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Literacy crisis, ChatGPT have educators looking like Wile E. Coyote after running off the cliff [1]

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Date: 2023-05-10

Wile E. Coyote, the immortal foe of the Looney Tunes Road Runner, seen here in a Governor Ron Desantis Halloween costume.

In yesterday’s diary we were discussing Nobel prize-winning theoretical physicist Richard Feynman — people of a particular age might remember him best from his investigation into the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster when he debunked NASA by dunking an o-ring in ice water.

In his commencement address to Caltech in 1974, Feynman explained his concept of “Cargo Cult Science” and bemoaned the lack of scientific integrity in so-called “scientific” studies. He specifically called out crime stats and reading comprehension as examples:

“Yet these things are said to be scientific. We study them. And I think ordinary people with commonsense ideas are intimidated by this pseudoscience. … “So we really ought to look into theories that don’t work, and science that isn’t science.”

It’s interesting that reading comprehension was on his mind nearly five decades ago, because it appears little has changed — although further down we’ll see there’s been a new wrinkle he (probably) couldn’t anticipate.

Here’s Motherly with a recent report:

Amid a widespread literacy crisis in the U.S., schools are still debating on the best way to teach children how to read. Per the National Assessment for Educational Progress (NAEP), there has been a significant decline in reading skills during the last three years due to the pandemic—only about 10-30% of all students in public schools can read at grade level proficiently. That’s a literacy crisis.

Almost every type of junk science Feynman warned us about in his 1974 address can be seen when President Ronald Reagan (the warm-up act for Donald Trump) immediately went to work constructing a facsimile of public schools made from bamboo.

Of course, I’m referring to “A Nation at Risk,” as explained here by NPR:

Very few government reports have had the staying power of "A Nation At Risk," which appeared 35 years ago this month and stoked widespread concerns about the quality of American schools. "The educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a nation and as a people," the authors thundered in one of its best-known passages. When it appeared in April 1983, the report received widespread coverage on radio and TV. President Reagan joined the co-authors in a series of public hearings around the country. The report's narrative of failing schools — students being out-competed internationally and declining educational standards — persists, and has become an entrenched part of the debate over education in the U.S.

You remember those goofy toys where you would “just add water and watch it grow?” The more one examines this country’s current problems, the more one can trace those problems back and muse, “Just add Reagan and watch it suck itself into a black hole.”

Writer Bettina L. Love in EducationWeek wrote a fascinating piece on The Lies America Tells Itself About Black Education to fill in some blanks:

Forty years ago, starting in April 1983, this country manufactured an education crisis that effectively put targets on the backs of its children, especially Black children. ... The report kindled education reform as we know it. However, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, tests that are the most widely respected yardstick of student achievement nationally, reported that from the 1970s to the early 1980s, the performance of elementary and secondary pupils increased moderately on some examinations while dropping slightly on others. The report intentionally omitted such positive educational data, but why? When Reagan took office in 1981, some of his education goals were to cut federal spending on education, abolish the Department of Education, put prayer in schools, and allow school vouchers so that public dollars could be spent at private schools. Reagan and the right wing needed a report to show the American people that public education was failing in order to advance their educational goals and military spending. For instance, Reagan had an interest in showing that the United States was falling way behind the Soviet Union so that more resources would be made available to win the Cold War. With that in mind, the administration was happy to see cherry-picked data that villainized America’s public schools. According to education historian Diane Ravitch, Reagan wanted the report to “make American public schools look as bad as possible.”

And if there’s any doubt what this is all about, one need only read what The Heritage Foundation put out upon it’s release, as she notes:

“The most damaging blows to science and mathematics education have come from Washington. For the past 20 years, federal mandates have favored ‘disadvantaged’ pupils at the expense of those who have the highest potential to contribute positively to society. ... By catering to the demands of special-interest groups—racial minorities, the handicapped, women, and non-English speaking students—America’s public schools have successfully competed for government funds, but have done so at the expense of education as a whole.” Heritage Today said out loud what “A Nation at Risk” could only imply.

In the decades since “A Nation at Risk,” the occupation of teacher of course became a hot, highly-sought dream job for many. After the strain and difficulties of Zoom teaching through a global pandemic, and with passionate parents at school board meetings, deeply involved with their….

Wait, what? Sorry, I got that ass-backwards. WNEW 5 in Michigan explains some reasons for what has been an increasing teacher shortage:

The pandemic is just one tipping point for the national and local shortage of teachers as it has been a trend for close to a decade. “2013 and 2014 is when Michigan was seeing a huge decline,” said Tiffany Pruitt, executive director of human resources in labor relations for Saginaw Public Schools. The reasons why the shortage is happening vary for both Rodriguez, who has been teaching for seven years, and Bright, who has been an educator for nine years. For Rodriguez, lack of support is one reason so many teachers are leaving the profession or deciding against becoming a teacher. “The lack of support, the more teachers that leave the more that gets put on our shoulders. The shortage just makes it more difficult to do our job every day,” Rodriguez said.

