Latest news with #AdvancingArtificialIntelligenceEducationforAmericanYouth
Yahoo
21-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
AI in education: Let's not miss the forest for the trees
(Matt Cardy / Getty Images) President Donald Trump recently issued an executive order titled Advancing Artificial Intelligence Education for American Youth. As with federal educational policy generally, it is not likely to have a significant impact on K-12 education because education has always been a state and local matter. In fact, in 2024, Gov. Glenn Youngkin issued Executive Order 30 and an associated set of education guidelines that have already generated important action related to AI in education, including a summit this week that brings together educators in the K-12 and higher education systems to try to create alignment and educational pathways to best serve students in the commonwealth. Trump's EO is a bit redundant to Youngkin's EO, and both miss the forest for the trees. K-12 schools serve multiple purposes; two of the most important are to prepare young people to be productive members of a deliberative democracy and to prepare them for the workforce. To properly serve either of those roles has always meant ensuring that students are technologically literate, meaning not necessarily that they are adept at using technology, but rather that they make good choices about what, if any, technologies might be used in personal or professional situations. Today, artificial intelligence dominates the technology discourse, and the potential effects of AI on the workforce and civic life are significant. Concerning the workforce, the Brookings Institute's late 2024 analysis concluded that '…more than 30% of all workers could see at least 50% of their occupation's tasks disrupted by generative AI.' On democracy, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace writes that 'AI models enable malicious actors to manipulate information and disrupt electoral processes, threatening democracies.' This research makes it clear: If public schools are to serve their highest purposes, it is incumbent upon educators to make sure students are AI literate. Being AI literate, though, means much more than just learning to use AI; it also means being aware of the ethics and potential risks. We know, for example, that AI is hurting the environment and that AI companies are defending themselves against credible claims of intellectual property violations. Students need to know that, too. Additionally, integrating chatbots into the learning process potentially dehumanizes a necessarily human experience. Absent this knowledge and the right skills and dispositions around technology and AI, our young people are less likely to be able to successfully engage in an increasingly technological civic age and are less likely to be prepared to succeed in an increasingly technological workforce. However, even that broader, ethics-inclusive approach to AI literacy is too narrow. AI is the latest form of technology to capture our attention, but our society is increasingly dominated by other technologies, including technologies of surveillance (some of which are powered by AI). Nearly all aspects of our society, from schooling to law enforcement, are changing because of technological developments. Long ago, institutions of higher education developed whole interdisciplinary programs of study that consider the historical, cultural and social impacts of science and technology on society. This is the broader, more interdisciplinary approach that needs to be integrated into our K-12 schools. Interdisciplinary programming is challenging in our siloed K-12 system, but it is possible and worth trying. We could, for example, ensure that when students read novels in school, they read one or two books that force discussion about the role of technology in our society. There is no shortage of good books like that. When students learn about history, they should learn about the Luddites. They might learn, for instance, that to be a Luddite was not just to be anti-technology; rather, Luddites started a labor movement that pushed back against the sort of automation that AI could contribute to today. For math, students could study quantitative reasoning and learn about how much of AI and machine learning is based on inferential statistics. I am the parent of a public school student and a critical friend of technology who wants my child to be able to explore the affordances of technology for learning. However, I am not interested in my child engaging in the sort of AI integration that Trump's EO speaks to. If my child struggles to grasp a concept, I want them to struggle through it with their classmates and teachers, not some AI chatbot tutor. And, as a taxpayer, I am not interested in supporting the integration of technology that comes from the 'public-private partnerships' that are highlighted in the EO. That's a not-so-subtle attempt to further enrich the technology leaders who sat on stage at Trump's inauguration. Instead of teaching my child to use Adobe Firefly to make fancy reports, I want my child's teachers to help them learn to navigate a world that is increasingly technological and morally complex. Among some members of society, there is a near-religious devotion to AI. And, coincidentally, how religion is handled in public schools (at least for now, as the Supreme Court newly considers the place of religion in public schools) may be instructive. The common saying has been that schools can teach about religion, but they cannot teach religion. I favor a similar approach to AI in education. We should teach about AI, not teach with or especially for AI. In fact, if our schools are to prepare students like my child for the world ahead, they must largely look away from the narrow and shiny new object of AI and meet the broader societal challenge this technology represents. SUBSCRIBE: GET THE MORNING HEADLINES DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX
