When Educational Leaders and School Technology Leaders Became AI Cheerleaders and Delivered Their School Children to AI Companies

A recent “round table discussion” (See article link at bottom) among education and technology leaders is more like a “Cheering pep rally for AI” than a critical discussion about AI’s place in our schools.

This incident is an excellent example of school leaders serving as a conduit for providing AI companies direct access to school children as uncritical users and consumers of AI.

At this so-called "round-table discussion" there was not a single voice of critical dissent (at least not reported in article) or pushback on AI and what it is doing to our environment, our society, and possibly to our children's minds.

It seems as if every single leader at this round table was a voice for OpenAI, or Google, or Anthropic. They might as well be on their payroll.

There are many school leaders who see their role to deliver students as users and consumers of the latest Silicon Valley tech all in the name of “preparing students for whatever age is brought about by the technology.”

They all assume that there's going to be "an AI-shaped workplace" without mentioning anything that a major goal of AI companies is replacing employees. It is might more likely be a workplace dominated by AI where employees are minions serving the machine in lower paying jobs.

Are there no critical thinkers among school leaders and educational technology leaders? There should be. The consequences of AI are going to be enormous for all of us. We're not talking about calculators here. We're talking about potential technologies that impersonate humans and the AI industry has made it clear it intends to replace workers and their jobs.

There was a time when educational leadership was about advocating for students and not the latest offering from Silicon Valley.

(Portrait of a Graduate in the AI Age, Tech & Learning)

When Ed Tech Companies Become Parasites: Adding Features, Increasing User Costs, and Degrading User Experience to Force Users Choices

Over the years, I noticed a developmental pattern among Ed Tech solutions school districts adopt to solve problems in their schools.

The schools search and find a new, low-priced solution. This solution is not elaborate, but it does what it does well. Sometimes it only does that one thing well such as sending calls to parents or contacting subs for teachers. It does that one thing extremely well and the price is perfect.

Then, this company decides to add on to their product. For example, the teacher sub contact system expands into payroll tracking or HR job posting and onboarding. Now, they have additional products on offer.

But, the school system decides to just stay with the substitute teacher calling system. It works well and better than other solutions but they already have payroll and HR systems working just as well.

The company has invested a ton of money into these additional functions, so they can’t really afford for their customers to stay with the original software, so they devise a plan.

The company INCREASES the price of the original product and they offer a package bundle, still substantially more, but what looks like a deal for the system. It is not because the system has the payroll systems and HR systems and does not need the other products.

But, if they want to keep the original teacher substitute calling system at a cheaper price, they either a) pay a much higher price, or b) adopt the additional payroll system and HR system.

In the end, the school system is either forced to look for an entirely new product and the cycle begins again; keep the product at a much higher price, or adopt the entire product line and spend hours and months transitioning everything and have even more money siphoned away by this so-called New Deal.

I have seen this pattern at least three times in 36 years working with Ed Tech companies, and it really is a great example of Cory Doctorow’s “enshitfication” Ed Tech style.

Invent a great new tech product or software. Add more to the product. Enshittify the experience of your users to force them into an upgrade or your product.

Ed Tech has learned well from Silicon Valley and this playbook is common.

The sad thing is this playbook only transforms Ed Tech companies into parasites who search for ways to suck additional money out of school systems.

That’s what happens when the focus is on short-term gains and not customer loyalty.

Can You as an Educational Leader Trust the Evidence of Effectiveness Provided by the Product Developer? Probably Not

Can educators and educational leaders trust the research that companies provide about their products? Should they? Probably not. The tech industry that includes Ed Tech has a major credibility problem in the middle of the calls for screen bans and screen limits. For example, there is growing independent evidence that social media is harming our children. Why else would Facebook settle their massive lawsuit.

I just completed reading Max Fisher’s 2022 book “The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World” and it clearly describes why we can’t trust research provided by companies on their own products. The book reinforced why I quit Facebook and Twitter sometime ago. But one particular incident in the book illustrates clearly to me why companies just can’t be trusted to provide unbiased, reliable evidence of their own product’s effectiveness or lack thereof.

In the book, Max Fisher points out that Facebook completed an internal study of their technology’s effects when faced with growing suspicion that their site might be making the political divisions in the US worse. Their own research warned internally that the platform was doing exactly what their company’s leaders denied it was doing. 

