The School That Replaces Teachers With AI (joincolossus.com)
- Reference: 0179654030
- News link: https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/10/04/1746211/the-school-that-replaces-teachers-with-ai
- Source link: https://joincolossus.com/article/joe-liemandt-class-dismissed/
> CBS News has a [2]TL;DR video report , but Jeremy Stern's earlier epic [3]Class Dismissed [at Collosus.com] offers a deep dive into [4]Alpha School , "the teacherless, homeworkless, K-12 private school in Austin, Texas, where students have been testing in the top 0.1% nationally by self-directing coursework with AI tutoring apps for two hours a day.
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> Alpha students are incentivized to complete coursework to "mastery-level" (i.e., scoring over 90%) in only two hours via a mix of various material and immaterial rewards, including the right to spend the other four hours of the school day in 'workshops,' learning things like how to run an Airbnb or food truck, manage a brokerage account or Broadway production, or build a business or drone."
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> Founder MacKenzie Larson's dream that "kids must love school so much they don't want to go on vacation" drew the attention of — and investments of money and time from — mysterious tech billionaire [5]Joe Liemandt , who sent his own kids to Larson's school and now aims to bring the experience to rest of the world. "When GenAI hit in 2022," Liemandt said, "I took a billion dollars out of my software company. I said, 'Okay, we're going to be able to take MacKenzie's 2x in 2 hours groundwork and get it out to a billion kids.' It's going to cost more than that, but I could start to figure it out. It's going to happen. There's going to be a tablet that costs less than $1,000 that is going to teach every kid on this planet everything they need to know in two hours a day and they're going to love it.
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> "I really do think we can transform education for everybody in the world. So that's my next 20 years. I literally wake up now and I'm like, I'm the luckiest guy in the world. I will work 7 by 24 for the next 20 years to fricking do this. The greatest 20 years of my life are right ahead of me. I don't think I'm going to lose. We're going to win."
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> Of course, Stern writes at Collosus.com, there will be [6]questions about this model of schooling , but asks: "Suppose that from kindergarten through 12th grade, your child's teachers were, in essence, stacks of machines. Suppose those machines unlocked more of your child's academic potential than you knew was possible, and made them love school. Suppose the schooling they loved involved vision monitoring and personal data capture. Suppose that surveillance architecture enabled them to outperform your wildest expectations on standardized tests, and in turn gave them self-confidence and self-esteem, and made their own innate potential seem limitless.... Suppose poor kids had a reason to believe and a way to show they're just as academically capable as rich kids, and that every student on Earth could test in what we now consider the top 10%. Suppose it allowed them to spend two-thirds of their school day on their own interests and passions. Suppose your child's deep love of school minted a new class of education billionaires.
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> "If you shrink from such a future, by which principle would you justify stifling it?"
[1] https://slashdot.org/~theodp
[2] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/alpha-school-artificial-intelligence/
[3] https://joincolossus.com/article/joe-liemandt-class-dismissed/
[4] https://alpha.school/
[5] https://tech.slashdot.org/story/18/11/24/1847235/how-a-mysterious-tech-billionaire-created-two-fortunes----and-a-global-software-sweatshop
[6] https://2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com/the-alpha-bet/
Good luck, (Score:2)
sounds like bullshit.
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I remember school as BORING!!! So I tend to agree that it should be possible to automate school and make it more interesting at the same time.
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There's a lot of room for improvement in schools, and all it will take is a lot more money and a tremendous amount of political will to make it happen: smaller class sizes, better trained and higher caliber teachers, better facilities, better food, better learning materials, better leadership.
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> There's a lot of room for improvement in schools, and all it will take is a lot more money and a tremendous amount of political will to make it happen: smaller class sizes, better trained and higher caliber teachers, better facilities, better food, better learning materials, better leadership.
I would argue that a large part of the issue with current schools is because people, on the whole, have been unwilling to adequately fund it. So teachers are forced into attempting a "one size fits all" approach that just doesn't work for a significant number of students. And that lack of funding has led to many of the people who could become "higher caliber teachers" deciding to do something else with their lives.
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With what teachers make to start it means you end up with people who can't do anything else.
Some places it gets better later in your career but that still doesn't attract the best and brightest additionally there is a whole ecosystem of diploma mills that cater to teachers all the way to a doctorate.
Half of being a bigshot in k12 is just getting access to the kind of funding to whip through these programs as fast as possible. People with rich parents or who marry to better salaries. Most starting salarie
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Moving up in the district office is much more about being a cunt and having no or distorted values than about being educated or competent.
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As a person who used to teach in public school, knowing I would not make a lot of money there, there are many problems with public and private schools, and you touched on some of them. I am much wealthier for having left public schools.
