School Desk Patent Model. Smithsonian Institution, US Patent and Trademark Office. James S. Rankin from Muscoda, Minnesota, received a US patent for an improved school desk on January 21, 1879. The backrest is made to fit under the shoulder blades and designed so that no hard points or surfaces are touching the spine. The chair was meant to support the students so they might have an “erect and natural position.” It was considered easy to access and allowed easy sweeping of the floors. James S. Rankin served as a county and city superintendent of schools in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The Rankin School Desk was exhibited in the Mechanic’s Hall at the Indiana State Fair where it was recommended for first premium, a cash award
“We missed the mark, and we didn’t communicate in a way that really showed our community that we understood where we were … and that we were worthy of being trusted to protect young people.” These were remarks by New York City Schools Chancellor Kamar Samuels at a gathering of educators in May about the ferocious response to draft guidance for the city’s use of artificial intelligence in the classroom, expressing forcefully what Chancellor Samuels described as “a lack of trust in institutions, a lack of trust in our security mechanisms, and also a lack of trust in or deep skepticism of (education technology) companies.” Revised guidance was promised for June but still has not surfaced; more than six thousand people commented on the draft, and parents lined up in public forums and hearings to denounce it. Nearly five thousand people signed a petition calling for a two-year moratorium on any AI use in schools in order “to establish rigorous processes for responsibly assessing the risks and impacts of AI on student learning, privacy, and the environment,” more than half of the city’s City Council members signed a similar letter, five hundred artists and writers published their own letter calling for a moratorium and declaring that “generative AI is built on theft, having stolen the work of countless creatives who made New York the world’s capital of art and culture,” the New York State Teachers union called for “developmentally appropriate limits on screen time and artificial intelligence in schools statewide.”
Even as the AI company Anthropic increased its New York presence and introduced its classroom product Anthropic for Teachers (joining ChatGPT for Teachers, launched in November, and existing K-12 versions of Google’s Gemini and Microsoft’s Copilot), and the poorly catalogued presence of AI tools grew throughout city government, and an audit from the New York State Comptroller’s office revealed system-wide deficiencies in the protection of student privacy, “the use of generative AI in the NYC schools is expanding, despite the lack of rigorous protections and the growing evidence that it can undermine student privacy, cognitive skills, creativity, critical thinking, and the environment,” in the words of the organizers of the petition.
On July 8 the Chancellor suspended software purchases for the coming year in the absence of AI guidelines; a June deadline in a law passed last year requiring the creation of an Office of Algorithmic Accountability that would set mandatory citywide standards on privacy, fairness ,and transparency for any algorithmic tools used by city agencies was not met. Also in June the New York State legislature passed a bill, not yet signed by Governor Kathy Hochul, prohibiting the use of unsafe AI chatbots by children, including in schools. Randy Weingarten, American Federation of Teachers President (and former president of New York’s United Federation of Teachers), after an unsettling visit to a Newark AI-based classroom, released a ten-point plan calling for no screens for students in pre-K through second grade and a ban on AI chatbots for students through age sixteen. This in spite of the fact that the AFT had set up, in partnership with Microsoft, OpenAI, and Anthropic, a “National Academy for AI Instruction” in the UFT’s Manhattan office. A coalition of parents, students, and educators in Washington, DC, Maryland, and Virginia is calling on area school districts to pause student-facing generative AI.
On the other side of the country, the LA School Board last April became the first US school district to limit screen time for students, prohibiting digital devices entirely through first grade, after the district approved a $6.2 million deal for a student chatbot with an AI start-up whose founder was subsequently charged with fraud by federal prosecutors. Parents had been shocked that devices were being handed out to younger and younger children with gamelike technology and unknown safeguards while they were struggling to limit screen time at home, and they formed an advocacy group, Schools Beyond Screens, to press for limiting technology in the classroom. Six states—including Alabama, Tennessee, Virginia and Utah—enacted screen time laws this year and at least ten others introduced legislation. Bipartisan legislation was introduced in May requiring the US Surgeon General, who has issued a warning on the harms of excesssive screen use by children, to establish age-based screen time recommendations.