Their own leaked research said “Our algorithms exploit the human brain’s attraction to divisiveness.” According to Fisher, this was in a 2018 presentation leaked to the Wall Street Journal. This presentation also said that Facebook’s systems were designed in a way that delivered users “more and more divisive content in an effort to gain user attention and increase time on the platform.” 

Later, this research was hidden by Facebook executives and they rejected the recommendations for tweaking the algorithm that would have resulted in less time spent online. They, in other words, deliberately chose to keep users addicted to divisive content that their own machine served up to them.  

This is why companies’ research can’t ever be trusted. Neither can their executives. This is also why educators can’t trust research either done by or paid for by the companies whose products they are considering to purchase.

Companies simply aren’t going to provide educators and educational leaders with reliable, independent evidence that their products are effective. They are also going to hide studies that are less than supporting of their products. I would expect no different, after all that would prevent sales.

Facebook’s own research showed their product was harmful, yet they buried the evidence. They made the deliberate choice to keep their product addictive.

As an educator, I always ask for independent evidence of product effectiveness. Independent being evidence generating by studies not done or paid for in anyway connected to the company. Most often, none exists.

If such evidence does not exist, then   ask the company to allow you to run a study of their product on a trial basis. Use research methods to evaluate the product for what they claim. Once you have that, publish it and make it known. Share it with other individuals.

I can envision a whole network of school technologists who independently evaluate these products and share that evidence independently and not as a testimonial asked for by the company. 

Where the evidence comes from, who paid for it, who conducted the study that generated it, and why the evidence is being provided all matters.

This is what has been lacking in the massive technology acquisition and placement in schools. Now, our parents and common decency requires us to do things differently.

Ed Tech Does Not Always Have to Be Revolutionary: It Just Has to Work!

 Educators don’t always adopt Ed Tech to “revolutionize” or “change” anything. A tool doesn’t have to transform the work to be effective.

Sometimes you adopt a new technology to facilitate and help do what you are currently doing, not disrupt; not transform; not change anything.

The mistake often made by Ed Tech is thinking that their product must “revolutionize” or “transform” and that’s their marketing story.

The truth is, there are times when no change is needed other than having a tool that helps you do what you are doing better.

I suspect one of the reasons for the so-called “tech-lash” is because of promises of transformation that never panned out.

But the Ed Tech industry never blames their technologies. It’s always the implementation or the “system” that is rigid and unwilling to change. But, it just might be that the technology does not work, and in some cases it might be harmful.

Have you ever heard anyone in Ed Tech blame technology? I haven’t heard that that I recall. It’s never the technology’s fault.  It’s the system, the school, the leadership, the teacher, the student, the parent…never the technology.

But, just maybe, the Ed Tech is garbage. Maybe the company spent a ton of money dressing it up in expensive marketing clothes, and the actual product is junk. 

Ed Tech does not have to always be revolutionary or transformative. Sometimes it just has to help schools and teachers do what they’re doing better. That’s not as big a sell, but it is a solid product.

How to Sell Your Tech Product and Tech Consulting Business No Matter What with the Silicon Valley Marketing Strategy

Want to sell any technology to everyone and ensure its total acceptance? Here’s how:

If I invented a product that had all kinds of potential dangers and harms but still wanted to make a bundle off that product, I would do the following:

-Convince everyone that my product is here, it's inevitable, and that they might as well use it.

-Convince everyone that failure to use my product means you are behind-the-times and irrelevant.

-Convince everyone that my product was just like a previously non-harmful product like a calculator, and that it was "only a tool." You can always blame the users for harms too.

-Convince anyone that any attempts to regulate my product will stifle innovation and just allow the Chinese to beat us.

-Utilize the Ed Tech and educators to make all the children of the world into proper consumers of my product.

-Buy a political establishment that will protect my enterprise at all costs—environment and health of the people be damned. Especially buy out local governments where I need to put my massive data centers.

-Tell wild fantasies about how my product has the potential to rule the world.

-Make my product as addictive as possible, and keep individuals using it for everything. Even invent uses and convince people to use it even if it is not actually more useful of effective. Goal is to keep users in the product.

That is a blueprint for ensuring product success no matter what harms and unforeseen consequences it might have. That’s the Silicon Valley marketing plan.

The Proper Role of Ed Tech and Educational Leaders in the AI Push into Schools

 “We as educators need to educate our students about AI,” is how Ed Tech’s latest pitch goes regarding their new project. Let’s look at what is really involved in that project.