I want to believe. (Score:2)
I got nothing out of school past learning how to read, i hated the entire experience and I'm bitter about the wasted time
I would love this to be true, and I've long said we underestimate what kids can do.
I hope I'm wrong but something smells fishy as hell.
It's just a scam (Score:1)
Texas is handing out public money to basically anyone who puts their hand out and is a scammer. This is just there the soak up some more Texas taxpayer money.
The Texas government is happy to do this because the goal is to destroy public education by any means necessary.
Ultimately the goal is re-segregation. At least of these psychopaths pushing this nonsense. It's to be able to have privatize education for the profit of a handful of psychos and to be able to segregate schools by race again.
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"destroy public education" I think not! Public schools are doing a great job destroying themselves and several generations along with them.
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I don't know what the answer is but other places seem to be able to educate their kids.
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We educate our kids just fine, it has simply become extremely lucrative to convince people that we don't.
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> Ultimately the goal is re-segregation. At least of these psychopaths pushing this nonsense. It's to be able to have privatize education for the profit of a handful of psychos and to be able to segregate schools by race again.
I think somewhere under all that froth you mean something like "parents would prefer their children be in actual schools instead of violent hellholes".
But it seems to be you who doesn't think that that is possible with racially integrated schools.
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Lol he doesn't say that anywhere, it's totally you projecting.
This post is like something you'd see in an example and roll your eyes because of course nobody could ever be this pathological.
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There's a bit of hyperfixation around the racial aspect of this due to the history of racial segregation in schools, which is still in living memory. But it's more nuanced than that. The new segregation is happening by class , which often corresponds with race in America, but is not quite the same thing.
Modern Republicans have no qualms about poor white and black children being fucked over jointly. That's a big part of boomer rage: "They're treating me like a negro!" (And of course, they've managed to convin
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Modern republicans and the movements behind them have been ok with lumping poor white and poor black people together.. they have been doing it since the 1700s.. but have also found that poor whites are a great tool to use against their real enemies.... other races.
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> Ultimately the goal is re-segregation.
Along with re-establishment of rigid class barriers that will prevent most people from moving above their assigned station in life no matter how smart, talented, and hard-working they might be.
First thought - recipe for raising antisocial kids (Score:4, Insightful)
It's true that schools exist to teach children useful skills - but those aren't all along the lines of "how to run a food truck". It's just as important to teach how to get along / cooperate in both formal (learning) and informal (playing) settings.
But, again, this is Texas...
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They mostly just teach kids to sit down and shut up.
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In theory, "teach how to get along / cooperate in both formal (learning) and informal (playing) settings" is a good thing
In practice, for people like me with Aspergers and no social skills, it's like being thrown into hell
I learned that everybody hated me and the only way I was ever going to succeed is to do it on my own
I perfected the skill of solving problems alone and went on to a very successful 50 year career in engineering
You can't force people to become social
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I have been diagnosed with Aspergers, and I think exposure to social situations is still helpful. In fact, it may be even moreso, since with that syndrome you're not likely to learn those things without making a point to expose yourself. It doesn't mean you're going to start going to start clubbing in your free time or something.
Also, for the other 95% of students who aren't on the autism spectrum, they need a school as well. A properly-funded and organized school system would have a separate place for kids
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Well they fail miserably at doing that! My life got infinitely better when I graduated high school. Working and going to college, you are significantly more likely to be around people that have made the active choice to be exactly where they are. They have a choice.
High school on the other hand, is more like prison. You are forced to go. The guards (teachers) are discouraged from any kind of relationship with their prisoners (students). On the learning front, less then half of any class actually even cares
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Hey cutie, I don't have any mod points to give you but I wanted to let you know i love your post ;)
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Texans care about their kids too. It's Texas because Texas is deeply under Republican control and makes it easy to run cons like this.
"It's just as important to teach how to get along / cooperate in both formal (learning) and informal (playing) settings."
Yes it is, and that's why home schooling is such a disaster.
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Which is a bit ironic since these kinds of kids, their ONLY skill is going to be social. For people with affluent backgrounds social connections are pretty much the determining factor for their success... so expect these 'AI schools' to mostly be social clubs.
AI can is both better and worse than some teachers (Score:3)
For some subjects, I could definitely see AI having a teaching advantage (math), but on other subjects, like English, there is no way an AI can match a good teacher. But that's the operative word: "good". I had some great teachers, but plenty of garbage teachers too. AI would have definitely been better than some of the blatantly man-hating female teachers I had, who always took any chance to humiliate or insult the intelligence of male students. AI won't show bias towards skin color, gender, religion, etc. So that's a big advantage. But again, I don't think machines will match good or great teachers in my lifetime, if ever.
