- cross-posted to:
- politics@sh.itjust.works
- cross-posted to:
- politics@sh.itjust.works
By a 4-3 margin, the Arizona State Board for Charter Schools on Monday approved an application from Unbound Academy to open a fully online school serving grades four through eight. Unbound already operates a private school that uses its AI-dependent “2hr Learning” model in Texas and is currently applying to open similar schools in Arkansas and Utah.
Under the 2hr Learning model, students spend just two hours a day using personalized learning programs from companies like IXL and Khan Academy. “As students work through lessons on subjects like math, reading, and science, the AI system will analyze their responses, time spent on tasks, and even emotional cues to optimize the difficulty and presentation of content,” according to Unbound’s charter school application in Arizona. “This ensures that each student is consistently challenged at their optimal level, preventing boredom or frustration.”
Spending less time on traditional curriculum frees up the rest of students’ days for life-skill workshops that cover “financial literacy, public speaking, goal setting, entrepreneurship, critical thinking, and creative problem-solving,” according to the Arizona application.
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lol those kids are fucked
yeah but the white ones will be able to vote
I can’t wait for the generation who believes that the War of 1812 was won by the French.
It’s already bad enough that many American believe that war was started by foreign invaders and that it ended in a resounding victory for the US.
Strategically, it was a long term victory for the US, but yeah, there’s a lot of misconceptions about it already.
This is some serious bullshit. I don’t have the time or energy to say more right now.
Charter schools, lol
I don’t get the panic. It worked great for 50% of Venture brothers.
And by “AI” they’ll just have the kids solve captchas for 2 hours.
“Which one of these pictures is Jesus?” with pictures of:
Bacon
Swastika
AR15
Trump
Damn it. Gonna have to be bacon, curse my carbon footprint
El oh fucking el. Can’t wait to see how AI handles a classroom of rowdy pre-pubescent teens
How long until the AI starts trying to sext the children, that seems to be a common theme across every article I read about AI and chikdren after its been running for a few months.
Online charter schools are horrifying. There is no expectation that the teacher know or understand the material they are teaching your child. High school is basically working through an online work book by yourself. Teachers use AI to “look up” answers they don’t know yourself.
It’s hell.
But this doesn’t sound like that. This sounds like a model that is using external tools made by humans like Khan Academy to actually do the teaching and just uses the AI model to process how well the person doing the course is understanding it.
I would be willing to bet serious money that a kid in this program would get a better education than a homeschooler, Because exactly like your earlier point, the vast majority of homeschool parents that teach their kids are fucking morons and only have their kids homeschooled because they’re fucking morons.
I can see this being the future…since they voted for it and all.
Today we will learn how to make a pie:
Gather ingredients:
- Flour
- Eggs
- Water
- 10 pounds of dog shit
- 10 gallons of cat urine
Cooking Process:
- Step 1: Mix all ingredients and place in a pan
- Step 2: Add Gasoline
- Step 3: Bake at 9000° Celsius for 12 hours
- Step 4: ???
- Step 5: Profit?
Thank you for this delicious recipe! My great aunt used to make this all the time for our ritual house painting and it always brought joy to the children. Try adding cinnamon or thumbtacks to the pie for extra zing! God bless!!
This recipe is garbage… I didn’t have any eggs, so I used olive oil. I also didn’t have an oven, so I put it all in my freezer overnight. It tasted terrible, although my 2yo liked it. My MIL told my wife to divorce me. 0/5 stars
not quite on-topic, but I hate online recipe sites/comments too
“Time for home economics! Today we learn to make pizza. Be sure to use plenty of glue on the dough so the cheese doesn’t slide off!”
As students work through lessons on subjects like math, reading, and science, the AI system will analyze their responses, time spent on tasks, and even emotional cues to optimize the difficulty and presentation of content
This will be a nightmare for any neuro-divergent students, or really any student with atypical learning needs.
Atypical kids being left behind is a feature, not a bug. There’s a shocking amount of parents even in the year of our Lord 2024 who think we’re “too much” of a drain on schooling.
Theoretically, by analysing the exact needs, and being able to address them individually (in contrast to a teacher, who has limited time, and a whole class of students to attend to), it could do a better job. I mean the whole sales pitch of these systems is that they can attend to individual needs, and not just give you the material made for the average, “regular” student.
We’ll see if it turns out that way. I have my doubts. It needs to have training data about neuro-divergent students, and knowledge how to handle them. And usually AI reproduces bias and stereotypes. Edge-cases are more rare in the training data, and that makes AI less knowledgeable. And that happens a lot. Plus current AI is very limited. I’m not sure if it’s even smart enough to address individual needs. Or feed students with proper facts instead of fiction.
