AI Is Not Going To Drive Trucks (Or Your Classroom)

From Jalopnik, we get this report from the world of self-driving trucks. Mark it the gazillionth cautionary tale for folks who believe that AI will be able to take over critical human functions any time soon.

The article takes a look at Starsky Robotics, a company that was in the business of producing unmanned semis for public highways. Now it's just in the business of shutting down. The co-founder, Stefan Seitz-Axmacher gave an interview to Automotive News that's behind a paywall but Jalponik shares some of the highlights.

Not as smart as it looks.

Starsky is closing up shop because they cant get backers, and they lost their backers because they insisted on putting an emphasis on safety rather than cool new features

But a problem emerged: that safety focus didn’t excite investors. Venture capitalists, Seltz-Axmacher said, had trouble grasping why the company expended massive resources preparing, validating and vetting his system, then preparing a backup system, before the initial unmanned test run. That work essentially didn’t matter when he went in search of more funding.

“There’s not a lot of Silicon Valley companies that have shipped safety-critical products,” he said. “They measured progress on interesting features.”

Seitz-Axmacher also notes that faith in self-driving vehicles is waning in the venture capitalist world, mostly because they've spent a lot of money and self-driven cars still aren't right around the corner, with a bundle of problems still unsolved. Seitz-Axmacher points at "edge cases," the rare-but-significant events that can happen. In driving, these events are rare but significant, like a deer or small child darting into the road. And "teaching" the AI about these events gets exponentially harder and more expensive as the events are rarer.

This is the flip side of our old issue, standardization. To make a measurement algorithm work, you have to set up a system that excludes all the edge events; one simple way to do that is multiple choice test questions. This is why AI still hasn't a hope in hell of actually assessing writing in any meaningful way-- because a written essay will often include edge elements. In fact, the better essays are better precisely because the writer has included an edge element, a piece of something that falls outside the boundaries of basic expectations.

Self-driving vehicles can't use a standardization solution, can't require all roads and drivers to follow the exact same set of rules, and so they have no choice but to find a way to "teach" the AI how to deal with the messy reality of human behavior on US streets. Well, they do have a choice-- they can just not do it, but that keeps ending up in the death of bystanders.

Seitz-Axmacher goes into detail in a blog post which, again, offers parallels to the world of education. For instance, his painful realization that investors like safety far less than they like cool features. The equivalent in education is the desire to promote cool features, features that will help your product stand out in a crowded marketplace, over whether or not the product actually works, and works all the time.

He gets into other problems with the "AV (autonomous vehicle) space," but I'm particularly struck by this:

The biggest, however, is that supervised machine learning doesn’t live up to the hype. It isn’t actual artificial intelligence akin to C-3PO, it’s a sophisticated pattern-matching tool.

AI isn't really AI. It's just pattern recognition algorithms, which, yes, is exactly the kind of fake AI that ed tech folks keep trying to sell to schools.

But wait-- didn't I read about Amazon having a whole fleet of driverless trucks doing their deliveries? Well, yes and no. Amazon is investing in self-driving vehicles, but its trucks are on the I-10; they are trained to handle one specific chunk of road. They have used the standardization route.

Seitz-Axmacher notes one other thing about his former industry-- it's loaded with bullshit to the point that people expect it. Okay, I'm paraphrasing a bit. But he sadly notes that presenting real, modest ac achievements in a sector filled with people trumpeting dramatic features, including plenty that they can't actually deliver, is hard. That tracks. If there's one thing that the ed tech industry does consistently, it's over-promise and under-deliver.

This kind of story is important to file away some place handy for one other reason-- because sooner or later somebody, maybe your brother-in-law or a thinky tank guy or a secretary of education, is going to say, "Gee, AI is revolutionizing all these other sectors, why not education?" The answer, in part, is that AI isn't doing nearly as much revolutionizing of anything as you keep hearing it is. Always--always--examine the claims. Real life is complex and messy and filled with "edge" events; it still takes a human to navigate.

Don't Ever Forget How Much Some Folks Hate Public Education

Interesting piece this week in the Washington Post, penned by Stuart Stevens, a GOP non-Trump fan consultant with a book coming out. The whole piece, about how the GOP has morphed into the kind of party ripe for something like this coronviracation we're now all sharing, is well worth reading, but here's just one quote:

The failures of the government’s response to the coronavirus crisis can be traced directly to some of the toxic fantasies now dear to the Republican Party. Here are a few: Government is bad. Establishment experts are overrated or just plain wrong. Science is suspect. And we can go it alone, the world be damned.

Those feelings find their way into a variety of issues, and public education is not immune.

