Arizona School’s Curriculum Will Be Taught by AI, No Teachers

Arizona just approved a new charter school called Unbound Academy where students in grades 4-8 will receive only 2 hours of daily instruction, delivered entirely by AI systems like IXL and Khan Academy, with no traditional teachers. Instead of teachers, “guides” will lead workshops on life skills for the rest of the day.

The school’s model, already operating as a private school in Texas, claims students learn twice as much despite reduced academic time.

So when are they gonna pay us for writing the curriculum?

We worked hard on a lot of the shitposts that AI probably got trained on.

I mean Arizona is near the bottom of the school systems…. Maybe it will be better?

I paid $8k a year to have slideshows read to me by lazy and disinterested professors. Being taught by AI would have been an improvement.

That being said, nothing can replace the intellectual nurturing of a good teacher, who cares about their job; such a shame, they’re so underfunded.

I’m actually all for having AI tutors for students but I still think there should be a human teacher setting the lesson plans and monitoring what the AI teaches the students.

When I was in school I saw so many students fall behind because a teacher teaching a class of about forty students cannot adequately provide the one on one interactions necessary to make sure the students understand the lesson material with all of them. So having a personal AI that can digest the class material and relate that information to the student in a manner the student can understand is a godsend. However jumping straight to having only AI teaching the students with no human oversight is folly.

I hate to say it but I’ve learned more from AI than my college professors and how they set up the curriculum.

Can’t do any worse…..worse state in America for public education. Or could it get worse?

*Sigh* Another example of all-or-nothing thinking. Hopefully people will realize that humans and AI working together is the only way forward before something terrible happens.

Teacher here. I’ve worked in a range of contexts from homeschooling to higher ed. Presently teach 5-7 grade at a relatively upscale private school.

I think something that most people don’t understand about teaching middle school age specifically is how much of the work is engaging kids and dealing with challenges that are not directly academic. Like, X is struggling with attentiveness during grammar lessons because they are struggling with their gender identity and parents are in conflict about this too, but if you can woo them with the proper creative writing topic, their engagement may increase over time and they may discover that there is something to this learning thing. Or Y reads three to four grade levels below the norm, but they struggle to ask questions and do everything to keep up appearances because they’re prideful. Getting parents to just engage with that reality is a multi-year team effort. I could go on and on.

So when I read articles like this and some of the discussion around them, it’s apparent to me that people miss the interconnected nature between core academic learning and so many other things going on in a child’s life, as well as how these play out unpredictably on a daily basis. “Lecturing” to middle schoolers is much more art than science.

I use generative programs in my teaching to help support student practice, and what stands out to me is how bad these programs are at helping students who lie at the outer fifty percent of the bell curve. They foster complacency in higher performers and frustration in lower performers. They’re a tool that has their place, but the limits to their adaptivity hinder them more than people realize. Will this improve? Absolutely, but kids often need personal relationships to help them work through challenges or push themselves. I feel as though the nature of these such applications as being created by engineers who are often self-starters and self-directed learners presupposes much of the same for the students they are working for. I don’t think five percent of the hundreds of individuals I’ve taught would properly succeed in such a setting no matter how good the tools.

Just some musings. AI is certainly a hot topic in education right now, especially of the independent school variety, and while it has its place and I am increasingly using it as a tool, like a lot of tech hype, its limits are overlooked and often misunderstood by those outside of the field.

I noticed there are “guides” the rest of the day. So just like teachers, minus the training and union and salary. So it’s a way to turn a skilled job to what’s an “unskilled” on paper job and give the people “guiding” the kids even less say in the workplace.