that will help them take the next step.

And he's aware of the limits:


Yet there’s so much else that we also want young children to experience and that’s hard—maybe impossible—to break down into little bits.

 Well, yes-- it is impossible. But that is exactly what the very marketplace that the Fordham has championed  for years is pushing toward. But he is either ignoring or in denial about the implications of what he has been pushing. Here he is imagining how a standards-based classroom should work:

Teachers would stop projecting the day’s standards-to-be-tackled on the board; they would stop asking students to determine whether they have mastered a particular standard, and how to know when they’ve mastered it—practices I saw at the school I visited. They would stop planning lessons by “back-mapping” from the standards. They would simply adopt a great curriculum that is aligned to the standards, then forget about the standards and teach the curriculum instead.

But that's not what happened. And Petrilli chooses to address the elephant in the classroom, which is test-centered accountability, a feature of reform that has absolutely guaranteed that schools would teach to the standards-based-ish tests. This oversight matters. Here's Petrilli on what he think has gone wrong:

That’s hard to do, though, in a personalized classroom, if the model is premised on the idea that we can break knowledge and skills into discreet standards and progressions, and if teacher-led discussions are discouraged. Perhaps that works for math. But for English? History? Science? Art and music? Character, values, and self-control?

No, no,no, no and no. And as for character traits, I refer Petrilli to the death of OBE, which was in no small part to strong reactions against the proposal that government would train students to be the Right Sort of People. 

But the problematic premises of PL/CBE are not just that we can break complex knowledge and skills into tiny pieces, but that we can use computer software to measure those pieces, and that we must measure those people, and that the ongoing measure of those pieces should drive the system, determining what module a student should work on next. PL/CBE takes the worst feature of reform so far-- test-centered accountability-- and drives it even deeper into the bones of the system. It takes the already-failing Big Standardized Test system we've been using to measure everything from student achievement to teacher effectiveness even as it has narrowed and gutted the education system-- it gets rid of that once-a-year travesty and replaces it with standardized testing, all day, every day.

Petrilli worries that the ideas will be taken to a bad extreme. The solution is the same one as ever-- take the reins out of the hands of corporations, investors, and all the other amateurs who have gathered to make a buck. Consider-- just consider-- involving trained professional educators in some of these decisions.

Petrilli visited a PL school and was not encouraged by what he saw. Little teaching, standards obsession, and "everything looked like distilled and fragmented test prep." Well, yes. That was not an aberration or mistake. It was not a bug-- it was a feature. Every piece of PL/CBE is aimed toward that product, and he can't be surprised or shocked, because he helped make that, and some of us, for years, have been telling him and others like him that this is what they are building.

Rutgers Prof Beats NJ Charter Attack

I'm happy to provide a good news follow up to an old story.

Two years ago, Rutgers University professor Julia Sass Rubin found herself under attack by the New Jersey Charter School Association. She had published research that contradicted the rosy charter picture in NJ, showing that, much to nobody's surprise, that charters enroll fewer very poor students, fewer non-English speaking students, and fewer students with special needs. So the NJCSA decided to play hardball. They filed an ethics complaint against Sass Rubin. As I wrote back at the time:

Yes, confronted by clear scientific data that conflicted with their position, the New Jersey Charter Schools Association did the only thing that reasonable, ethical, intelligent human beings can do in that situation-- they went after the bearer of bad tidings with a switchblade and brass knuckles. Not since Tonya Harding tried to have Nancy Kerrigan kneecapped have we seen such a reasoned and rational approach to conflicting views.

The NJCSA attacked Rubin by accusing her of correctly identifying herself as a Rutger professor, even when participating as a member of Save Our Schools New Jersey. Again, from my opriginal blog about the charges:
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The complaint seriously seeks the remedy of having Rubin stop identifying herself as a Rutgers professor when she says these things that make the NJ Charter operators look like lying liars who lie. From philly.com coverage:

"The paper's conclusion and recommendations are identical to - and clearly intended to provide the appearance of legitimate academic support for - the lobbying positions that Dr. Rubin and SOSNJ have zealously promoted for years," the Charter Schools Association wrote in its complaint.

So, as a citizen, she's not allowed to believe what she believes as an academic? When her research as an academic leads her to certain conclusions, she must never talk about them outside of school? Or when she's speaking as a citizen, she is not allowed to note that she has professional training and skills that qualify her to make certain conclusions?

