The end of August is here, and for millions of students across the country, that means the start of a new school year. Parents are buying new notebooks and school bags, teachers are decorating classrooms and finalizing first week lesson plans, and students are scrambling to complete summer book reports they forgot about.
Except many of them aren’t. Many won’t bother reading “Of Mice and Men”, and even fewer will take the time to write about Lennie and his long-sought rabbits. What’s the point when, as many students have realized, you can have AI write the paper for you?
This is just one example of how schools of all levels, from elementary to college, are wrestling with the challenges of new technology both in and out of the classroom. Changes are coming, and schools are wholly unprepared for what they have to face.
Now, before I go on, let me clarify that I’m not a luddite. During my time as a high school English teacher, I saw first-hand how technology has revolutionized education in many positive ways. This goes beyond just Zoom, which was ubiquitous among schools world wide during the pandemic. I’m talking about things that students can use in class to create and collaborate. Students now can use Google Drive to work together on research and presentations. Platforms like Newsela and Century allow students to practice reading and writing skills at their own pace. Few things brighten up a dull lesson like a quick game of Kahoot. And the increased access to tablets and other devices have opened up possibilities for creative classwork; for instance, students in my classes could create short films or podcasts, assignments that would have been impractical just 5 years ago.
But amidst all the excitement about how technology will enhance learning and engage students, there are real drawbacks and harms. For all the time and energy spent championing technology, there are major pitfalls with some of this new tech. These days, it feels like everyone – students, teachers, principals, and parents – has been left to navigate the problems on their own, fumbling blindly through a confusing fog of new terms like “AI” and “deepfake”.
So, what are some of the most pressing issues schools face today? And what can we do to fix them?
Mobile phones
Ask any teacher about their experiences with students and cell phones and you’ll hear about the struggles. For me, every day it seemed that there was a battle between me and students’ devices, a vain fight against some of the most sophisticated Silicon Valley engineering. Over the years, I’ve witnessed students’ attention spans become increasingly fried, with many younger students unable to stay on task for more than a few minutes before getting sucked off task by the siren song of social media. Breaks and lunch times had devolved into students sitting alone in classrooms or hallways, watching Instagram shorts or playing games by themselves. Students now are less connected, less empathic, and less confident working in person or interacting face-to-face; when working in groups, many will now sit silently and type on shared docs rather than speak to one another. I’ve also seen first-hand the increase in mental health issues among the high schoolers I’ve taught.
Before the pandemic, it was getting bad; since then, it’s been a nightmare.
Although this is anecdotal, it’s hardly unique – or revelatory. By now, the topic of teens and cell phones has been so widely studied that the harms almost feel like common knowledge. Every other week, there seems to be new research coming out about the ways that phones and social media are hacking our brains. Here are just some of the harms:
- Increased social media usage correlates with a rise in teen mental health problems, and rates of depression for boys and girls have increased since 2010 (when smart phones and social media became widespread)
- Excessive social media use (more than 5 hours a day) has been connected to decreased mental well-being and higher scores for depression (especially among girls).
- Increased phone usage is connected to teen loneliness.
- Cell phone addiction means that half of teens say they ‘sometimes’ or ‘often’ feel anxious when they don’t have their phone.
- Facebook’s own 2021 study found that Instagram usage caused 1-in-3 teen girls to have harmful and negative self-images.
- A 2022 survey by the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) found most students find devices distracting in class
I could go on all day. At this point, the evidence feels almost overwhelming. It’s no wonder, then, that some are now calling for us to get rid of the “phone-based childhood” altogether.
What do we do about it?
Thankfully, schools are starting to wise up to the problems of phones in class, and many are banning them completely. The Los Angeles school district is one of the biggest to ban cell phones from school, and California Governor Gavin Newsom is pushing the rest of the school districts in the state to do the same. This is an obvious idea, and it isn’t revolutionary – in fact, the US is actually behind on this, with places like China and Italy having banned cell phones in class years ago.
Schools and districts must ban cell phones in school. This should be a no-brainer – the harms are clear and the benefits are immediate. Schools that have banned phones report greater student engagement, improved wellbeing, and less bullying. Even students who are initially opposed to such bans often come around when they see the positive impacts.