I'm not talking about folks like the AEI-Fordham axis of disruptors. There are people in the reformster world who have (or at least show) respect for teachers, even recognize there is some value in the public education system.

But that's not everybody. I've been watching-- am, in fact, still watching-- a thread unfold on the twitter that is venomous pile-on that embraces all of the the fantasies listed above. Assertions in this thread include:

Public education should be abolished.
There's nothing special about being a teacher; anyone can do it.
Schools are oppressive prisons devoted to indoctrinating students into... well, something bad.
All of public education is a socialist plot. Or maybe a fascist one.
Parents own their children, not the government, and they will make all decisions themselves.

Plus the ever-popular idea that public education is a scam perpetrated by the teachers union to just grab all the taxpayer money while simultaneously providing jobs for evil incompetents (who will then do those jobs poorly).

You've seen the stuff before in comment sections, in certain Facebook groups, and twitter pile-ons, and maybe you've viewed it as just an education thing, but I invite you to look back at that quoted paragraph.

It is easy to mistake the anti-public-ed crowd for a bunch of reformsters, but that would be a mistake. Heck, back when Common Core was Public Enemy #1, it was also easy to mistake them for allies. But these are not folks who want to reform or disrupt; they would like to burn it all to the ground.And of all the folks who threaten public ed, they are ones who are perhaps most closely aligned with the current administration.

There may be a lot of feel good memes out there, posts from parents who are expressing newfound love of the schools and the teachers, and that is a great thing. But it's not the only thing going on right now. Pay attention. Be vigilant.

PA Scraps the Big Standardized Test

Word has been shooting out over social media for the last twenty minutes. The PSSA, the Keystone exam, and even the PASA are officially not happening this year.

“Our school communities are operating within unprecedented conditions,” said Secretary of Education Pedro A. Rivera. “Schools are making extraordinary efforts to remain connected to students and families, to provide food service and to put appropriate systems in place to continue student learning. Assessments should not be the focus of school leaders right now."

And just in case that isn't clear--

“To be clear, all assessments are cancelled for this year,” Rivera said.

They'll submit paperwork to the feds. They'll presumably have to figure out what to do about the missing data for school and teacher evaluation. They'll probably dither and kick the Keystones-as-a-graduation-requirement can further down the road.

But for the moment, Pennsylvania teachers have one less damn thing to worry about. And all the other states have one more source of pressure for doing the right thing and canning the useless, pointless tests this year.

Trust And Teaching

Among the may lessons we get to glean from the coronavirus semester is this one: trust matters.

Trust matters a lot. And it matters in little things as well as big things, because little things set the stage for big things. You can start out with silly stuff like "My inauguration crowd was the biggest ever," and folks can just wave it off as harmless, but at the other end of the road is a major event for which the public needs a dependable national-level source of information, and there is not one to be found.

Trumpism is a symptom of a larger disease, fed and watered by the internet (which is neutral on the subject of truth) and actively supported by the fringe media (which is actively opposed to it). Fox is only the most successful of the breed. There are plenty of others out there pushing conspiracy theories and fear-feeding bullshit (go see just how much is out there pushing the idea that the coronavirus is caused by 5G phone networking). Both sides do it, but the right does it more effectively (Fox News).

Trust is a quality that literally erodes-- the more of it that is worn away, the harder it is to build, and the faster even more is lost. In the absence of trust, fear grows. And fear makes people stupid. And people who don't know how to build or gauge trust become increasingly desperate for someone or something that will tell them what to think, what to feel, what to do.

That leads to the most classic of mistakes--mistaking confidence for competence.

This is a mistake that young humans are particularly prone to make (I once read a piece arguing convincingly that the key to being popular in high school is being confident).

So what is a classroom teacher to do?

First, earn the trust of your students. Create a trust-filled environment, and put the maintenance of that trust at the top of the list of your teaching values. That means being honest, including about your own biases and feelings. Conversations periodically erupt in the edusphere about whether or not a teacher can bring their agenda and biases and causes into the classroom; my answer is that you can, and maybe must, but you also must label them as such. In other words, "This is how I feel about that issue and why--" instead of  "I will now tell you the Truth, handed from God to me."

We see the idea of class as a safe space mentioned a lot; part of that is physical safety, but it's also a large part trust. Can the student trust you? Are you fair and consistent? Do you mean what you say and stand by your word? Do you honor and respect their needs, their words, their person?

All of this matters not just because it matters for your classroom to function. It's not just that students need a teacher they can trust. When you do all this, you are also modeling what a trustworthy person is like.