Paul Kingnorth writes in his 2025 thought-provoking book “Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity”:

“…we need to understand the consequences of the Machine we have built, and which is now rebuilding us so that we may become more perfect consumers, shopping for individual fulfillment in its global marketplace of goods, ideas, and identities.”

The Ed Tech calls for “AI Literacy” are part of the “Machine” project that Kingsnorth describes here, the project of “rebuilding us so that we may become more perfect consumers” of AI, Silicon Valley’s latest money-maker. Big Tech, as it did with the internet, Web 2.0, social media, has once again activated our Ed Tech establishment in schools to take on the task of transforming students and teachers into proper consumers of their latest cash cow, AI.

Part of this project of Big Tech has been to short-circuit any critical thought about AI as they have made it, about its moral and ethical uses, and even whether we should accept it as presented. They did this through their “inevitability” myth, and their “everybody-is-using-it” myth, both of which are not true and does not have to be true.

They have used these myths effectively in the past, and educational technology has been acting and is currently acting as the proselytizers of Silicon Valley since it beginnings as a disciplinary field. It is a discipline that exists to carry out Big Tech’s latest proclamations, and their latest is to get all of education—students, teachers, parents—to acquiesce without protest, to being blind, perfect consumers of AI.

Educators have no business acting in this role. If anything, they should be fostering critical-thinking individualists who decide for themselves the role, if any, AI will play in their own lives and use. These students can also decide for themselves whether acceptance or resistance is called for. The next generation can demand that AI serve humanity, not those who stand to profit the most from its success.

Reflecting back on thirty-plus years in education and my own role in Ed Tech, I have seen how educators become implicated in this whole project of consumer generation. Now, we see how this blind promotion of technology has not really transformed anything for the good.

Past history tells us, that this AI consumer project will not end well in its present form either, without ensuring that our students, teachers, and parents are able to think for themselves critically about the place and form of this technology in their lives. 

We do not have to let Silicon Valley and Ed Tech decide for us.

When Educational Leaders See Employees and "Human Resources" and "Human Capital: Are You Devaluing Teachers?

What is wrong with using the terms “human resources” and “human capital” as an educational leader?

I was reflecting today on my time in “human resources” and I realized that the entire time working in that area, the word “human resouces” always caused me just a slight shiver when I heard and used it. Why?

It is actually the word “resource” that is a bit bothersome, because it refers to “any material, person, or asset that can be USED to meet a need, solve a problem, or produce something value.” In other words, the term refers to USING people for some purpose.

I suppose it is just that word “USED” that bothers me, because that word so easily slips into manipulation and exploitation. The term “human resource” also makes me think of something like “natural resources” which are extractions from nature USED AND EXPLOITED for manufacturing purposes.

So the term “resource” has always had a slightly bad smell for me.

Then why not use the term “human capital” instead? Sometime ago, our North Carolina Public Schools started labeling its work force and teachers “human capital." When I heard the monthly webinar with the state called the “Human Capital Webinar” I had that same quiver of uncomfortableness.

But the word “human capital” has a bit of stench to me as well. Why? Capital means in many ways the same thing. Capital is a broad term for “financial assets, such as money, or physical assets, like machinery and buildings, USED to produce goods, services, or generate income or value.”

So is using “human capital” any better? Not really. One still has to slightly hold the nose on the “USED” part of that meaning if one sees people for more than just a tool to be used to reach a goal. It still has that slightly off-putting smell.

But, I suppose if your intention is truly to USE people for these purposes, then these terms work well. 

Still, I can’t help but wonder how the use of the words “human resources” or “human capital” somehow deeply affects how leaders view those to whom they lead, especially school leaders. 

Words have meaning and they have power. I have always believed that, and the terms and words a leader chooses, has power over a school leader’s work.

By viewing people as “resources” or “capital” to be used and manipulated for organizational purposes seems to avoid attaching any other value for people other than how they can be used for those purposes. This means leadership is about using and manipulating people to produce, and I think too often, school leaders will resort to any tactics to achieve their purposes.

Just maybe that’s why “accountability” has become gospel to educational leaders. Educational leadership as a field has taken all it can from the world of business, including the terms “human resources” and “human capital.” Accountability in the form of test scores gives purpose, and teachers simply become the resources and capital to that end.

Using words like human resources and human capital allows the school leader in good conscious to engage in the same kinds of exploitation and manipulation tactics as business leaders sometimes engage in. It can use people for the achievement of a simply purpose: increased test scores.

Perhaps it’s all OK in the end, but I do think educational leaders need to be a bit skeptical of all these leadership concepts and philosophies that have infiltrated educational leadership as a field. 

