AI Tutoring is the Logical Extension of High-Stakes Testing

Clips from an excellent op-ed in the NYTimes by the President of Bank Street College in New York.  After you read it, follow this link, and get onboard:

Last year, I visited a seventh-grade math classroom in a public school in the Bronx. Twenty students sat bent over laptops, working with an A.I. tutor on story problems about converting fractions to decimals. A teacher moved around the room, checking a dashboard that tracked how many tries each student needed to reach the right answer.

On the surface, the classroom was working. Students were engaged, and most of them, eventually, were getting to the right answers.

When I looked closely, though, many of the students were lost. They didn’t understand fractions conceptually. Each time one of them made a mistake, the A.I. tutor backed up and suggested another step, but it never identified the underlying gap in understanding. The teacher could not see it either. Her dashboard showed which students were stuck, but not why.

The core intellectual work of teaching is noticing why a child’s understanding breaks down and then knowing what to do. It might mean pausing the class for a mini-lesson or pulling out fraction tiles for one student who needs to visualize the math. In the class I visited, that work had been handed to a tool that could do neither. No one was arguing about strategy or turning to the kid across the table to ask, “Wait, how did you get that?” Each child sat alone. Silent, in front of a screen, clicking away.  

. . .For a generation, American schools have been shaped by standardized tests that measure a narrow band of skills. Because the tests carry high stakes, teachers teach to them. The curriculum narrows. Time for projects, argument and problem-solving shrinks. The A.I. tutor drilling concepts a seventh grader doesn’t understand is not an aberration of that system. It is its logical extension. 

. . . .Parents and educators across the country are organizing. In New York City, they have demanded a moratorium on A.I. in schools. Nationally, a coalition of more than 250 child development experts and advocacy organizations is calling for a five-year pause on generative A.I. in K-12 classrooms. They are right to be alarmed. . . .