Miami Herald
04-05-2025
- Science
- Miami Herald
Education research takes another hit in latest DOGE attack
Education research has a big target on its back. Of the more than 1,000 National Science Foundation grants killed last month by Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency, some 40 percent were inside its education division. These grants to further STEM education research accounted for a little more than half of the $616 million NSF committed for projects canceled by DOGE, according to Dan Garisto, a freelance journalist reporting for Nature, a peer-reviewed scientific journal that also covers science news. The STEM education division gives grants to researchers at universities and other organizations who study how to improve the teaching of math and science, with the goal of expanding the number of future scientists who will fuel the U.S. economy. Many of the studies are focused on boosting the participation of women or Black and Hispanic students. The division had a roughly $1.2 billion budget out of NSF's total annual budget of $9 billion. Related: Our free weekly newsletter alerts you to what research says about schools and classrooms. Neither the NSF nor the Trump administration has provided a list of the canceled grants. Garisto told me that he obtained a list from an informal group of NSF employees who cobbled it together themselves. That list was subsequently posted on Grant Watch, a new project to track the Trump administration's termination of grants at scientific research agencies. Garisto has been working with outside researchers at Grant Watch and elsewhere to document the research dollars that are affected and analyze the list for patterns. "For NSF, we see that the STEM education directorate has been absolutely pummeled," Noam Ross, a computational disease ecologist and one of the Grant Watch researchers, posted on Bluesky. At least two of the terminated research studies focused on improving artificial intelligence education, which President Donald Trump promised to promote in an April 23 executive order,"Advancing Artificial Intelligence Education for American Youth." "There is something especially offensive about this EO from April 23 about the need for AI education… Given the termination of my grant on exactly this topic on April 26," said Danaé Metaxa in a post on Bluesky that has since been deleted. Metaxa, an assistant professor of computer and information science at the University of Pennsylvania, was developing a curriculum on how to teach AI digital literacy skills by having students build and audit generative AI models. Related: Chaos and confusion as the statistics arm of the Education Department is reduced to a skeletal staff of 3 Another canceled grant involved college students creating educational content about AI for social media to see if that content would improve AI literacy and the ability to detect misinformation. The lead researcher, Casey Fiesler, an associate professor of information science at the University of Colorado Boulder, was almost midway through her two-year grant of less than $270,000. "There is not a DEI aspect of this work," said Fiesler. "My best guess is that the reason it was flagged was the word 'misinformation.'" Confusion surrounded the cuts. Bob Russell, a former NSF project officer who retired in 2024, said some NSF project officers were initially unaware that the grants they oversee had been canceled. Instead, university officials who oversee research were told, and those officials notified researchers at their institutions. Researchers then contacted their project officers. One researcher told me that the termination notice states that researchers may not appeal the decision, an administrative process that is ordinarily available to researchers who feel that NSF has made an unfair or incorrect decision. Related: DOGE's death blow to education studies Some of the affected researchers were attending the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association in Denver on April 26 when more than 600 grants were cut. Some scholars found out by text that their studies had been terminated. Normally festive evening receptions were grim. "It was like a wake," said one researcher. The Trump administration wants to slash NSF's budget and headcount in half, according to Russell. Many researchers expect more cuts ahead. Contact staff writer Jill Barshay at 212-678-3595, jillbarshay.35 on Signal, or barshay@ This story about NSF education research cuts was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Proof Points and other Hechinger newsletters. The post Education research takes another hit in latest DOGE attack appeared first on The Hechinger Report.