Why? Because education is NOT just about “producing graduates” or even “producing citizens.” Narrowing education education into any single purpose or purposes limits its possibilities.

Education as a field is notorious for "relabeling" things when a term becomes fashionably and culturally unacceptable or somehow viewed negatively. For example, I still laugh to myself when I hear the word "learning cottages" to describe "mobile classrooms" or "classroom trailers." But I am not advocating a label change here, because this is not a language issue; it is a educational cultural issue and will not change by changing the "human resource" or "human capital" label. Those are only deeper symptoms of a way of thinking that sees employees as objects of exploitation for purpose. That's what should be the target for revision.

I realize that organizations are going to use the words “human resources” and “human capital.” But, I have always valued my own “slight discomfort” at the use of the terms, because it was always a reminder to me that, these terms did not have to determine how I viewed employees and that I could value them as the human beings they were too.

Ed Tech Doesn't Need to Advocate for Technology: It Needs to Shine a Spotlight on Its Flaws Too

One key component of any Digital Literacy Program? Web content is not always there due to its merit; it's there because someone "pays for its spread" and "games the delivery algorithms."

Of course, the most astute users already know this.

But if we want truly digitally literate students, they need to know the games people play to get noticed.

They need to know that all web content, especially that disseminated on platforms, is not necessarily there due to its merit, but because it is like a paid informercial or because someone knows the algorithmic game.

As schools grapple with AI, it is important to include in literacy the games behind its creation as well. Its use of web content, including pirated copyrighted content in its development. Also, its use of exploited labor to train models, and its massive consumption of our natural resources and power.

Too often, educators get caught up in the shiny gleam of technologies as gems and fail to see that most of the time what they really have are rhinestones.

Ed Tech promotes the "gemstones" myth for all technologies.

Ed Tech Defends Devices Not Students: There Is an Attention Problem and It's Not the Screentime That's the Problem: It's the Products or Screens

Many in Ed Tech are striking back against those wanting to control screen time with bans and restrictions. They rely on the old “utilitarian argument” used by gun advocates. “Devices don’t distract students; students distract themselves” they say.

How ludicrous does that sound when the devices are PURPOSEFULLY DESIGNED AND ENGINEERED by Big Tech to “distract” and “capture attention?”

Sure, it’s not the time spent behind the screen that is the problem. Its the products that Ed Tech uncritically subject students to.

It’s devices and apps that are purposefully engineered for addiction. The product is the problem. It’s how it’s made and that is of concern.

These companies aren’t going to change their money-making products, and their goal is more and more addictive and distracting designs with each new feature.

In the classrooms, teachers are fighting “mech-dealers” (the tech-equivalent of meth dealers), who sell these addictive products and who only want students attention and data so they can make more money.

That is the problem with screens.

Instead of working with these Ed Tech companies and serving students and their attention on a silver platter,  why not join with those who want to address these issues. 

No, like Ed Tech does when their devices flop, it’s the teachers’ fault; it’s the school’s fault.

It’s an implementation problem, they say. Just maybe, the product is the problem.

Come on Ed Tech, advocate for students, not the Tech and those peddling it.

Why Abandoing E-Books Restores an Old Experience of Reading

Why do I still buy physical books? Call it reverse digital conversion.

When the Kindle appeared, I was in awe and I have purchased multiple versions over the years, and always used the app across devices. It gave me instant access to book purchases (though under Amazon terms I did not actually own the books but simply pay them for access). It also allowed me to carry a library around with me at all times (though I discovered you still can only read one book at a time.)

That awe e-books invoked has long-since cooled and I buy more physical books than I do e-books. Why?

The experience of reading a physical book for me is different and more suitable to the way I want to experience reading. 

First of all, reading from a device can bring the multitude of distractions that gadgets bring. I can read a physical book on MY TERMS, and truly block out the world. Devices are designed for distraction, so a physical book has none of that.

Secondly, I like to physically underline as I read, make notes in the margins, and I have an old-fashioned journal and pen I can pick up and record quotes and thoughts. I have never been able to get that feature in the Kindle app to work the way I want to work. 

Despite what the Tech evangelists tell us, devices LIMIT sometimes, and the e-book limits my reading experience.

Finally, I honestly like to own my books, and not pay for access. I return again and again to my books and right there in them are my notes and thoughts. I don't have to make sure my device battery is charged or whether there's a wifi connection. Just open it and you're there. That's pretty darn efficient.

