alterin | Reading Test Focused

There’s a huge focus on reading and math (but, I’ll stick to my speciality, thank you very much). But the methods, rationale, and the assessment don’t mix. The people in charge of education policy at the school district are very much removed from the classroom, and the research that they use to make their decisions is shaky at best. There’s also a continuous tendency for school districts to always be chasing the next big thing. What’s the next big program that will help us achieve our results?

And of course if you wanted to make a guess, you would probably say they’re going to use some form of AI to inform the data and the instruction. And of course, you’d definitely be correct.

I haven’t heard it directly from any sources because news reaches the people on the frontlines last, and there’s a possibility that as a high school educator, I won’t be hit by this. BUT, it looks like the next big thing in CCSD for reading intervention is going to be I-Ready. Now, I-Ready is not a new program, but the direction it’s going like, most other programs, is going to heavily use AI to make decisions about what is most appropriate for students of a given need for intervention.

And I can already tell, it’s going to be hell: bad for teachers, and bad for students. There will be of course some fans, there’s always fans of the next big thing, but it’s not going to have the desired effect.

My top reasons for why it’s not going to work:

AI is not ready for kids
Continued removal of the human element
Continued attention bandwidth erasure
And probably most importantly, the data is flawed as all hell.

Now, I’m not a big anti-ai advocate. And I don’t think we can stop it if we wanted to. There won’t be enough kickback until we’ve turned I-Robot and Terminator into the cautionary dystopian tales that they were. But as an educator, I can tell you that these tools have zero, zero worth for any students in the k-12 realm. Does it occasionally make my life easier? Meh, kinda, not really, but yeah, but no: that’s its own post.

The shortest version of that piece is thus: AI tools takes away the actual foundational things that k-12 schools actually cover. And if you do not have those foundational things set, you are not capable of shifting through and analyzing the outputs that AI gives you. But I digress.

Using AI to help specific students does potentially have uses, as long as we appropriately shield students from engaging with an AI chatbot, it’s possibly okay. But in general, AI generating fake reading materials for students, even if those materials are targeted at very specific things, are not going to have the desired effect. It’s like learning how to play golf by playing Mario Golf. We need real things in all of their beautiful, soulful, and real states. Because despite what some anti-education conservatives will tell you, I have no power nor a desire to brainwash a child. (And I honestly don’t have to, critical thinking skills on their own will allow students to see the bullshit that the right puts forth)

What educators do is ultimately a social skill. My job is one that should be safe from the AI revolution. We tried taking out the social component. We tried putting kids in front of devices for an entire school day. We tried all of this before. Some of us, we’re probably not even half bad at it. But the end result speaks for itself. COVID set all of these kids back, not just educationally but socially too.

And the saddest part is we learned nothing from it all. The American attention span is less than my kids, and that is saying something.

Case in point: we just as a society figured out that we should take students phones away. We just did that. We spent millions of dollars on phone pouches (which were like 3 cents a piece). But we’ve already forgotten one of the major reasons: swiping through an algorithm for a new dopamine hit reduces attention spans.

When my school hired two new ELA teachers this past year, they emphasized that we don’t teach novels as if that’s a good thing and it goes with the scientific literature on reading assessment. And, in a way it does, when we train students to read short texts, surprise surprise, they do read better on assessments that test how well they read short texts. It’s not brain surgery.

It’s been the same ole story since the beginning of trying to apply standardized data points to evaluate education. An experienced veteran teacher says, “I don’t teach to the test! I shouldn’t teach to the test!” An experienced administrator says, “I hear you! You shouldn’t teach to the test! We’re just using this system to measure growth, and it’s also the only thing that matters. And you have to spend 40 minutes per week using this system.”

So, experienced teachers spend all of their working hours trying to teach to the test, but also teach to what we know actually helps readers read. It’s always this weird balancing act of what on the ground, frontline people know, and what this weird divorced from reality bureaucrat thinks they know. And the politics of it all is why we can’t actually teach, and that teachers are burning out.

We don’t need another program that we need to fit in within our already stressed and engaged day. The hardest part about timing when it comes to ELA classes is that students need to read to be able to show that they read and to talk about what they read and to engage with what they read and also to enjoy what they read. Because if we’re making it a chore, we’ve already failed so hard, and we haven’t even started yet.

The data shows that reading rates and proficiency are lower, and the trap that we’re really falling into is that we’re trying to read the raw data without the context of the whole situation. And we’re trying to quantify quantitively something that really needs to be read qualitatively. And then when the data doesn’t improve because we’re forcing students to hate what they’re doing by forcing them to do the worst version of that thing, we’re going to double down and find a new system to add.

And the end result is the data is going to be worse, and we’re going to blame the schools. And some people are going to take advantage of the broken system that they’ve forced upon us, and they’re going to say: we need to privatize education! CAPITALISM WINS! ALL HAIL CAPITALISM.

And charter schools are going to continue to select their students, continue to siphon public funds for all to public funds for a few, and they’re going to point to their data that has been stripped of all the many points of failure, and say: we have a better way.

But they don’t. They’ve self-selected their students; they get rid of disruptions; they are not providing the purpose of public education; they aren’t offering something for all; they’re offering it for a few. And those few are going to widen our socioeconomic gaps and those will continue to widen the gap of who achieves and who doesn’t.

If we want to actually improve reading outcomes, we need less computers, less data, and less trying to quantify the quality. We need to hunker down and slow down and give students a reason to read. Adding another computer program will not do that.

And we need the type of attention span that can read a full novel (hell, right now I’d be happy with a good short story) without being bored out of their minds. Because what the data is actually showing is reading a short passage and answering questions about what you just read is BORING, and kids, who have trained on TikTok, know they just need to swap right and get it over with.