I recently listened to this episode of Decoder with Nilay Patel about how AI is fueling an existential crisis in education, and it really resonated with me. The episode features interviews with teachers who are grappling with fundamental questions about their role and purpose in an AI-driven world.

One quote that particularly struck me:

“That idea that we don’t really understand AI yet, that a lot of people don’t know how it works, and that we have no long-term data about its effects in the classroom because it’s so new, well, that’s a really big point of contention that we heard from a lot of teachers.”

This captures a fundamental problem: we’re making decisions about integrating AI into education without understanding its long-term effects. We don’t have decades of research like we do with other educational interventions. We’re essentially running a massive, uncontrolled experiment on millions of students.

The podcast also highlights how we might be repeating past mistakes:

“It feels to me like we haven’t learned some key lessons, a lot of them very recent. One of those during the pandemic was the costs of unhuman teaching and learning. I worry that as we did with cell phones and over reliance on one-to-one devices, we’re going to wake up a decade or more from now and realize we jumped on a tech bandwagon that keeps kids tethered to screens, harms them and harms learning.”

The pandemic showed us the limits of screen-based learning, yet we’re now pushing AI tutors that would keep students even more tethered to devices.

The most powerful theme from the podcast is the question teachers keep asking: “What are we even doing here? What’s the point?”

When AI can write essays, solve problems, and answer questions, what’s left for human teachers? The answer, I think, is everything that matters most: understanding the student, building relationships, fostering curiosity, teaching critical thinking (not just problem-solving), and helping students to navigate the world as human beings, not just as test-takers.

1EdTech (formerly IMS Global Learning Consortium) develops technical standards that enable interoperability between educational technology systems. These standards ensure that different platforms—learning management systems, content publishers, assessment tools, and student information systems—can communicate and share data seamlessly. This interoperability is crucial for institutions that use multiple edtech tools, as it eliminates data silos and reduces manual workarounds.

Below is a quick reference guide to the key 1EdTech standards, organized by their primary function and data flow patterns.

We knew that saying please and thank you costs Sam Altman millions of dollars. But this article presents some research that says that impolite prompts tend to outperform polite prompts.

I will try my hardest to eliminate my please and thank yous from now on. But I don’t think I can find it in myself to be intentionally rude, even to an AI.

Alpha School has been on my mind lately, since I listened to this podcast. I don’t normally listen to that podcast, but I discovered it in my podcasts app. Joe Liemandt has some good insights and ideas, and the podcast serves mostly as marketing for Alpha School. .

Because I’m tuned into AI and education, I’ve had quite a few stories about Alpha School in my feeds. And then this Wired Story hit my feed, and it really made me think.

A few things stand out to me:

• The host’s child attended Alpha School and then left
• None of the results claimed are independently verified
• There’s always tradeoffs

It was a head scratcher to learn that Peter Attia’s child attended Alpha Schools but then left. If it was so good, why leave? The Wired story states that this is a common occurence since many parents find that Alpha Schools pushes their children too hard.

The fact that none of Alpha Schools claims are independently verified is also a red flag. With the market opportunity uncovered, there are many private schools making big claims to attract students. There are a lot of snake oil salesmen.

There are always tradeoffs. If students are learning everything they need to know in two hours with AI, then there is going to be a tradeoff. Alpha Schools may enable students to outperform their peers on MAP scores, but there has to be a tradeoff. If you believe the Wired story, it is the student’s wellbeing and sanity.