I still purchase a e-book every now and then, but it is usually one I read for relaxation or interest. It's the books I usually give away. It is never one that I will re-read or return to. Though, there are times when I purchase an e-book first, but find that I want a physical copy instead. 

There are obvious issues with physical books but one adapts. For example, the photo below is my solution for that stack of books I kept by my chair on the end table. The book tree works well. I can see my titles and pull and replace easily. Of course a single Kindle on a table would replace, would it not? God forbid! Then it brings its distractions, charging issues, etc.

This really is an illustration of "reverse digital conversion." We all need to think outside the silicon box that technology has placed us. Perhaps then, we will rediscover old experiences and invent new ones. The world is not yet encased in chips, and if it is, I don't envy living in such a place.

"There's an app for that...but should there be?" Teaching Students Answers Sometimes Lie Outside Devices

“There’s an app for that…but should there be?”

That’s the question we should be asking instead of always searching for an app to solve our problems.

To automatically look to technology alone for answers, is “tech solutionism.” That’s narrow-minded and dogmatic thinking.

But that’s the mindset Ed Tech has adopted.

But to always turn to tech for answers narrows the possibility for available solutions. 

It’s not thinking outside the box; it’s boxing up the mind into a silicon container.

To teach students to always search for answers in technology is making students dependent upon devices, which is what Big Tech desires.

Big Tech wants addicted users.

To counter that, educators need to be sure to expand their students’ toolboxes beyond the screen.

Our goal, either intentional or unintentionally, should never be to teach students to be “good little consumers of Big Tech’s latest.”

It should be to teach students to be critical and free users of tech WHEN IT IS THE BEST SOLUTION AND WHEN THEY WANT TO USE IT.

To do that, teach them that the answers sometimes lie outside the world of silicon and microchips.

Ed Tech’s problem has always been its inability to see anything but the gleam of gadgets and devices. It always searches for its answers there.

In this always-search-for-answers-in-devices it actually “imprisons” children in a world where the only real answers are found in screens. That’s not reality.

That’s dogmatic, narrow-minded approaches that will forever have students looking for answers from Silicon Valley and Tech. Sounds like device dependency to me!

That’s not growing critical, adaptable, and creative learners.

If there is an app for it, sometimes we need to ask, “Should there be one in the first place?” And “Should I use an app to do this?”

Teach students that and they will be free human beings and not mindless customers for Big Tech and those peddling devices.

Ed Tech Critical Reflection Needs in a Time of Screen Time Limits

EdTech has some accounting to do now that major questions about the place of technology and screens in are being heavily scrutinized.

It is a time for the Ed Tech field to come to a reckoning.

Instead of acting like dogmatic, fundamentalists defending their technology tenants of faith, those in the field of Ed Tech should be engaging in mass self-criticism and self-examination, focusing on everything they have taken for granted since they first pushed devices into the schools.

Some thoughts on what those should be?

For example, Ed Tech has always had an extremely cozy relationship with those who create and sale the gadgets (and I use that word to broadly cover everything, computers to AI). These companies sponsor Ed Tech conventions, and Ed Tech has allowed them free uncritical access to all the educators attending. At these events they give attendees free gifts and subject them to company delivered or sponsored keynote addresses. They provide “free” training on their products. Not one minute is devoted to critical thinking about the products peddled.

In this way, Ed Tech has allowed the product companies to control the discourse and the discipline. Leaders controlling the budgets who really do not understand the technologies are sold on these, then Ed Tech jumps on board and tries to justify the purchase. This should not be.

Ed Tech needs to develop a conscience. It needs a “critical mind” that looks upon its discipline with skeptical, questioning eyes. 

Instead, we salespeople are allowed to promote unquestioningly their wares, and then, we horrifyingly, subject our students to these. Use now and ask questions later with no regard of the effects on our students is sometimes the thinking.

Is it any wonder, that these devices and gadgets have sometimes caused much harm and little good?

Joseph Weizenbaum, computer scientist and pioneer thinker about AI, once wrote:

“There are certain tasks which computers ought not be made to do, independent of whether computers can be made to do them.”

This statement, the field of Ed Tech does not get. It sees their devices as always the answer. They are most often “pure technology solutionists,” who look for problems to solve with their tools, instead of looking at the problems and then trying to find the tool to solve them. Maybe sometimes, even inventing problems in order to use their gadgets to solve them.

That’s why they always see their devices as the answer to every educational problem.

