Friday News Roundup

It’s Friday. Time for the Roundup.

Do Cell Phone Bans Work? Educators Share Their Experiences (EducationWeek)

No, they don’t.

According to EducationWeek online this week,

“At least 88 percent of teens own a personal smartphone, according to Common Sense Media, and 43 percent of 8- to 12-year-olds have smartphones.”

“About 1 in 10 teachers, principals, and district leaders say that cellphones are banned in their schools while 22 percent believe that they should be banned on campus…”

Banning cell phones is a losing proposition for schools. They would be better served by focusing on improving reading, writing, and problem-solving skills.

Cardona Says Standardized Tests Haven’t Always Met the Mark, Offers New Flexibility (EducationWeek)

According to EducationWeek online this week,

“U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona is urging states to ditch their fill-in-the-bubble and short response tests and work to create a new breed of rich assessments by taking advantage of longstanding – but little used – federal flexibility.”

“In announcing changes to a program known as the Innovative Assessment testing pilot that was designed to encourage states to develop and deploy a new generation of state assessment, Cardona acknowledged that the current crop of tests has considerable limitations.”

It will be interesting to see how many states follow Cardona’s lead. States have invested billions of dollars in the current collection of high-stakes tests. It’s difficult to say if these same states will throw those tests away and invest more money in a new brand of assessment. Plus, fill-in-the-bubble and short response tests are easier to grade than more innovative options.

We’ll see.

Fear of Competition? Research Shows That When Asian Students Move In, White Families Move Out (The 74)

It used to be that white families fled public schools because black and brown kids started to enroll in those schools. According to The 74 online, no longer. In an article published this week, the education news organization reported that,

“Asian Americans increasingly find themselves at the center of scorching debates over educational opportunity and fairness, whether related to admissions practices at highly selective colleges or pressing concerns over social exclusion in school.”

“Now research evidence demonstrates that they face racial isolation simply by entering the classroom. A recent study of wealthy California suburbs finds that white families drift away from public schools as more Asian students enroll in them – and fears over academic competition, rather than outright racism, may play the biggest role in driving the departures.”

As Schools Move to Change How Kids Are Graded, Some Families Push Back (EdSurge)

EdSurge online reported this week that,

“When a public school system in the San Francisco Bay Area explored replacing traditional grading practices with a form of ‘standards-based grading system’ meant to eliminate bias, it sparked widespread opposition from parents. They signed petitions and showed up in force at school board meetings to rail against the changes.”

“The proposal, which leaders of the Dublin Unified School District began testing with a cohort of teachers last year, was pitched as a way to shift emphasis from winning points on tests and homework to student mastery of material – and to improve equity by better supporting students who might take a bit longer to learn. So it put opponents of the plan in the somewhat awkward position of vocally fighting something named ‘Equity Grading.’”

“But one after another, parents at a July school board meeting did just that.”

“Some complained that the change to the grading system made their students guinea pigs in what they saw as an unproven approach. Several others objected to a system where a student can get a high mark even if they skipped the homework, as long as they could prove they understood the material.”

Am I missing something here? Isn’t understanding the material the outcome all learners are after?

It’s time to personalize feedback for all learners. We have the ability to do it. It’s arguably immoral and unethical not to.

Is AI Friend or Foe? (University of Houston Newsletter)

We’ve discussed AI in this column. I think I’ve decided that, even though AI has a huge upside moving forward into the future, its present state just isn’t as dependable as it needs to be. For example, read the story of Jeff Morgan, a mathematics professor and associate provost at the University of Houston. According to the U of H newsletter,

“In April of 2023, [Morgan] decided to give ChatGPT a math test. Specifically, he wanted to determine if the massively popular artificial intelligence platform – still less than six months old at the time – could solve the type of question he would pose to the sophomores in his linear algebra class.”

“He asked the machine, ‘Can you determine the number of positives definite 2 by 2 real symmetric matrices whose entries are integers from -10 to 10?’ When he later recapped this quiz for a post on the UH AI/ChatGPT blog, he wrote that the problem was one he could solve by writing a few lines of code. In other words, it was the sort of quiz the world’s most powerful, publicly available AI chatbot should be able to parse with ease.”

“Instead, the machine made a series of simple mistakes, wrote some gibberish that Morgan called ‘pseudo code,’ and came up with an answer of 310, well off from the true answer of 986. The professor concluded that ChatGPT seemed to understand the question, but badly fumbled the logic needed to answer it. When he shares results like this with his class, Morgan’s message to the students of 2023 is ‘buyer beware.’”

“’I was very open and honest with them,’ he says. ‘The underlying statement to them was, ‘Hey, be careful with this stuff because it can give as many wrong answers as it gives right answers.’”

Sounds like ChatGPT needs improvement. Let’s see what it can do in a year.

Enjoy your weekend! SVB