We have talked a lot about the need for civics education to understand how our society is supposed to work and for critical thinking skills so that they can sort the interwebz wheat from the on-line chaff. But let me suggest another way to frame this.

We need to teach them about how to tell if a person is trustworthy or not.

Because the answer should not be "if he seems real sure about what he's saying" or "if he says things that confirm what I already believe regardless of evidence or reasoning." It should be about performing the human equivalent of literary analysis, of seeing if the person's words and actions match each other as well as reality, as it is reliably described by trustworthy people. It should be about devining human motives and asking how those motives might effect their trustworthiness. It should be about consistency, both external and internal-- do they seem to behave in a way consistent with what they say they believe?

I taught a lot of this stuff for years without realizing it; it's part of the point of teaching literature, for me. If I were still in the classroom, I'd be working on a more deliberate unit. Here's hoping one of you gets in there and does the job for me.

Scrap The Big Standardized Test!

Education writers have been saying it for a week. I said it.

There are plenty of reasons to question the high stakes use of these tests in any year, but one thing is clear—this year, they will produce no useful data.

Peter DeWitt said it.

Given all of the stressors that students, teachers, staff and leaders are under right now, and given the fact that there is still so much we do not know about Covid-19, might education departments, like NY State's Education Department, take this one step further and cancel the assessments all together for just one year? Schools have enough to worry about, and high stakes testing should not be on their plate of concerns. 

Steven Singer said it.

This is at least a month of wasted schooling. If we got rid of all the pretests and administrator required teaching-to-the-test, we could clear up a good 9-weeks of extra class time.

Education leaders in states across the country are saying it. Here's Michigan state superintendent Michael Rice:

In many cases, children will have experienced trauma. In other cases, they will simply need to be reacclimated into their schools. In all cases, students will have missed instruction, and this lost instruction will render any conclusions about test results dubious, especially any comparisons across school years and in light of the pending public health concerns of parents, students, and staff. 

And here's Rick Hess, ordinarily a supporter of accountability systems, writing an open letter to Betsy DeVos:

It's time to scratch federally mandated state testing for 2020. All of it. All of the reading, math, and science testing mandated by the Every Student Succeeds Act. Scratch it. Period.

The data's value is usually that its broadly consistent and comparable. Well, the 2020 data won't be. No one should want states or districts plugging erratic, dubious data into accountability systems or public report cards. If that creates headaches for scorecards, accountability systems, or researchers, so be it.

Massachusetts folks have a petition. And, of course, some states have already grokked the writing on the wall and lowered the boom on the test.

This will make the worst applesauce

If, like me, you're not a fan of the Big Standardized Test, this year's can only be seen as gumming up the works even worse. But if you are a fan of data collection via testing, then you also have to hate the prospect of an entire year's worth of what is, at worst, bad data and is, at best, data that will require folks to compare apples to one big ugly watermelon. This data will not be usable to measure growth; it will not be comparable to any other year, and it will be impossible to suss out how the huge coronavirus variable factors into the results. This year's data would be literally meaningless.

Giving the test this year serves nobody's interest (beyond, of course, the test manufacturers who sell the damned things). It is a huge waste of time and money during a year in which both are being sucked away by a national health crisis.

I hear that some states are working on it, that some groups are back there trying to sell the idea. Jump on in and make the case. Send a note to your legislators, your department of education, anyone who could help.

Incidentally, this goes double for all those states that require their third graders to pass a standardized reading test in order to move to fourth grade. That test should also be scrapped, scratched, booted, abandoned and otherwise ejected from this year's game plan. That is way too much to load onto eight year olds.

There is too much hanging over the heads of students, teachers, and parents. This is one concern that can be easily set aside, and the folks in charge should do so ASAP.

On Line Class Discussions

Think of this as part of a series on ed tech tools that can actually be useful, now that some folks are being required to use them.

Some of my teacher friends are discovering the joys of on-line class discussions, and I myself was always a fan. The best ed tech doesn't supplant the classroom, but extends its reach, and the on line discussion format offers several appealing features.

Most importantly, it shifts the balance of power. Live class discussion favors the talkers; on-line discussion favors the writers. If you get a good system in place, you will see students who rarely say boo in class suddenly becoming powerhouses of discussion. There is also something about typing that prompts a level of honesty and openness that you don't always get in class. As roughly sixty gigazillion examples on the interwebz show us, people write things in front of everyone else that they would never say in front of everyone else. This force can be harnessed for good in your class.