But here’s the rub: As Weizenbaum points out, just because a computer, a smart phone, or AI can do it, that does not mean we should use them to do it.

In these times, Ed Tech as a field would do well to reflect critically on itself.

Instead of a field that acts as a conduit to pipe gadgets into the classroom and schools marketed to them by tech companies, Ed Tech educators need to begin asking questions like these:

-Is this something I want technology to do?

-Is it something technology should be doing? 

-Is it just possible, that this learning, this teaching, this task would be best achieved through analog means?

Asking such critical questions, and being skeptical and critical of technology would perhaps give this field the beginnings of some kind of conscience. It would upset the uncritical value tech has and decenter it in the field of education, which is what should happen.

If Ed Tech educators had become critical and skeptical about the role of gadgets in the classroom from the beginning, instead of being awestricken by the glow of the devices, this might have also headed off the push to limit screens in schools because educators would have been more discerning before subjecting children to devices in their Ed Tech experiments.

Let's Welcome the Debate Regarding Screen Bans in Education: It Forces a Conversation that EdTech Stifled from the Beginning

One great positive that is coming from the threat of "Screen bans."

Ed Tech is being forced to defend its support of unbridled access to devices and a long-time cozy relationship with technology companies.

It is forcing a great deal of critical thought about the rightful place of all these technologies in the classroom. That's of great benefit.

Through criticism, there can be the asking of the difficult questions, and the questioning of the taken-for-granted assumptions that have fostered the uncritical acceptance of technology's potential.

I welcome the debate and let's see whether truth wins or whether special interests and money wins.

Lessons Learned: Preventing Companies from Keeping Your Users and Institution as a Locked-In User

Since my decision to discontinue my use of Evernote after Bending Spoons eliminated the plan for Personal Users, I have found my replacement: the Notes app within my Mac OS system.

The Mac OS Notes app successfully captures what I wanted to do with my note taking activities and other tasks I was doing with Evernote. It turns out, with some modifications, I can do all that I was doing with Evernote.

For example, while the Notes App does not have “notebooks” it turns out that its “Folders” feature functions in the same manner. You can gather connected documents into a folder and tag the folder. You can scan documents; insert documents; insert audio recordings, etc.

Basically, Notes appears very much like Evernote used to be before Bending Spoons acquired it and began adding Bloatware to it in order to charge customers more.

I suppose Bending Spoons did me a favor. I was really paying to use Evernote when I did not need it. The simple solution was right there all the time.

Sometimes the solution to our problems is already there, and sometimes, when it comes to tech solutions, it’s not the product expanded with bloated features; it’s the simple solution.

Sometimes the “Keep It Simple” adage is best, and app solution developers would do well to keep that in mind when the adding of features does not always equate to value for your current users. Keep your current users in mind and don’t add features that degrade their experience of your product. That is, if you have any loyalty to your current customers.

Keep adding bloated features that pull your product away from what your legacy and original users want, then expect those users to exit when the costs are too high and your product can be superseded by a solution that captures what they want to do.

On the flip side of things, all users would do well to prevent themselves from getting “locked-in” with apps and tech products. Keep yourself flexible and portable so you can relocate at any point the app developer stops providing the product you want and need.

Figure out a way to transfer those app escape costs back to the app developer where they belong. 

After all, they are trying to engineer their products to keep you “locked in” as a user. With some anti-lock in measures, you can keep that from happening.

The Next Time You Hear a School Leader Say "AI Is Not Going to Replace Teachers, It Will Replace Teachers Not Using AI" Think

 If "AI is not going to replace teachers, but replace teachers who do not use AI," perhaps we should really look at that statement used by many school leaders pushing for this technology in their schools.

 It says a great deal.

1-This school is authoritarian. You must use AI, even if you have proven to be effective without it. If you don't I will replace you.

2-AI is your savior, accept it, or be gone.

3-Keep your opinions to yourself; they don't matter.

4-No room for critical thought or discussion about the use of AI in this school. Just do it.

When school leaders and AI advocates use this language they hide their own authoritarian leadership style behind a statement to generate fear.

I would question whether I would want to even teach in a school operated by such dictatorial tactics.

Should We Subject Our Students to AI Products as They Now Exist? There Are Reasonable Objections

What is most objectionable about the current iterations of AI that we have available? Here’s what’s most objectionable:

AI has been developed by Silicon Valley Companies with questionable motives and with Silicon Valley CEOs who have repeatedly demonstrated that they will sacrifice the well-being of everyone and the world community for profit. Their ethics are aligned with selfish gain. That will lead to an AI that ultimately serves their ends and not anyone else’s—just look at what has happened to the web and social media as well as all smart technologies.

