There’s so much wrong with this, I’ll limit myself to my three main complaints.
While many school districts across the country are reducing screen time for students, Houston ISD is going in the opposite direction with its educational technology, prompting concerns from some parents.
Districts in California, Pennsylvania and Texas have introduced new guidelines to limit devices in classrooms after parents have protested the screens are harming their children’s development.
Meanwhile, leaders at HISD continue to adopt technology and experiment with AI, such as AI-generated curriculum, ChatGPT for special education, and other learning platforms. All high school students receive a Chromebook, and in August, HISD will debut its new AI-focused model, called Future 2 schools, which have drawn mixed reactions from the community.
State-appointed Superintendent Mike Miles said during an April virtual town hall that the district does not “overwhelm” students with screen time during the day. In fact, he said the district is “geared to non-screen time” and people are complaining that students are reading too many paper packets.
“We’re not anti-AI. We’re not overwhelmed by AI. There won’t be a lot of screen time (in Future 2) but there will be some screen time, and we’re not going to apologize for that,” Miles said. “Kids need a little bit of that if they’re going to be successful in the future.”
[…]
Experts said increased technology use in schools can have long-term effects on students.
David Kahn, a clinical assistant professor of psychology at Texas A&M University, said schools need to make sure that they are not exposing students to an excessive amount of screen use, which can cause attention problems for children.
“I recommend that tablets be used at a minimum at the elementary school level,” Kahn said. “And then, of course, once you get into middle school and high school, certainly by high school, it becomes a little bit more age appropriate, for a lot of the instruction to involve tablet-based learning.”
Kahn said he supports more traditional assignments with paper and pencils in Texas schools. However, he said they must expose students to screens to a certain extent because students take state standardized exams online, which measure their performance in critical subjects like reading and math.
“The reality is screens are a big part of our daily lives,” Kahn said. “They’re not going to go away, and they’re going to be a big part of our children’s lives, but we also need to make sure that from a developmental perspective, we are giving children the access to traditional paper-pencil activities, traditional project-based activities that have always been part of learning.”
HISD’s approach to technology has also expanded beyond student devices.
The district has also embraced generative artificial intelligence under Miles, including a partnership with an AI company to produce thousands of reading passages and the use of ChatGPT to help teachers manage special education compliance.
[HISD parent Casey] Williams said there’s not much of a difference in what her son learns online in school versus the paper packets which she says are AI-generated. She said she’s seen her son and his friends become irritated and offended by the use of AI to produce class work, which she said is often riddled with typos and errors.
“There is an entire wealth of curricula out there that’s not AI-generated, that’s not screen-focused, that if they were just to give the teachers enough autonomy to use it, it certainly exists,” Williams said. “I’ve seen quality curriculum. I know what that looks like, so it’s not like, ‘Oh, they either have screen time or they have these paper packets.’ That’s a false dichotomy.”
See here, here, and here for some background. I’ve made these arguments before but I’m going to make them again here because they’re worth repeating.
1. We don’t know what the best practices are for using AI in schools. The technology is well ahead of the research, and it changes rapidly. Someone needs to be the early adopter – or rather, someone will be the early adopter – which will help us better understand the good and the bad of AI in schools, but that doesn’t have to be us. The risk that we’re doing at least some of it wrong is likely to be significant, more than enough to outweigh the possibility that we’re doing enough right to gain a measurable advantage. As with technology overall in the classroom, for which there’s plenty of evidence that we have done harmful things, even things that seemed like common sense and for which there was overwhelming consensus, there is much to be said for hanging back a bit and learning from the experiences of the pioneers.
2. There has been zero opportunity for input and feedback from parents, students, teachers, and principals. None of them have any voice in part because Mike Miles doesn’t care about what anyone else thinks, and in part because he has no oversight from an elected Board that does take their constituents’ concerns into account. Maybe some schools and principals would have wanted to be more aggressive in this approach while others preferred to wait. An approach that catered to both would both provide any available early mover’s advantage while also giving first-hand data on what worked well and what needed refinement. It would also show HISD as a district that took its stakeholders’ needs seriously, a fine quality to have in these times of enrollment decline.
3. As a corollary to #2, did you notice that bit about HISD “partnering” with an AI company to produce all that material? What assurance do we have that Mike Miles isn’t making some money on this deal, or throwing some business at a friend/relative/person of interest he’d like to do some real business with once he’s free of these shackles? The answer is none, because we have a Board that answers to Mike Miles (and Mike Morath), not the other way around. Maybe it’s all on the up-and-up. I have no evidence to suggest otherwise. What I am saying is that the normal process of review and oversight that we depend on is not present.
4. None of this was in the mandate Mike Miles was given to get HISD out of state-takeover hell back in 2023. I guess I’m never sure how much of this complaint is reasonable, in a “he’s stretched the takeover law in a way that is not consistent with its intent, which should be addressed by the Legislature in a way that clarifies things, hopefully in the narrower direction that I would prefer”, and not just in a “I don’t like Mike Miles and so I’m looking for things to complain about” way. But I did believe then and still believe now that his mandate was to improve the performance of the schools that had put or could put HISD in the position to be taken over, while also addressing certain specific problems with HISD’s special education program. He has, to varying degrees, done those things, which I would have hoped would have put us on a firmer timeline for being released from captivity. But he has also meddled with many other aspects of HISD’s operations and the operations of its schools and teachers, which I believe is both outside his scope and a distraction from his mandate that could be slowing down his progress on it.
If you believe that he was appointed as HISD Superintendent and thus gets to operate as any Superintendent would do, I can’t say that’s an unreasonable interpretation of the law or of TEA Commissioner Mike Morath’s power in appointing him and setting the “get out of mandate” terms. What I can say is that my interpretation – that he is to focus on the compliance matters and act as a mostly light-touch caretaker of everything else until a Superintendent appointed by an elected Board of Trustees can be named – is also perfectly reasonable. It bothers the hell out of me that he’s got to do his thing in such an unfettered and unquestioned manner.
OK, list of complaints is over now. Until the next time I feel compelled to reiterate them all again.