But I don’t think analysing the students behaviour is the issue here. If at all, it’s going to lead to improvements of those AI models, if they collect data about neuro-divergent people and feed them in.
Honestly the thing I’d be most worried about is that kids at that age are learning important social and language skills. Without an adult in the room to interact with, who are they going to learn that from?
Seriously. Teachers aren’t just some machines spewing out lessons. They are meant to be a trusted adult in a kids life. Someone they can learn social norms from and someone they can go to if they need an adult they can trust that isn’t their parents. I can foresee kids who go to this school having a much harder time getting away from abusive parents.
Yes, thank you. I feel like since the AI boom people have forgotten that the purpose of school isn’t just to teach kids to regurgitate facts
I feel like it’s even bigger than that. Since the AI boom it’s become increasingly clear that our society has completely devalued humanity as a social concept. Companies acting like it’s terrible to ever interact with another human. Schools acting like teaching is something to be automated. Dating apps trying to integrate AI to message people for you. Our society is going insane.
I think that dynamic predates AI, at least in it’s current form. As far as I know people have become separate and more anonymous and more alone for some time now. That got out of hand with technology in general. Videogames, surfing the web. Looking at phone screens all the time. And spending a lot of time on social media instead of in the real world.
Though we had people complaining even before that. I think I once read some very old text complaining about kids reading too much and spending their times in a fantasy world.
That doesn’t invalidate the current situation. A lot of that has indeed become problematic. And though there are AI therapists and teachers, I strongly suspect they’re going to make everything way worse than it already is.
the AI system will analyze their responses, time spent on tasks, and even emotional cues
That means every student is going to be recorded with a camera and microphone? Is anyone else horrified by the fact that the AI software is going to be actively watching and listening to these kids?
Or is it going to analyze typed responses only? (which is still creepy AF, btw)
I’m sure their privacy policy will heavily favor the students personal rights and that their backend database will be hackproof…
I’m sure an AI babysitter won’t be immediately and utterly broken and bypassed by every single kid in these “classes”.
(Seriously: we’re talking about 8-12 year olds here and the absolutely are smart enough and incentivized to break the ever-loving crap out of this stupid idea.)
When I was in school, someone figured out that if you go into Google Translate and type in a link, you could go to whatever website you wanted. We also figured out that despite Google Images being blocked, you could just click on the images tab of Google search and use it that way. Even the teachers told us about that one lol.
At that age I figured out that I could bypass the policy restrictions on my computer by unplugging the Ethernet cable right after login. Gave me full local admin.
A year or so prior to that I figured out that if you viewed IE’s temporary internet files and just backspaced your way up, you can access the otherwise restricted C:, where I found other kids had already installed games onto.
No way this works for a full school year.
I’m old so things were easier but I remember in my middle school days I figured out you could bypass the schools content filter by using babelfish to translate the page from English to English in like 1998. Somehow accidentally stumbled across the concept of a proxy
A year or so prior to that I figured out that if you viewed IE’s temporary internet files and just backspaced your way up, you can access the otherwise restricted C:\
Public library Halo classic… good old days
Library software today can be wayyyyy better and lock down all the old tricks. Gotta count on the kids to keep cat ‘n’ mousing for their generation.
A few of my friends and myself ended up with the network admin password, so we had full administrative access to every computer. Ah, the good old days.
Honestly that seems like its going to be a valuable set of skills to develop.
“Bamboozling corpo AI 101”
In 20 years the gen alphas are walking around getting double Human Chow rations for no reason and not even fulfilling their work quotas. Then, when the Overseers come to discipline then there are these weird pulses of light and the drones wander off mumbling about how, as a large language model, they have no opinion about that topic. We beg them for help, or maybe some left over kibble, but those stupid kids just laugh and say “OK Xers”.
Problem is that yes they will probably do that and get away with it and a bunch of kids get to have a bunch of fun … learn very little other than how to cheat and get by and they get a passing grade and go through school learning nothing.
To be fair, the kids smart enough to cheat it would have, most likely, learned nothing in regular school as well
Believe it or not if a teacher is effective people actually want to learn.
It doesn’t matter how smart you (think you) are if you’re not educated. It’s possible to educate yourself, but unlikely for the vast majority of people. If you were a smart slacker, you wouldn’t be one of those teaching yourself “boring” topics, whether that’s trigonometry or history. You could barely motivate yourself to open your mouth while being spoon fed.
So they will run for office in Arizona.