The biggest opposition often comes not from students but from their parents. Despite parents’ never-ending battles with cell phones, many oppose cell phone bans, with one survey finding that just one-third of parents were in favor of a proposal. The reasons often boil down to wanting to contact their children in an “emergency”, whether it’s a change of after-school plans or a school shooting.
These concerns, while understandable, can’t outweigh the real harms that cell phones bring, both to teens individually and their education. School shootings, horrifying as they are, are rare, and it’s difficult to see how students having phones would keep them safe. And if parents need to contact their children, there’s no reason they can’t call the school office, something that was the norm for generations. For many parents, the phones are, as one activist describe it, an “emotional security blanket”. When we see teens struggling to separate from their devices, it’s easy to see where they learned this behavior – from their parents.
If we want our kids to let go of their phones, we’ll need to convince their parents to do so first. This will require communication and meetings with PTA’s and other groups. Schools need to clearly articulate the harms and problems phones bring as well as the benefits of banning them. They should also include parents in the rule-making process as much as possible.
But the end goal is clear. In this case, the call is coming from inside the classroom, and a complete phone ban is the only way to answer it.
ChatGPT
It’s easy to forget that’s only been less than 2 years since ChatGPT burst onto the scene. OpenAI’s program, which responds to requests and questions in ways that are frighteningly similar to real human speech, has upended everything with its ability to produce authentic-looking texts. Virtually every industry is faced with the same dilemma: Do we push back against the unceasing tide of tech change, or do we give in and embrace the coming wave?
Education is no different, and unfortunately, we haven’t found a good answer. As a teacher, we spent hours discussing all the way “exciting opportunities” AI could enhance our teaching. And there have certainly been upsides. Students can quickly research authors or get tips to tackle a new type of writing. Some programs will let them define unknown words or even simplify whole texts. I once asked students to use an image generator to create pictures of characters from Yukio Mishima’s The Sound of Waves, and we spent a good 20 minutes discussing which were the best (as well as laughing at how weird some of the bad ones were).
But of course, AI has brought a host of problems. As we now know, AI can often hallucinate, and so students who rely on ChatGPT alone for research may get wrong information without realizing it. There’s a real fear that relying solely on programs like ChatGPT may harm students’ ability to research and critically assess what they’ve found. If ChatGPT can summarize it for me, why bother spending an hour reading through first-hand sources (or, for that matter, checking what I’ve just read)?
And then there’s the bigger issue of students using AI to do the work for them. I don’t believe ChatGPT can write an A+ research paper, but it can easily churn out a C-grade one, and that’s more than enough for the lazy, dishonest students. I regularly dealt with students using AI to write everything from poems and essays to scripts for presentations. This kind of thing not only undermines the integrity of the assignment and the course, but it is antithetical to the entire purpose of education in the first place.
The use of AI to cheat has become a huge problem, especially at the high school and college level. As The Atlantic recently reported, even 2 years later, colleges still aren’t sure how to deal with the proliferation of AI-generated essays. Many schools can’t even decide what qualifies as “cheating”, with policies often varying between departments and even individual classes. One teacher may encourage students to use it for research while the other across the hall has banned it entirely. And even when schools do have clear policies, catching students is tough. Distinguishing AI essays from authentic ones is very difficult, and tools that help to identify such essays either produced mixed results or are unavailable. (I’ve personally spent more hours than I care to count trying to deduce whether an essay was written by a student or a machine.)
Today, schools find themselves in a disorganized mess, stumbling forward as teachers and students grapple with a technology they neither understand nor can agree on how to use.
What do we do about it?
History is replete with doomsdayers who felt that the next new thing – video games, the internet, TV – would bring the end of society. When the printing press was invented, scribes across Europe pushed back, protesting and smashing printing presses and declaring the cheap, mass-produced texts to be the work of witchcraft. Plato was against the very idea of writing itself, believing that it would, “implant forgetfulness” in men’s souls and that they would eventually “cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written”.
