Google's AI Push For Schools

Google has scored another chance to get its products into schools in the form of a “sizable investment” in AI training. As Greg Troppo reports at The74, training will be offered through ISTE+ASCD (that’s the fused Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development and the International Society for Technology in Education).

The justification will seem familiar. Per Troppo:

“We have just heard so much feedback from teachers that are just saying, ‘We are not prepared,’” said Richard Culatta, ISTE+ASCD’s CEO. “‘We don’t have the training, we don’t have the background that we need for the realities of teaching in an AI world, both teaching in the classroom and also, secondarily, but equally as important, preparing students for the world that they’re going to be in.’”

Sigh. I do believe that teachers are feeling swamped by the ongoing wave of AI stuff, the students who are using it, and the folks (including all too often administrators) hollering that they have to get on this bandwagon Right Now. I do believe that teachers need plenty of training to help them cope with this toxic tide of anti-human plagiarism machines.

You know what would be lousy source for that training? The company that has bet the farm on being able to rope in a mountain of money to support that toxic tide. The company that has a vested interest in selling its product to every carbon-based life form on the planet. That company. Google.

Not that other education folks haven’t made similarly terrible deals (looking at you, American Federation of Teachers). But why keep falling for this same pitch?

Particularly from Google, a company that was just caught referring to its work in education as “a pipeline for future users.” Did we not already do this with the tobacco industry’s attempts to enlist customers while they were still young enough to be enticed by cartoons? “You get that loyalty early, and potentially for life,” said A) Google or B) RJ Reynolds. Is it bad for them? Who cares. Rake in those dollars!

This is Google, the folks who brought schools Chromebooks (described in education circles as “What if a laptop, only broken?”). We’ve have let advanced computer tech run loose in schools, a solution in search of a problem, like a puppy looking for a good place to pee.

When the tech has a purpose, it can be great. I spent much of my career on the front lines of using desktop publishing tools to create yearbooks, and it was absolutely awesome. It was also purposeful and useful and sold itself exactly because it had utility, helping us do a job better than we could without it.

But that was not all of ed tech. And the high tech revolution was a nightmare of moving fast and breaking things, bringing us to headlines like the recent Fortune piece by Sasha Rogelberg-- “The U.S. spent $30 billion to ditch textbooks for laptops and tablets: The result is the first generation less cognitively capable than their parents.“

Soooo many parents have handed their too-young children high tech tools, soothed at least in part by the fact that such tools were in their child’s classroom, and surely the school would only use these tools because they knew the tools were safe and effective. Meanwhile, schools had no damned idea.

So AI is a chance to turbocharge this whole ed tech mess by injecting fantasy, magic, and more desperate profiteering into the equation.

Do schools and teachers need someone to help them cope with these dangerous bots? Do they need to learn how to help students and families cope with a revolution whose outlines we can barely grasp and whose story is a jumbled mash of fantasy, magical thinking, and utter bullshit? Should they be getting those answers from a company whose primary concern is selling as much of the AI service to as many people as possible for as much as they can collect? Gee, that’s a stumper.

Meanwhile, we have the steady drumbeat of tech-fueled ecstasy and agony. Everyone should sign up for i-Ready! Oh, no-- turns out that i-Ready is terrible! The idea of putting students in front of a teaching machine is a century old, and yet has not produced a win for students yet-- just the occasional money for investors. And AI companies increasingly don’t even try to pretend that they are aimed at helping students learn.

So can organizations that claim to care about education please just take a breath and slow down before selling out. Maybe take a moment to think about how to best serve the interests of students and society before signing up for the latest barely-disguised sales pitch from an AI company whose biggest concern is not education, but how they’re going to make back some of the gazillion dollars they’ve poured into AI.