Making AI the Teacher

Leaving education to the dogs

Can AI replace teachers? Not a chance, but that doesn’t mean some self-styled educational genius won’t try it anyway.

I just started writing this, and Substack put up a prompt that said, “Help me write.” I’d like to be surprised that people writing need that kind of assistance. Still, after reading dozens of anonymous Unity blogs I know that many people haven’t got the time to bother with frivolities like organized expression of thought. Why do that when you can type in a few words and it’s done for you?

It makes me sad to see teachers using tools like this. It’s especially upsetting from those who’d portray themselves as leaders of educators. It shows a rudimentary lack of understanding about who we are or what our jobs entail. Most disturbingly, it shows remarkable ignorance of who our real enemies are.

Michael Mulgrew can declare me, or my friends, enemies of the union simply because we oppose him. Real enemies of the union don’t believe in union. They also believe that teachers should be at will employees who can be fired on arbitrary or capricious grounds—just as Mulgrew fires any UFT employee who dares question his Word.

As Unity plods on attacking those of us who seek to improve our union, they form committees and discuss things. Despite all those discussions, and despite our paying for their time as they conduct them, they show little understanding of what faces us.

To put it quite bluntly, AI is the holy grail of reformies.

When Bill Gates gets up and says let’s find the very best teachers (and by that he means the teachers whose students score highest on standardized tests), he wants to record their lessons and show them to hundreds, thousands, millions of students. To him, and other self-appointed education authorities whose only qualification is the size of their bank accounts, this represents the best of all possible worlds.

It was 16 years ago that Gates was entertaining that particular fantasy. That was right before he refocused and started hanging with Epstein. No doubt he still fancies himself a role model. That said, had AI been around during Gates’ self-appointed educational genius phase, he’d doubtless have been hyping non-human teachers rather than bothering with live individuals.

Now, of course, there is a whole new generation of reformies. Reformy in chief is Linda McMahon, Secretary of Education. McMahon is no stranger to pretending to be an expert. She’s gone into wrestling rings with professional athletes and pretended to fight them. But that’s not her most important qualification, Like Gates, she has tons of money and bought her new job fair and square. (And she put a halt to all that student loan forgiveness nonsense. If you aren’t born rich, and don’t marry into money, McMahon figures you deserve to be in debt forever.)

Despite McMahon’s stellar qualification, she pales in comparison to First Lady Melania Trump. Melania entered a press conference with a robot, and that robot can speak every language, work out pi to the nth digit, and recite the Encyclopedia Britannica verbatim.

There is no doubt in my mind that, given half a chance, the current occupant of the White House would fire every teacher in America and replace us all with robots. You might determine I don’t much care for Trump (and you’d be right). This notwithstanding, one of the very worst presidents in education was Barack Obama.

Obama’s education secretary, Arne Duncan, famously said that Hurricane Katrina was the best thing to happen to New Orleans education. Duncan, of course, was never a teacher himself. Nonetheless, he was a bold thinker. Who cares how many thousands died, or were made homeless? The important thing was that he managed to totally eliminate public education, thus creating profit for the parasitical individuals who started and ran charter schools.

Duncan was a Gates puppet, and if you don’t believe me, ask yourself this—have you ever seen Arne Duncan talk while Bill Gates was drinking a glass of water?

I taught kids from all over the world for decades. They’d tell me their stories, and many were incredible. Some were heartbreaking. I had a young woman crying in one of my classes. I brought her out in the hall and asked her what was wrong. She told me she was thinking of her brother who was murdered in El Salvador.

I consoled her as best I could. I’m sure it had no profound effect on such a horrible loss. Still, she knew some grownup American cared about her. Do you think Melania’s robot could’ve done that?

Me neither. I don’t think any kid would be consoled by the robot. In fact, I don’t even think the robot could run a class. It’s huge misconception that anyone who knows, say, math can get up and teach it to 34 teenagers. I remember, as chapter leader, going up to speak with a new math teacher who had a doctorate, knew everything, but could not maintain the attention of his class.

I spoke to him for a long time, but could not really make a dent. The man looked like he wanted nothing more than to drive a fork through his own beating heart. And he was gone, of his own volition, well before the semester concluded.

As for that monstrosity of a machine, I wouldn’t want it around my kid. Do you recall the robots losing it in Robocop? Of course, that’s not a concern for people who push this nonsense. What they’re worried about it enabling education on the cheap, while stuffing whatever public cash remains in their pockets. And they bolster such decisions by emphasizing test scores.

"Don't let anyone tell you that standardized tests are not accurate measures. The truth of the matter is they offer a remarkably precise method for gauging the size of the houses near the school where the test was administered." ~Alfie Kohn

I couldn’t agree more. For the record, I spent most of my career working in a school that had good test scores. Frankly, I can’t attribute it to our brilliance as teachers. I see it having more to do with the students who attended. However, I’m glad they saved our school from Bloomberg, a real enemy of education.

I don’t trust reformies. Gary Rubinstein, Peter Greene and Diane Ravitch have written extensively about how they manipulate test scores, omit records that will make them look bad, and pressure students who don’t achieve to just get the hell out. Whether it’s charters, vouchers, self-styled “experts,” or this new thing, AI, the design is the same—eliminate unionized teachers, crush unions, and make teaching the lowest paid gig work, the most tedious grunt work it can possibly be.

AI is a very real threat to us. I’m glad there are UFT and AFT committees looking at it, but they’re populated by the same folks who supported Obama even as he weaponized the Department of Education against us via the so-called Race to the Top. They went so far as to fire the entire staff of a Rhode Island High School for their test scores.

The fact that a high percentage of the students in this were English Language Learners was neither here nor there. So what if your kids don’t know English? If they don’t pass the test, they’re outta here. While the teachers were eventually hired back, there were all sorts of conditions attached.

Yes, sometimes kids fail tests. But sometimes the help kids need has little or nothing to do with their test scores. We, living breathing educators, are here to provide that help. Reformies? They just want to send the robots in and as far as they’re concerned, the kids can go to hell.

And here’s the secret—reformies don’t really even care, even about the test scores. They just want any excuse they can muster to get their paws on education tax dollars. If robots are paid nothing, whether or not they get the test scores up is neither here nor there.

We, real teachers, can do way better than that. And it’s on us to make sure our children have real teachers, even if we haven’t got the money Gates, Trump, Bloomberg, and Obama do. They and their ilk use that money to send their kids to private schools with low class sizes that enable the sort of attention all children need and deserve. This is particularly true of kids with low test scores that could easily reflect deeper issues.

If Michael Bloomberg’s kids had to attend public schools, you’d best believe class sizes would be universally small, and we wouldn’t even be discussing AI as a potential teacher.