Let’s be clear – ChatGPT and other AI programs aren’t going away. I sometimes think about the math teachers in the 80’s protesting the use of calculators; these protests look silly in an age where most middle schoolers have a computer in their pocket more powerful than what took astronauts to the moon. Tech resistant attitudes often don’t age well, and they’re almost never successful – just ask the Scribes’ Guilds who protested the printing press in the 1500’s.
But as our experiences with cell phones have taught us, schools can’t turn a blind eye to the problems. ChatGPT and similar AI software is still new, so we have an opportunity – albeit a narrow one – to get ahead of this and figure out how to utilize this wisely in our classes.
First, schools need to be clear and uniform in their policies. Having different teachers with different definitions of the “correct” way to use AI is ambiguous and confusing for students. Schools also need to make these policies clear, and spend time teaching when and how to use AI. I often struggled with getting students to understand the distinction between, for example, using ChatGPT to do research for an essay and using it to write the essay itself. Even well-intentioned students find themselves sliding down a slippery slope from “How do I start a literature essay?” to “Write me an essay on Of Mice and Men”. Making sure they understand the difference – as well as the consequences of plagiarism and cheating – will help set them up well for college.
Schools also need to be more proactive in policing AI use. At my school, we did a number of things to deter students from using it on papers, including using Turnitin and having students write everything on a single Google Doc with instructions not to copy-paste into the document. We could also use programs like Brisk to review students’ work and make sure what they were submitting was actually their own. Other schools have done away with typed work and reverted to the time-honored tradition of paper and pencil.
Finally, schools may need to reconsider the humble, long-cherished essay. In the coming AI age, writing, especially writing that is just a summary of research and facts (i.e., most essays) is cheap. Teachers may need to get creative and think of new ways to assess students’ knowledge. For instance, instead of a paper about George Washington, students could create a series of YouTube-style videos in which they role play as Washington and recount experiences during the Revolutionary War. This kind of project-based learning is engaging, prepares students for the world, and and is not easily generated by a machine (at least not yet, anyways).
Deepfakes
Perhaps the single most alarming tech-related worry isn’t about students’ attention spans or academic integrity, but their very safety and wellbeing. And this risk is coming from deepfakes, which are realistic, AI-generated images that can appear to show someone doing or saying something they never did. While some uses are innocuous or funny, many schools have had to confront a much darker side, what The New York Times has described as an “epidemic” of students spreading deepfake nude images of classmates.
The idea of your peers trading and gawking at nude pictures of you is horrifying, and the damage this could bring to anyone, especially a vulnerable teen, is immeasurable. These images are shockingly easy to make – a 60-second video can be made made in less than half an hour – and they can ruin the reputation and careers of vulnerable young people before they’ve even had a chance to finish high school. And it isn’t just students who are affected. Teachers have also fallen victim to this kind of harassment, leading some to change jobs or quit the profession altogether.
What do we do about it?
Schools need to get serious about this, and fast. While some districts have been quick to implement policies, others have been caught flat-footed. Schools and districts need to create clear policies, make sure students understand them, and be prepared to enforce them, even if it means expelling harassers.
But this is bigger than schools. There’s a shocking lack of legal protection for victims, and in many states, prosecutors are struggling to know how handle cases like this. Only 10 states have laws that explicitly ban explicit deepfake images, and even those can be hard to enforce or carry little more than fines. The borderless nature of the internet makes this issue bigger than individual states which is why we need a federal law that criminalizes these images. The DEFIANCE Act is a good start. The legislation, which has passed the Senate and is waiting to be taken up by the house, would allow victims to sue anyone involved in creating or spreading sexually explicit deepfake images of them.
So where do we go from here?
As a teacher, one thing I always liked about working in schools is how every year brings a fresh start. There’s new classes, new students and teachers, and a new chance to start over and do better than the year before. And that’s exactly what we have now.
We have a chance to change our relationship with technology. We have a chance to reset and reconsider what technology we let into our schools and how we use it. We can work to make sure our students are learning and growing while being kept safe from all the harms that unrestrained tech use can bring. We have a chance to do better by our students. For their sakes, we must.