Bad teachers is mostly a Gen x problem (Score:1)
Gen x had a metric fuck ton of bad teachers because of the Vietnam war. You had a bunch of people going into college to get out of the draft and they just kind of hung out in college for 5 or 6 years. At the end of that time they didn't really have a specific set of skills or even classes so they had to piece together a degree out of something.
A lot of them became teachers so if you were in that age group you got stuck with a lot of bad teachers.
Don't get me wrong there are still bad teachers out th
That is a _really_ bad idea (Score:2)
Some (few) people can learn self-directed. But even they benefit a lot from teachers that help them find their own approaches (which is exceptionally critical) and being self-motivated is not a given even for these people.
The whole thing sounds like an utopian experiment by an asshole that does not care that he harms children.
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> The whole thing sounds like an utopian experiment by an asshole that does not care that he harms children.
I'd be slightly more concerned about that if the current alternative wasn't "Fallacy Of The False Alternative Urban Hellhole Public High".
Okay, it's not really "teacherless" (Score:3)
I just took a look at Alpha's web page. They've basically just re-branded "teachers" as "guides". From TFA:
TL;DR what the billionaire claims is happening doesn't really appear to be what's happening at the schools.
> THE ALPHA GUIDES
> At Alpha School, teachers shift from traditional roles like grading and writing lesson plans, to supporting students’ emotional and motivational needs and teaching life skills. This impactful transformation frees up teachers to mentor, motivate, and coach students to become self-driven learners.
> Guidance:
> Adults, whether teachers or parents, become ‘Guides,’ shifting the traditional teacher-student relationship to offer motivational and emotional support.
> Support:
> Assist students with AI-powered learning, help them develop life skills, and pursue their passions.
> Motivation:
> We motivate kids by giving them the gift of time to pursue the things they want to do and develop life skills. Adults in the room support motivated students to foster a growth mindset and independent learning.
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> I just took a look at Alpha's web page. They've basically just re-branded "teachers" as "guides".
Which is hardly new.
It can work, with inwardly (self) motivated students ...
This is good to see (Score:5, Insightful)
Even though early experiments often fail, it's good to see experiments
Traditional school is more about showing up on time, sitting quietly and following rules
It's training students to be compliant worker bees or soldiers, not brilliant, independent thinkers
We need a new approach that helps students identify their talents and perfect them to the highest level
In a typical classroom, filled with students of varying talent, the smart ones get bored, the less talented get lost and the ones in the middle endure it
We need to make learning the most exciting thing a student can do, and present the material at the pace that matches the student's talent
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This is so stupid. Even those in R&D do 5% R and 95% D. Sitting down and working to the rules are huge parts of getting most things done in life. I don't want the guy at the Snickers plant getting creative and dropping LSD into my candy, and I don't want my physician getting creative and dropping LSD into my vaccine.
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> Even though early experiments often fail, it's good to see experiments
You know, when I want to do an anonymous (no names are preserved) survey of security professionals, I have to go through multi-week or even multi-month IRB (Institutional Review Board) approval, explaining how I protect the data I collected and the subjects, etc. IRB members often have opinions on my survey questions and also on whether I am sufficiently clear about how and where the data is stored in the survey header.
And that's when I don't keep the names of my subjects nor do I collect anything persona
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Move fast and break... kids.
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"Traditional school is more about showing up on time, sitting quietly and following rules
It's training students to be compliant worker bees or soldiers, not brilliant, independent thinkers"
A false choice. Schools teach students many things, including following rules. That doesn't mean students can't be "brilliant, independent thinkers". Thinking otherwise is a sign of a small mind.
"We need a new approach that helps students identify their talents and perfect them to the highest level"
What is your evidenc
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And do you already know how to teach people who have a device in their pocket that helps them to get the answer without even reading the assignment? You take a photo and ask chatgpt for the solution and in case of schoolwork you can be sure it is 100% right. Update the teaching concepts now or be cheated.
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It's good to experiment even when this is not how it will eventually look like. You can almost forget giving homework in the age of ChatGPT. So if pupils are going to use AI anyway, help them to use AI in a way that helps them learn.
If you don't they will use AI just to cheat. The outside school use is outside your control, but inside school you can show them how to use AI to learn at their own pace. You have a stupid question? The AI explains it. Again. And Again. And you don't grasp the basic concept in t
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I strongly disagree. I just finished a degree after a 20 year gap. Half of the classes were online only and almost all the learning was done via reading a book or engaging with a platform. My tech classes and a Math class was entirely done with a platform and the teacher didn't really have to do much of anything. More like a proctor. Sociology (DEI requirement for California) did have a recorded lecture but by and large, you read the book, you take the tests and you finish a capstone project but all of it i
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""...but it would work equally well ..."
That's not an endorsement.