Nationally, an advocacy group called Fairplay released a letter in April calling for a five-year moratorium on generative AI in the classroom signed by over two hundred organizations and experts. Brookings Institution issued the results of a yearlong global study finding that “at this point in its trajectory, the risks of utilizing generative AI in children’s education overshadow its benefits.” Brookings’ ideological antipode, The Manhattan Institute, last week issued model AI guidance restricting student-facing AI to critical coverage of it in upper grades. UNESCO released a Charter for Public Learning Platforms calling for school digital technology that is “owned by, controlled by and shared by the public and in service of the public,” rather than private interests dedicated to maximizing subscriptions, data collection, and engagement in order to generate profit for private shareholders. Advocates cite the success of school cell phone bans in restoring student attention and social connection and well-being, and argue that schools cannot afford to wait so long to enact more rigorous defenses against the encroachment of AI in the classroom.
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Coverage of this growing revolt against AI, gadgets, and tech in the classroom generally dates the arrival of pervasive commercial tech in school to the pandemic, but as a 2017 New York Times series “Education Disrupted: How Silicon Valley is gaining influence in public schools” by Natasha Singer (who has a book on tech in schools coming out in September) shows, the groundwork was laid long before. Her May 2017 examination of Google’s expansion into K-12 education is startlingly prophetic and germaine: beginning in 2013 Google began developing apps specifically for schools, directly recruiting teachers—who were frustrated with the limited technology education departments were able to develop and provide on their own—to test and advocate and use the programs. As usual, deep-pocketed tech companies are able to offer sophisticated products for free, a strategy, as Natasha Singer writes, that privacy advocates warn is designed to build dependency and has historically been used by big tech to drive out competition and harvest users’ freely surrendered data. (Anthropic for Teachers and ChatGPT for Teachers are free in the first year.)
Natasha Singer wrote that over 30 million American students were as of 2017 using Google apps in schools and that Google Chromebooks, a low-cost laptop running Google’s Chrome operating system and Google web-based apps, were more than half of the mobile devices shipped to schools, with roughly 7 million of them in American classrooms already in 2016. Chromebook shipments to schools more than doubled with the onset of the pandemic and its sudden demand for remote education, to nearly 16.8 million. Jessica Winter, in a terrific piece for The New Yorker that combines her experience as a public school parent with conversations with powerful executives in ed tech, writes that a national survey conducted by the Times last November found that eighty percent of K-12 teachers said that their districts use Chromebooks, creating “a vast captive market” for Google’s AI chatbot Gemini, which is now baked into searches on Chrome, helping to make AI in schools “a near-universal prospect.”
Natasha Singer noted that unlike Apple or Microsoft, which make money primarily by selling devices and software, Google derives most of its revenue from advertising. Google monetizes its users, for advertising and for their data. “Schools may be giving Google more than they are getting: generations of future customers,” she suggested. She further observed that Google was with its ubiquitous presence helping to “drive a philosophical change in public education,” prioritizing technical skills over academic knowledge, its own interests incentivized to develop future customers and workers rather than, say, to serve a civic or intellectual purpose. (Education scholar Larry Cuban thought she overweighted that threat.)
What kind of data tech companies are able to extract from education technology remains a highly contested question. Advocates have for years argued that commercial educational technology is either careless with private student information or deliberately harvesting it. Then-Senator Al Franken in 2016 demanded transparency from Google about the handling of student data in its increasingly pervasive classroom systems. In a lawsuit filed last month publishers charged Google with violating its own agreements to use books for AI training, indicating that its commitments to respect firewalls around content are mutable. Anthropic claims that Anthropic for Teachers is compliant with FERPA, the federal law protecting student privacy, but this claim is empty on its face because FERPA requires clearance at the district level for accessing student data and Anthropic, like Google before it, is marketing itself directly to teachers and bypassing district-level tests for safety and reliability.
Google claims that its AI chatbot Gemini is disabled by default on the millions of Chromebooks in the hands of students, but New York City education officials acknowledge that Gemini “reinstalls” on Chromebooks and parents, including Jessica Winter, report that Gemini’s chatbot pops up on the ubiquitous devices to offer to help their children with their work …
Read Part Two of this post here
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