| House subcommittee holds hearing on potential - and pitfalls - of AI in schools |
On Tuesday, the House Subcommittee on Early Childhood, Elementary, and Secondary Education held a hearing to examine the potential benefits and pitfalls of artificial intelligence (AI) for classroom teaching, student data privacy, and critical thinking skills. While over half of U.S. states have published their own guidelines for using AI in schools, according to the national TeachAI coalition, relying only on states to deploy AI in classrooms without guidance from the federal government “is a recipe for fragmentation” and a “missed opportunity in education,” argued panelist Erin Mote, chief executive of InnovateEDU and the EdSafe AI Alliance. Districts such as Mississippi’s Pearl Public School District have their own internal enterprise systems to safeguard student data; however, many cannot afford to set up such networks. Mote also said that cuts to federal agencies, including the Education Department's Office for Civil Rights, make it harder to "reweight" sensitive data, particularly when it comes to students with disabilities or those from other subgroups. i"[I]n order to do that, to have the data, to be able to train those models, to be more equitable, … we need data and data infrastructure,” Mote said. “And right now, we are seeing a dismantling of our data infrastructure at the federal level, the very data sets that would allow industry, that would allow researchers, that would allow others to use that data to be able to train these schools to mitigate bias.”