Anyone who pays attention to this crisis understands it isn’t limited to when the school bell rings. Key contributing factors include food, housing and child care for when the child’s caregiver is working.

COVID-19 provided the kind of safety net these businesses have always needed, like seen in this article in WisconsinWatch:

For the first time, many providers had a stable revenue source outside of the cost parents pay for care. In some cases, it allowed for wage increases (although child care is still a notoriously underpaid profession), long put-off updates and even prevented substantial tuition increases. “For us, Child Care Counts has been able to make us stable in the sense that I don’t worry about how I’m going to make ends meet because I know we’re going to be supported … but I am still conscious of every penny that is spent,” Renae Henning, administrator at Community Care Preschool and Child Care in Beaver Dam, told The Post-Crescent.

But as we see in a recent opinion piece for NEWSONE, LaDon Love warns we’re at mission critical because that support is evaporating:

Here in D.C., decision-makers must take the threat of an antagonistic federal body at face value. House Republicans just submitted their harmful Default on America Act which would cost D.C. families 700 childcare seats and 3,600 housing vouchers, while an additional 34,000 families would be at risk for losing SNAP or WIC benefits – including 5,000 seniors – and 95,000 D.C. residents at risk for losing health coverage due to increased work requirements. Their plan would make these cuts while forgiving $114B from the wealthy in tax cheats, and on top of the millions of federal dollars and programs lost at the end of the Public Health Emergency that impacted programs like the federal Child Tax Credit and emergency housing assistance.

Some out there hope, once again, technology will turn up and bail us out (since public policy appears to be going nowhere fast). Bill Gates dreams of a world where AI teaches our children to read through personalized lessons, as reported in Yahoo Finance:

In a keynote speech at the ASU+GSV Summit, Gates proclaimed that within the next 18 months, "the AIs will come in as a teacher's aide and give feedback on writing. And then they will amp up what we’re able to do in math." He added that intelligent chatbots like ChatGPT from OpenAI are already demonstrating remarkable fluency in reading and writing, which he believes will change the way students learn and improve their skills. ... "The idea of personalized learning where the software is deeply understanding where you are and giving you exercises that are uniquely beneficial for you ... that’s very exciting," he said.

Oh. Joy. Lest we forget, AI doesn’t exactly work for… everyone. Here’s Jeff Raikes in Forbes:

There is a huge and troubling AI defect that should give everyone pause: Many are still subtly perpetuating – or worse, enhancing – the biases of their (mostly white male) creators.

Coders out there will recognize this as classic GIGO — Garbage In, Garbage Out.

So forgive me if I take pause before we allow any Cargo Cult Science prop up some hare-brained implementation of AI in our education system.

We’ve spent so much time on literacy at the primary level, it’s easy to forget how bad things have gotten at the higher end, with ChatGPT.

Here’s Inara Scott with an opinion piece at InsideHigherEd:

Back in January, I, like many others, thought we could design our coursework to outwit students who would rely on AI to complete their assignments. … Turns out, I was incorrect. Particularly with the arrival of GPT-4, there is very little I can assign to my undergraduates that the computer can’t at least take a stab at. Students may have to fill in a few details and remember to delete or add some phrases, but they can avoid most of the thinking—and save a lot of time. ... It tends to make things up, including citations and sources, but it’s right a lot of the time.

The degree to which this leaves educators in mid-air like Wile E. Coyote moments after running off the cliff is enormous, as she continues:

The tidal wave of AI-generated assignments is coming. By the end of the spring term, I suspect more than half of my writing assignments—the ones I thought were so clever and engaging—will have been authored by ChatGPT, Bing or any of the other AI tools heading our way. Why aren’t we panicking about this? Why isn’t everyone treating this as a crisis? Is it because we have started using ChatGPT to do our work as well? (How incensed can we be about students using a tool that is writing our papers and creating our exams?) Or is it that we don’t see a way forward, so we are pretending not to know our students’ discussion posts are 90 percent AI generated? Or worse—are we patting ourselves on the back because we assume that the motivated students, the good ones, will continue to do the work on their own, and the other (bad) students will suffer some kind of well-deserved unemployment?

We’re in uncharted waters and educators need all the help they can get. We need to approach this problem with real study — and not Cargo Cult Science like “A Nation At Risk.”

While Elon Musk hasn’t come up today (shocker), I’m still going to end with a mild tweak of my mantra. You might think I’m not talking about SpaceX here, but I am — where is the money for education? What are our priorities?

Tax Musk. Fund Education. Get a better result.

Okay, I’m through. See you in the comments.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/5/10/2168514/-Educators-like-Wile-E-Coyote-in-mid-air-after-running-off-the-cliff-with-literacy-crisis-ChatGPT

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