AI Is Coming To Evaluate You

The unending tide of AI used for stupid things just keeps on coming, and as widely predicted, the major accomplices are managers and employers, sucked in with promises that AI will make their work faster and easier and less have-to-deal-with-humans-y. Take the ars technica piece “The résumé is dying, and AI is holding the smoking gun.” This strikes me as a parallel to teacher letters of recommendation, which are about fifteen minutes away from being wiped out by a mountain of near-identical and completely useless AI-extruded letters.

So it’s no surprise when Technological Horizons in Education Journal is happy to pass along a PR release from Edthena about a tech tool that will do some of your principal’s job for him.

Edthena, mind you, is a company straight from AI hell. They’ve been around peddling old tech types of teacher coaching (watch yourself on video!) They have all your favorite PD buzzwords-- High Impact Feedback!! Amplify Coaching Capacity!! Scale Effectively!! Some of their marketing language feels... careful. “Evidence from video feels objective” they say, without addressing whether or not it actually is.

And they’re an approved platform provider for edTPA.

So they are a perfect business for AI-ing teacher observations into a useless stupor.

Meet Observation Copilot! Your principal can feed it a half page of loose notes about what he saw in your classroom, and Observation Pilot will pad it with a bunch of professional and framework-aligned bullshit until you have pages of mind-numbing argle bargle in mere seconds. (No kidding-- the “demo” is below). The program will even generate suggestions for the teacher to implement, including all the approved soulless jargon, though unfortunately it does not appear that the program generates a suggestion to the principal that he either do his damned job or get the hell out of the profession.

And you know that this “tool” is only about five minutes away from the concept of letting a video-cam collect the “observation notes” and thereby reducing the human principal’s contribution to zero.

Sadly, there are actual testimonials here, like Brent Perdue, principal at Jefferson Elementary in Spokane, Washington. Brent says, “Observation Copilot has been a true game changer for me. It took that piece of the wordsmithing, of having the language flow, where I could really go down and just put in the facts of what I’m seeing.”

Or Juliana Addi, a school principal in Hoboken, who says, “Observation Copilot has changed my teacher feedback process. The writing that goes into it, it just expedites that pace - much quicker.” Because speed is the important thing.

I can’t begin to express the rage I would feel if a principal used this plagiarism machine to flood my evaluation with mounds of bullshit. I can only hope that the teachers who are subjected to this admin-o-bot respond by having ChatGPT write their response, or perhaps sitting in the post-observation conference and asking, “So what exactly did you mean when you write [insert quote here].” They should definitely do this while holding their copy so that the principal cannot see where the quote comes from in the fake evaluation.

This is of a piece with one through line of the LLM-in-education attack, which is the assertion that the business of turning a rough idea into a coherent sentence is an unimportant technicality that can easily be outsourced to a bot without any loss to whatever task is being completed, because human expression is no big deal. Just imagine.

Abraham Lincoln: “ChatGPT, just write me something about how this war is important to democracy and stuff.”

Ernest Hemmingway: “Give me something booklength about how the Great European War made a lot of people sad.”

Martin Luther King, Jr.: “As long as I’m sitting in this Birmingham jail, can ChatGPT just whip up some stuff about ignoring bad laws?”

Me, several years ago: “ChatGPT, please whip up something about love and getting married and stuff.”

Yeah, stringing together the actual words-- that scary “wordsmithing”-- isn’t all that important. Just have the bot do it.

AI most easily moves into places where the humanity has already been hollowed out. If you are a principal looking at this and thinking it seems like a super great idea, at a bare minimum, I hope you sit and have a hard think about your concept of your job. But maybe you should just think about alternate careers, because this kind of disregard for the human teachers who work for you is truly, deeply discouraging.

This is a terrible idea. Teachers need support from actual humans, not pages of jargonated filler from a bot that knows nothing about actual teaching. Teachers need to work in buildings where lines of communication are open, not ones where communication comes from a bot and not a human. Teachers need suggestions and ideas that come from a knowledgeable educator, not bot scrapings from the bottom of the internet bird cage. For a principal to use this kind of tool (because I’m sure there are more out there) is unethical and disrespectful.

This little toxic AI menace is current available free of charge, because of course it is. The charging money part comes later, after you’re so used to this crutch that you’d really hate to give it up. But with a dollar price of $0.00, using this tool will carry a higher cost than a school can afford to pay.