Education in the US is full of contradictions.
Many suggest that creating schools outside of the public schools is shortchanging the students in poor areas who can’t afford private schools. OTOH, not surprisingly, the public schools have often not been “good enough” to meet the formidable challenges of those “poverty” kids in the inner cities.
It turns out that the overall environment of learning support outside of the school is a key variable in student success. So If we were doing it right in the US, the inner city schools would need to be considerably better than the suburban public schools, instead of too often considerably worse.
Into this situation we now have the tremendous expansion of Federal Support for private schools through a somewhat complicated funding apparatus created through the Trump big budget bill. This also brings out contradictions because the voucher program theoretically can greatly improve learning opportunities in the areas that need that the most, while at the same time increasing the private schools affordability. Which can benefit poor students.
Except that also provides funding for already well supported private schools for wealthier kids and neighborhoods, and creates greatly increased alternatives to the public school system, which has formerly been a cross-class integrator, and a non-religious “one size fits all faiths” Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, and sometimes even Atheists. In addition public schools create some embedded civic-minded support for our way of government.
Into this roiling pot we now add what AI can do to support and enable learning, at potentially lower costs that can improve the learning opportunities for those in public schools that are failing.
Except, some of the initial roll outs of AI in Learning, such as the Alpha Schools discussed in the attached article, are extra pricey… which forms a barrier to one size fits all.
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Open in new tab Then there’s the issue of whether AI replaces teachers, whose salaries are a big part of the cost of education, but have traditionally been seen as the core piece of learning systems in the US. As well as part of an essential system for providing an adult supervised location for stashing kids…. who would otherwise be “Home Alone” with both parents working, and fewer grandparents around to babysit.
AI for learning proponents say things like “we are not replacing teachers, we are just changing roles.” But the Alpha schools seem to not employ teachers, and instead employ uncredentialed support people, who presumably earn a considerably lower salary than credentialed teachers? That’s not the same paradigm as traditional US Learning systems at all.
It’s hard to imagine a politically powerful entity such as the Teacher’s Unions, with many millions of members across the US, accepting the “change of roles” that AI would bring. OTOH, the new Trump voucher plan creates a large incentive for alternative schools that might redefine teachers out of their former roles into a new, as yet undefined, set of parameters for working with AI learning tools.
So yes, it’s complicated.
How many teachers are there in the US?
- Public K–12 teachers: about 3.24 million.
- All K–12 teachers, public + charter + private: roughly 4.2 million