As with all software, little things matter. I started on-line discussion groups with Moodle, which offers a threaded discussion feature (what many interwebz oldtimers will recognize from their favorite old bulletin board systems), and that worked great. When we were forced onto a different platform by the district's IT department, that platform offered discussion-- but in a clunky format that wanted to be Facebook and so copied Fbook's "we'll put responses to this post in any old order" feature, which was a discussion-killer. Google--well, Google brings the same deft touch that they brought to the massively failed Google Plus.

You also need to put some requirements in place. Absolutely no fake names-- everyone must post as themselves. And links to sources-- none of this "I read some article that said..."

One of the challenges was getting students to participate. I created a requirement (start at least one thread, post responses on at least two others), but it became an excellent example of how you can make people do something, but you can't make them do it well. Moodle had a genius feature that harnessed the power of judgy teenagers; I had the option of letting everyone give every post or response a score from 1 to 5. This instantly ended the practice of posting a quick "Yes" or "What she said." 

There are plenty of forum platforms out there, though you'll likely be restricted in the long term by what your IT people are willing to do. 

The on-line conversations can provide some useful springboards for in-class discussions, even essay assignments. And they can make rock stars out of your more introverted students. If you are being required to hold class "remotely" during this mess, on-line discussion is worth experimenting with, because it will still be useful when you're back in a classroom again. 

It's Okay. You Don't Have To Homeschool.

Like most teachers, I've had those student requests. End of the period, usually, they stop by the desk, usually looking downhearted. "Could I have the assignments for the next week or so," they ask. And then the cause. Death of a relative. Family emergency. A non-elective operation. A family tragedy. Some sort of unavoidable crisis that would take them away from school.

My answer was usually something along the lines of, "Just worry about taking care of yourself. We can sort out the work when you get back." On the occasions when the absence might cause extra falling-behind stress, I would offer some general direction ("We're going to be finishing the novel, wrapping up the rough draft, working in groups for the project"), but always with the same caveat-- take care of yourself first.

I've been thinking about that as school across the country shut down and social media fills up with all sorts of guides for home schooling or keeping your child organized. Color-coded hour-by-hour schedules. Guides to on-line resources and lessons. A dozen different tools to help have some semblance of school at home. And parents passing all of these back and forth, fretting about how to keep their child's education still happening. Quick! What's a Zoom and how do I get on it!!??

My actual first thought was--well, I don't remember ever seeing this level of freaking out over summer vacation. On the one hand, the concern is understandable; on the other hand, you would think some of these families had never been through summer vacation before.

But my second thought was this--

Just chill.

Stop.

Breathe.

This is a weird, scary, stressful time. If you want to create some structure and sense of forward movement by doing your version of ad hoc homeschooling, that's certainly okay. But if you'd rather not, that's okay, too.

Know that this is not like having a kid out sick, laid up at home on the sidelines while the big education train barrels on without her. The train has stopped. When it's time to get back on board, it will be more or less right where you left it.

In the meantime, depending on their age, sophistication, and personal situation, US students are living through the coronavirus scare, too. They may be sad about not getting to see their friends. They may be sick, know someone who's sick, be worried about getting sick. Their parents may be among the many who, despite DC's half-assed efforts, can't afford to take time off; they might even be among those who have lost a big chunk of income entirely. The students might be home alone, or shipped out to someplace-not-home while the parents are working. A big chunk of their day may be taken up with getting to food for breakfast and lunch.

It may be that some sort of regular daily "lesson," or school-like activity will be the thing to help them calm and center, and that's okay. But it may be that they've got too much going on to focus on or care about schooly stuff. This is, after all, one of the reasons we have actual schools as places where students can, if need be, leave behind that chaos of the world.

There are going to be some interesting side effects to this coronaviral Grand Pause, lots of chances to say, "So if we can suspend that rule for a pandemic, why are we bothering with it the rest of the time?" I think it also gives us a chance to question the all-American focus on frantic balls-to-the-wall forward motion, the notion that if we aren't Doing Something Right This Second, then we're screwing up and life is leaving us behind. Would it really hurt to pause and reflect a bit more often? Now we have a chance to try it out.

Yes, some schools are going to try to remotely educate their students. I hope they aren't going to try to hard, and I hope their students' families aren't going to feel too much pressure to keep up. I hope that parents spend some time with their children, that children slow down enough to do things they enjoy. I hope they read a book. I hope they grab onto the space and time and strength they need to deal with whatever they're feeling and wrestling with in the midst of all this.

And I hope that those of you who are parents can turn off the voice in your head that keeps telling you you'd better get that kid in front of some sort of educational something right away or something terrible will happen. If it's taking most of what you've got to help your kids keep it together, then know that you're doing the important stuff, and your big color-coded home curriculum design plan can just wait.