SRA Cards: 1960's Self-Directed Learning (Score:2)
Reminds me a bit of the instruction a Canadian co-worker described he received back in the 1960's at a school in a remote area. After successfully completing their self-paced, self-directed learning assignments (e.g., [1]SRA Cards: A History of Programmed Instruction and Personalization [hackeducation.com]), kids were free to leave the school building on their own and play hockey at a nearby pond or explore the surrounding area with classmates.
[1] https://hackeducation.com/2015/03/19/sra
Public School is not about advanced learning... (Score:2)
I sent my kids to public school so they would have to learn how to socialize. Growing past the typical societal road blocks by seeing and recognizing them, under our parental guidance, was our modus operandi. IM(not so)HO: Public school is a minimal baseline of education, it is a parents job to push kids above that baseline.
Will these AI tools make growing above a base-line education better? Dunno, depends heavily on the LLM training criteria - the current slop engagement training criteria of public facing
$40k a year and no open enrollment is there? (Score:2)
If you select from a group of highly motivated and financially privilege students, you are naturally going to do well with many alternative learning methods, aren't you?
An odd mix... (Score:2)
Of sinister sounding dystopian stuff and naive optimisim.
> I will work 7 by 24 for the next 20 years to fricking do this.
I suppose he will be giving '110%' all the while? Will be interesting to see someone give up sleep, food, bathroom, and everything else for 20 years.
> your child's teachers were, in essence, stacks of machines.
And this is supposed to ingratiate the concept with the audience?
> Suppose that surveillance architecture
Again, "surveillance architecture" is a pitch for some education we are supposed to want?
> Suppose your child's deep love of school minted a new class of education billionaires.
Seems like the fallacy that if everyone just had a billion dollars, everyone would live like billionaires do today...
Charter School Grift (Score:2)
Charter schools movement was launched by idealists looking to reform public education. It has long been hijacked by grifters who figured out they could make a lot money if they limited the student population to students who would achieve high test scores with very little investment. The schools are "non-profits" funded by the public schools but they contract for services with various businesses that produce a profit for the owners who organized the "non-profit" charter school. This is just another example o
Re:Charter School Reality (Score:1)
And yet NYC charters cost less per student, are EXTREMELY popular among minorities, plus are doing an excellent job. This success is arguably mainly due to: (a) not being beholden to teachers unions, (b) free to hire and fire teachers based on their teaching qualities, and (c) can be shut down when caught doing a poor job . Only white “progressive” democrats - like NY Governor Hochul or NYC mayoral candidate Mamdani - and, of course, teachers unions, oppose charters. Receipts:
NYT Nov 2022:
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> "And yet NYC charters cost less per student
What does that mean? Do they receive less per pupil from the city?
> are EXTREMELY popular among minorities
Which simply confirms that they aren't actually educating the same population as public schools.
> “the vast majority of students in charters are Black and Latino”
>> Only 15% of the students in New York public schools are white. The only way a charter school would not have a vast majority of students of color would be if it deliberately discriminated against them.
If you're a kid from a poor family (Score:2)
Or live in a poor school district, you ain't gonna be gettin no $1000 tablet
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Neither you will be in a school that costs 40k.
Welcome my son (Score:2)
Welcome to the machine
What did you dream?
It's all right, we told you what to dream
Slow clap (Score:2)
> "If you shrink from such a future, by which principle would you justify stifling it?"
(Addressing the author of the article here, not that I'm under any illusion that they're reading this.)
Kudos for the rhetorical trick of framing opposition to your plan as stubbornness or unreasonableness on the part of the questioner. It's clever, but it's kind of a shame that that's not how burden of proof works. It's not up to us to prove your way is wrong, it's up to you to prove that your way is better than what we a
AI? (Score:2)
This has been going on a while, longer than the current AI push, so since the claim is some radical new approach to learning, by the AI name-dropping. It stinks of a con.
Your next generation of psychpaths (Score:1)
This is going to go great.
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> This is going to go great.
Yeah, next thing you know, they'll be shooting people they disagree with! We'd better ... prevent that.
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By banning guns, or ideas?
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Hey, it is the american way since 'they must hate crime' or 'they are not really people'.. Evangelicals have been saying so for decades.
Or are you trying to reference one of the rare cases of a right winger actually getting shot instead of doing the shooting?
Re:Your next generation of [humanbots] (Score:2)
Interesting seed of conversation for FP, but I disagree with your premise. Any evidence why this approach will produce psychopaths? Or care to explain the attempted joke that didn't work?
I think the larger risk is that they will become mentally crippled. People are too ready to learn to think like machines and these kids will mostly learn to ask questions that the machines are good at answering. Unfortunately, those are the same kinds of questions that are easily tested, thereby producing test results that
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All of the people going into AI-induced psychosis, perhaps?