Yesterday evening, the Boston School Committee met and approved both the adoption of an artificial intelligence policy and the city’s first private school centered on artificial intelligence.
The policy is fairly broad and leaves a number of open questions. It makes allusions to issues such as environmental impacts and overreliance, but it’s not clear how it actually addresses them. There are also no explicit references to potential harms to cognition and learning from artificial intelligence use in either the policy or the associated documentation. Notably, Google’s Gemini and Notebook LM are made available to most students in grades 7 and up by default and K-5/6 schools can request that these be made available to their students as well. The lack of any mention of research on cognitive harm as well as the wide-spread access to chatbots raises serious questions about what data was used in making the policy.
The approved private school, Alpha Academy, is run by a company named 2 Hour Learning and centered on a model of a two-hour core academic block. Along with the many general concerns with artificial intelligence in education, an investigation by the outlet 404 Media found a number of worrisome issues at already existing Alpha Academy schools. Internal company documents that showed that lesson plans were sometimes faulty or presented illogical questions. Former employees voiced concern about the surveillance tools the academy used and the investigation found deficiencies in the storage and sharing of student data. In addition, the company has trained the AI models it uses by scraping data from a variety of other online courses without permission, potentially in violation of the terms of service of those platforms.
The Alpha Academy schools are part of a larger set of products which 2 Hour Learning has been attempting to role out across the country. Another one of the company’s schools, part of its Unbound Academy network, was rejected by the Pennsylvania Department of Education, which noted that “The artificial intelligence instructional model being proposed by this school is untested and fails to demonstrate how the tools, methods and providers would ensure alignment to Pennsylvania academic standards.”
The policy document makes repeated references to the notion of responsible and safe artificial intelligence use. The reality, however, is that we simply do not have the data available at this time to make decisions about what constitutes such a use in classrooms and that the policy as it stands leaves many openings for students to be exposed to artificial intelligence in ways that are already known to pose problems. Hopefully the committee will elect to reevaluate its decisions in the future and vote for artificial intelligence regulations that help secure the education that Boston’s children deserve.