Another objection has to do with the drive to sacrifice the environment and natural resources at all costs in their pursuit of profit. Their push to create massive server farms are depleting water supplies, forcing more fossil fuel use, consuming vast amounts of resources to create a monster with will perpetually consume more and more, pushing human needs aside.

Still another objection is that Silicon Valley and AI creators are pushing full steam ahead in creating a machine that can further pollute the world with misinformation and so-called “AI-Slop” that pushes people further into schizophrenic world where people are lost and unable to experience the world as it is.

Next, AI is also objectionable because it is a misguided effort to re-create human intelligence in a Frankensteinian effort to replicate ourselves. Such efforts rarely end well as history and our own literature tells us, even if it is possible. This recreation of “human intelligence” is being attempted without any clear definition of what such intelligence is. In other words, Silicon Valley is creating intelligence as it thinks it is, which is problematic because they do not share our human values.

Finally, AI offerings today are objectionable because there is an intense lack of trust when it comes to sharing any more data with companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google. Silicon Valley has not been great stewards of what we have shared with them, using our own data to profit while making us more unsafe. These companies would sacrifice your data-well-being in a minute for profit, and they’ve proven it.

When I advocate caution or even resistance to Ed Tech AI evangelism and AI generally, it is usually due to these objections. Silicon Valley has proven untrustworthy most of all, and I would not do anything to be further complicit in connecting them to the even greater data sources of our students freely sharing information with their products.

When It Comes to AI, the Field of Ed Tech Acts Like a Fundamentalist Religion

Has the field of Ed Tech become like a “fundamentalist” religion? In some ways it has.

Ed Tech as a field appears to sometimes take it by faith that there are no instructional and educational problems that can’t be solved by technology.

As a corollary to this solutionistic view of technology, any technological gadget or invention has some kind of application in schools if only it can be found. And, it is responsibility of all educators to integrate these gadgets otherwise they are going to be left behind.

At its core, Ed Tech is in some ways like a fundamentalist religion. It requires that one keep these two principles of faith at all times. It dismisses any questions of technology’s central place in education. 

If one questions a new technology or whether it really has application in schools, that person is declared a heretic or an obstacle to progress. There is no room for dissent.

This is perhaps as Big Tech, Ed Tech, and consultants would have it it seems. What better way to invent, market, and ensure adoption and their prosperity? If critical talk about technologies such as AI are short-circuited from the beginning, then these benefactors of that tech win. 

The problem is, sometimes students lose due to negative consequences, only to be experienced years later.

It's Time to Rethink the Teacher Shortage Problem and It Does Not Involve Pay

 Perhaps the real problem with the shortage of teachers is that fewer and fewer people want to do the work as it has evolved over the past 30 years or so. 

When I started teaching in 1989 teachers operated in classrooms that allowed for independent creavitity, initiative, and excitement. There were no testing surveillance systems. You could operate without the intrusion of administrative experts and consultants who claimed to know how to teach content better than you. Parents were generally supportive of teachers and were not engaged in antagonistic tactics to what you were doing. They came to you if their were problems usually, and the teacher could work with the parent.

Classrooms have become culture war zones. They are places where the teacher often receives less and less professional deference. Instead, there are so many voices out their saying, “No, you need to do it this way, not that.” In a word, teaching has been transformed into a mechanistic scientific management task where one is surrounded by a troup of experts all telling the her/him how to do the job. 

There is no art to teaching anymore, because the administrators and their cadre of experts have transformed the instructional act into a scientific management work task.

It’s no longer rewarding to be a teacher. So, the answer seems to be in focusing on pay. Certainly you can find someone willing to do this work for the right pay, the idea goes. The problem is apparently you can’t pay enough for someone to do the teaching work today because fewer want to do it.

The reality is, teaching has lost what librarian-researcher Fobazi Ettarh calls “vocational awe.” 

Vocational awe is defined as a set of notions that Librarians have about their institution and themselves. To have vocational awe, the worker has to believe in their institution’s goodness and rightness. Also, the worker has to believe that their profession, the work they do is inherently good and sacred. In other other words, the worker believes their work is a calling, which means they will endure and persevere in the work tasks because of the good, sacred and worthwhile big picture.

