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.
Let the charter schools try this first. Eventually something like this will be integrated into common education, but the first attempts are guaranteed to be disasters. Let those fall on 1/4 of learning time of a small subset of Arizonian charter school students and not “all California public school students” or the like.
Buncha damned bullshit. Those kids better start reading more literature before those ai fuckwads get started
AI has it’s usecases, but it’s not currently at a place where students can be left alone with an AI. This is dumb.
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 don’t think homeschooling should be the standard we set for education.
I 100% agree with you, I actually don’t think parents should be legally allowed to homeschool unless they get a real teaching education themselves
Kids aren’t being taught how to read, use a computer, or math. Now they’re not going to be taught at all through grades 4-8? I imagine if the parents are involved, it may do something, but what about kids with working parents? Whose going to make sure they’re actually retaining information? It’s kind of fucked up that they’ll be reintroduced into the “normal” system, and possibly be severely behind kids who had to go to class everyday.
It’s just online school. If you don’t answer the questions you can’t go to the next sections. If you don’t progress you wouldn’t pass. If you don’t pass school you get held back… Parents who work wouldn’t sign their kids up for online school as they would get arrested for leaving their kids home alone. Some kids do well in it, a lot don’t. The kids that do well in it will get ahead quickly. Likely could finish a year early for those 4 years. Is that good? Debatable… but these things existed before this “slap the name AI on it” craze started. I knew some kids that were doing it in 2018 because hurricane Michael destroyed their school. And then many switched to it when covid started. Nothing really sounds any different here other than the AI being labeled on it.
I also think this sucks massively, yet the possibility of a well made curriculum focused on one Person dies sound enticing. So much less time wasted on stuff one child has no problems with vs another that’s just stuck at some logical step. Ofc no social interaction is such a big - it almost can’t be fixed.
Yeah, I want to hate it (and I do) but the idea is great. It’s just that there’s no way in hell the AI is doing the same job as a teacher. It’d also be very hard to tell if it’s working correctly. Who’s going to tell them it’s not? The student?
I do think we need to modify our educational system to better suit people with different needs, but this should be through increased funding for more teachers, not AI to increase profits.
TBH my thoughts are almost a bit dystopian, but I think the AI should be implemented to spec the teachers performance vs his pupils and not on the children directly. There are (at least in my country) almost no barriers to what teachers can and can’t do, some AI that checks the children’s homework and tracks what’s going on could be immeasurably valuable to gain insight into the children’s learning behaviour.
ofc from the (good) teachers perspective this understandably is the beginning of the end. I don’t even want to imagine how a system like that could be abused by bad actors or just plain and simple republicans.
El oh fucking el. Can’t wait to see how AI handles a classroom of rowdy pre-pubescent teens
That’s the neat part: It doesn’t!
Drone strikes.
They are individuals sitting in their house. So if they get rowdy their parents deal with their kids. Kids in these grades legally can’t be left home alone in most states either. So it’s just stay at home parents who don’t want their kids to go to public school or have to drive them to a private school, or doing any work to homeschool them.
At some point the AI says…fuck this guy, here color this shit and watch this movie. Eventually the student becomes a great painter.
I don’t get the panic. It worked great for 50% of Venture brothers.
What the clown car fuck?
The most humane thing about this is there isn’t a teacher getting abused by paying them an insultingly low salary.
Or a student being abused by their teacher. Just a computer.
“This ensures that each student is consistently challenged”.
They will be challenged alright.
I wanna see the Karens losing their mind because the AI teacher dared to mention evolution.
I don’t think the AI is actually teaching anything. Sounds like the courses exist and are written by people. Then a program just presents the content to them, and it has a set of questions. The only thing that sounds to be maybe AI about it is that if they get a question wrong the computer will give them an easier one next. Meaning someone categorized the questions into hardness levels and likely groups that were similar to ensure it could swap them with an easier/harder question pertaining to the same concept. Really it could just be done with an if statement. Maybe they think saying it is being taught by AI is to make people feel like someone is paying attention to their kid… When really they are just left by themself. We could have done this 20 years ago… but maybe we thought better of it back then.
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
Great, one AI to set problems and another to solve them.
Those kids are gonna get pretty good at Fortnite though.
Keep kids dumb so they turn into dumb voting citizens and a big fuck you to teachers too! Whomever came up with this really deserves to get rich. This embraces so many modern American ideals all at once. If they haven’t thought about helping to lower the cost by placing ads into the platform, I would like to take credit for this idea.
Seems short sighted when they will ultimately just do away with voting.
My suspicion is students who understand the situation will try to game the system. Like they do with organic teachers, too.
They already do with online charters. Teachers don’t know the material, they just spam AI generated essays and answers. Teacher work loads are so much that they don’t check the responses.
I work in education. Grading is always a burden, yeah. Homework/activities often need to be designed for the students AND for grading load.
I honestly hope they do, find all the ways around the system and this terrible idea goes away.
