Reading yet another think piece on how AI will disrupt American education and I'm convinced that the nuts and bolts of learning will not significantly change due to the technology. I DO believe, however, that the expansion of AI in education will make it easier for lawmakers to pay teachers less.
First, some background on "revolutionizing" schools. Public education is not one thing. In grad school I learned about the "marble cake" of education policy: schools are governed by a mix of local, state, and federal laws and rules. There's not some centralized body that forces change, at least not in the way that people talk about k-12. We have 50 states, thousands of school systems, and hundreds of thousands of schools filled with educators that have a surprising amount of autonomy to accelerate or slow down policies.
That fact makes any claims of robust transformation hard to swallow. Revolution requires buy in, and so far it's not there. Also it leads to my second point: education is fundamentally relational. The relationship between a student, teacher and the material is integral to learning. Sure there are instances of a child learning a ton with just youtube videos and books, but that is the extremely rare case. Anyone who has spent time in the classroom will attest to the need for human interaction for the vast majority of young people.
Finally, those individual cases of a child who learned a lot with just particular tools are illustrative. They ignore the majority of kids who would struggle in that environment or who learn something incorrectly. At the same time, they get lifted up as an example of why teachers are optional. If you're a lawmaker, why would you push for teachers to get paid a living wage if your nephew knew a kid who started a business after high school after only learning via AI? Teacher salaries and benefits are by far the largest expenditure in schools, and schools are the largest expenditure for states. If you can find a rationalization to pay teachers less, AI is a gift.
It's already happening, by the way. In the years I spent lobbying in the Georgia statehouse you would hear examples about students thriving in the cyber charter school or the private school where kids get workbooks and Khan Academy. No one would follow up about the awful student outcomes in these schools on average or how the teachers were paid pennies. As much as Gov. Kemp has gained notoriety for raising teacher wages, they are still paid much less than their counterparts made in the 1990s in Georgia.
Once this wave of AI-in-education hysteria crashes on our most vulnerable schools, we are still going to have students go to a building where they learn from each other and from an educator. The difference is that it will be easier to rationalize paying that educator even less than they get now.
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