Teaching has lost this vocational awe. Schools are constantly labeled failing by everyone. Even administors focus on the negative always in an environment of so-called continuous improvement. In addition, the teacher’s work is no longer seen as sacred, as special because it has been turned into tasks to be carried out scientifically. The teacher’s institution and the teacher’s work is fundamentally degraded by a system paranoiacally obsessed with trying to improve or change, in the worship of constant innovation.

What’s more, administrators and school HR recruiters can no longer capitalize on “vocational awe” to fill teaching positions. That’s because the “awe of teaching” and “being a teacher” is gone. 

The profession of teaching has been destroyed by politicians who want to cut budgets and continuously impose new requirements on teachers. 

It has been decimated by administrators who think they know how to teach so well, they constantly intrude into classrooms with their so-called coaching and feedback, treating teachers as if they don’t know anything. 

The teaching profession has been decimated by a consultant industry made up of experts who say they know teaching better, even though some of them spent less time in the classroom, and sometimes no time there.

The teaching shortage problem will not be solved by pay alone. 

It will certainly not be solved by relying on the vocational awe myth any more because no one is buying it. 

The teaching problem will only be solved if those who have degraded the work of teaching to the point that no one wants to do it, no matter the pay, are convinced to change their ways. 

No one wants to be a teacher anymore because vocational awe no longer exists.

Why Promises of EdTech Disruption Fail: What Should Educators Do Instead

One thing educators can expect—a continuous barrage of new product pitches that claim to have disruptive and transformative abilities—and that is happening as Tech Companies churn out their new gadgets.

AI is just the latest iteration of that pitch. This time, the AI evangelists claim, there is finally going to be profound changes in education.

This prediction is wrong.

Schools are conservative institutions. They resist disruptive change because that’s the way they are built, for better or worse. 

If they change, the do so incrementally and slowly and that is purposeful, because if schools radically changed at the arrival of every technological or pedagogical whim, they would be “fad-surfing institions.”

Institutions that surf the lastest fads don’t every really fundamentally change in ways beneficial to anybody. Once the hype and the money has been spent on EdTech and AI consultants and technological hardware, the school is still there, and history shows it is no better or worse mostly.

Schools spend millions on these so-called “disruptive and transformative initiatives and when the hype dies down and has moved on to the next thing, they are left wandering why things are still the same and where all the money has gone.

True incremental educational change does not come from adopting new gadgets and paying off EdTech and AI consultants.

True incremental change happens when educators as a community of teachers sit down and do the hard work of examining where they are and working to find solutions.

You don’t start with a solution looking for a problem to solve which is what AI seems to be. We did that with PCs, the web, social media, online learning, only to discover that our long-time problems were left behind.

Silicon Valley Big Tech Innovation Model and Ed Tech's Role in It

 Silicon Valley Big Tech Innovation Model…

Big Tech engages in the “BIG Search.” This is where the companies search for the next Tech that will capture and enslave and addict users.

Discovery of Next Thing. Big Tech companies find a technology, device that has addiction/enslavement potential. (Variation, sometimes they transform and invention into an addictive technology).

Marketing for Addiction. Tech companies market their product as: a) a must-have tech or you will be left behind/irrelevant, or worse a Luddite, b) everybody is using or will be using, so you will be left out, c) you might as well adopt and adapt because the tech is already changing the world for the better. (NOTE: This is said even if it is not or if its negative consequences are substantial.)

Getting the Ed Institutions On-Board. Tech companies next get educators and Ed Tech involved by getting them “integrate” or “usage-promote” for students. This ensures future and sustainable users and markets for the companies. Also, Ed Tech consultants get a cut of the pie through consultant fees, keynote speaking fees. (NOTE: This is usually done on hearsay and no evidence. Educators who want to do what’s best for students are guilt-tripped until they get on board.)

Maintenance of the Addictive Solution/Technology. Tech companies maintain usage through continued marketing tactics above. They use uncritical acceptance of their product to their advantage. Ed Tech evangelists attack anyone who questions and criticizes. (NOTE: The Luddite Name-Calling Tactic is common.) They market their product as an unequivocal societal good, even as negative consequences stack up.

Big Tech Innovation Cycle Repetition. Tech companies search for more “innovative” addictive tech products. (NOTE: Variation—Big Tech companies buy out other technologies by small new companies and repeat the process above.)

As an educator what is most worrisome is the uncritical, entanglement of Ed Tech with these companies. This forces educators to subject students to these technologies uncritically. 

Educators are expected to sanitize and Tech-wash these products by Big Tech and the Educational Establishment.