Opinion | American Students Shouldn’t Be Guinea Pigs for Chatbots

Alpha School’s methods and claims of student success have never been independently studied or verified, and as a private school, it gets to choose its students. The tools Alpha students use include Khan Academy, whose own founder, Sal Khan, has already walked back some earlier, effusive statements about the promise of A.I. in education. “For a lot of students, it was a nonevent,” Khan said, referring to the introduction of the company’s A.I. chatbot, Khanmigo, into public schools.

Last October, after McMahon’s visit, Wired’s Todd Feathers published an article about families who pulled their kids out of another Alpha School campus, some in the middle of the school year, because their academic and social experience was so miserable.

If McMahon were up-to-date on the latest research and reporting on the use of artificial intelligence in K-12 schools, she might not be so credulous about the aggressive use of A.I. If she were paying closer attention, perhaps she would have discovered a study of over 26,000 Chinese students from grades 7-12 that was published in June by the Center for Economic Policy Research.

The economists David Strömberg, Victor Lei and Yanhui Wu found that while A.I. use raised homework scores among students, it lowered “monthly exam scores by 20 percent within six months. High-stakes entrance-exam scores fall by 18 and 24 percent,” with student performance worsening over time. The students with the greatest negative effects on their exam scores appeared to be rushing through their homework by outsourcing to A.I.

It feels as if our educational leaders have abdicated their responsibility to students, teachers, parents and society by allowing Big Tech to more or less dictate national policy on screens in public schools. In an article adapted from the forthcoming book “Coding Kids: Big Tech’s Battle to Remake Public Schools,” my newsroom colleague Natasha Singer outlines the corporate playbook run by Google, Microsoft, Apple and OpenAI:

Tech companies finance national polls and research reports to help make products like A.I. chatbots, and courses like computer science, more urgent priorities for students and school districts. They advocate for new laws to require schools to teach industry-aligned subjects. They sit on committees that help shape learning standards for public school students. They supply or sponsor teacher training and free course materials for students. They fund the National PTA, teachers’ unions and other prominent groups.

Big Tech companies are already embedded in the lives of many Americans, which is why I find it hard to imagine that we are going to succeed in adequately regulating tech in our schools. But it doesn’t have to be this way — there’s a path forward that involves evaluating educational technology, including A.I., in a holistic manner that goes beyond test scores or corporate deliverables.