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.
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
At some point the AI says…fuck this guy, here color this shit and watch this movie. Eventually the student becomes a great painter.
Khan Academy was pretty good last time I used it, so I guess it’s better than a no-name AI company.
Let’s think of the average parent that home schools their kid. I don’t believe for a second they’d do a better job than what is proposed here.
Of course not. No kid, let alone an adult, wants to listen to a soul-less robot for half the day. The schools cutting corners to pay teachers less is still an issue, for sure.
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
I don’t get the panic. It worked great for 50% of Venture brothers.
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.
I get that it’s the aim but I am gonna be blunt. I never trusted any tracher. I liked a few, but that’s it…and when I grew up, this was mirrored in most of the male group. Girls tended to be more open to teachers, but that’s it. Is it any different today?
I think that’s how puberty works, and not the teachers’ fault. I’m also kinda old and I don’t know exactly how it is today. We had both, some bad ones, some that were unnapproachable and stuck to their role as a authority figure. But we also had some excellent ones. Also some you could approach with your small struggles as a teen and who’d respect and help you, instead of yelling at you. There is both. And always has been.
We had great teachers, don’t take ne wrong. Simply nobody trusted them anyway. Like, once I had a teacher that whole class was ready to throw hands for, yet still, except for joking around, nobody trusted her.
Maybe it’s cultural thing, I dunno.
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.
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.
From what I’ve heard, they were basically allowing anything with a pulse to teach in AZ, so who knows, being taught by an occasionally hallucinating wiki engine might be an improvement over the wife of some national guard dude.
Great, one AI to set problems and another to solve them.
Those kids are gonna get pretty good at Fortnite though.
“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.
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.
I guess kids in Arizona won’t know how many R’s are in strawberry then…
Dude. It’s been over two hours. How many R’s ARE THERE? Dont leave us hanging.
Okay but did you fall?
Yes. But not before cheating. Asked my boss as he was passing by. “How many R’s in ‘strawberry’”, I says to him. He almost answered but caught himself. Then he sort of peered upward, thinking. Then he grinned and said, “nice one, rhsjj.” And then went about his day.
I still don’t know the damned answer.
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!
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.
That’s such lazy parenting. AI is lazy parenting for lazy parents and lazy school administrations.
Drone strikes.
Buncha damned bullshit. Those kids better start reading more literature before those ai fuckwads get started
As someone who is mildly in favor of the research, development, and use of AI, I think this is a horrible idea.
Its whatever. Ages 8-12 are hardly important and aren’t formative at all.
Until now.