I can understand their confusion to a point. It is, of course, standard operating procedure in the reformster world to NOT identify who you actually work for, get money from, or otherwise are affiliated with. It's SOP to put out a slick "report" without actually explaining why anyone should believe you know what you're talking about, but Rubin and Weber go ahead and list their actual credentials. Apparently NJCSA's argument is that it's unethical to let people know why your work is credible.
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The charter association went so far as to hire Michael Turner to handle the PR-- Turner is an expert in smear tactics to help his clients. The goal throughout was simple-- to make Rubin and her colleague Mark Weber (Jersey Jazzman) shut up and stop using facts and research to undercut charter marketing. As I noted back then, the research is basically just crunching numbers, so NJCSA could have attacked the data or the methodology or even the conclusions, but instead they attacked the researcher. It's almost as if they knew they didn't have a leg to stand on when it came to the facts.

But news came yesterday that this assault on Rubin has come to naught. The State Ethics Commission bounced the complaint back to Rutgers, and Rutgers has found "no evidence to support allegations against Julia Sass Rubin."

Well, hooray for that. Nobody should have to work with allegations hanging over their heads that are boundless and intended to shut the person up. Disagree with someone? Then dispute what they've said, and don't go trying to ruin their career or just make their professional life miserable. I hope the NJCSA wasted all sorts of money of this attempt at bullying.

So this time, the good guys win and the charter forces will have to find some other way to obscure the facts.

The Takeover Lie

One of the techniques in the reformster arsenal has been the school takeover, in which some august body declares a public school a failure, and that school is marked for Takeover. That failure can be certified by specious Big Standardized Test results (yay, PARCC and SBA) or by the more cynical method of refusing to fuly fund a district and then certifying them, as financially distressed. This particular "solution" was built into Race To The Trough Top and RTTT Lite (more waivers, less paperwork), but it has been embraced in a variety of forms, such as the Achievement School District of Tennessee and other attempts to create via bureaucracy what had previously been accomplished by natural disaster (aka Hurricane Katrina).

You can see it happening yet again in Gary, Indiana, where the schools have been taken over by the state. That state takeover, which strips the elected school board of power and replaces them with a state-appointed manager, was enacted a month ago and explained to the public more fully just a week ago. Gary was a two-fer, a district slammed for both low test scores and for failing to get enough money to keep itself solvent. Within roughly five minutes, a charter company was putting in its bid to run the formerly-public school system.

The proposed management group is the Phalen Leadership Academies, a group with strong ties to Indianapolis's big charter boosters with giant apsirations loaded into its name-- the Mind Trust. The group was founded by a former Indianapolis mayor and his head of charter schoolery, and it has done a fine job of finding ways to funnel public tax dollars into private pockets. So there are plenty of specific and historical reasons to oppose Phalen's glomming up one more set of de-public schools.

But the whole takeover process is itself a scam of tremendous proportions, a house of cards resting on a foundation of falsehoods.

Remember, the basic idea here is, "You public school people couldn't make this school work, so we're going to bring in someone who can." Let's consider that premise for a moment.

What's your secret?

The takeover premise requires someone who knows the secret of making a school "work." Someone who knows more about how to educate children than the trained professionals who previously ran the school. Let's mull on that for a second-- if this person (or person's company) knows the secret of Making Schools Work, what exactly have they been doing? Why have we not already hear about them? Why are they not already rich from running seminars and presenting training and having entire states adopt their special techniques for success? Why aren't principals and teachers falling all over themselves to bring these people in to run professional development so that we can all be awesomely successful? Why haven't we all heard and read about their great success?

Have they had these Secrets for Success all along, but they've been sitting on them, saying, "Well, we're not sharing this with anybody unless they pay us a bunch of money." And if so, are those the kind of people we want running schools?

Or could it be that these takeover artists don't know a damn thing more about educating students and running a school than the rest of us?

What's the cost?

In addition to pulling off the trick of deploying super-secret education techniques unknown to anyone who actually works in public education, takeover artists must also pull off some financial magic.

The takeover artists must run the school with the same money as the "failed" managers-- and they must somehow squeeze that piggy bank so that there is money left over to pay the takeover company.

In other words, they must keep doing what the school was always doing for the same amount of money, and have more money left at the end. Which means, of course, that they can only pull this off if they don't keep doing what the school was always doing. That means cutting programs or closing facilities or paying bottom dollar for personnel (and therefor having their pick of hiring from among all the people who couldn't get real jobs).

The fantasy is that schools-- even, somehow, schools that are in  financial distress-- are loaded with such waste that a savvy business person can find efficiencies and eliminate waste., which is sort of true if one believes that paying teachers or offering certain programs are wasteful. Or, of course, one might believe that certain students, by virtue of their special needs, cost too much money to keep a trim budget, and so those students must be pushed elsewhere.

The central lie

The heart of the takeover idea is that there are people out there who know special secrets-- how to educate students, how to run schools, how to do it all for less money--  that somehow nobody in public education knows. But we've had these companies in business for years now, and there's no reason to believe that the heart of the takeover idea is anything but a profitable falsehood.

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.