The American education establishment loves to rebrand. Home economics became family and consumer science, while vocational education is now career and technical education. Remedial education is now developmental coursework, economically disadvantaged students are at-risk or underserved, and English as a second language students are English language learners or emerging bilinguals. The new terms that replaced the old reflect educators’ evolving perspectives on these concepts.

One label, though, has refused to die: gifted. For decades, experts in and outside of gifted education have criticized the label as elitist, simplistic, and generally problematic. Yet, the term persists in schools, among scholars, and in popular culture.

In one sense, it does not matter what label one applies to accelerated academic programs and the students enrolled in them. The need for advanced programs remains because individual differences in aptitude lead some students to learn complex material better and faster than their peers, whether or not such students are called “gifted.” As Shakespeare wrote, “That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”

But many education scholars still find that the gifted label and the concept of “giftedness” runs contrary to psychological data and the reality of educating children. The contradictions are real.

Criticisms of the gifted label are not new. The most common response among experts who grapple with these criticisms is to advocate its elimination. But the label persists, even in the scholarly work of some of those who want to abolish it. I believe the label endures because it has some usefulness, and its critics’ true contention is with the concept of giftedness. However, this does not mean the education system must or should retain the gifted label forever.

“Giftedness” Is Dead

The critics rightfully point out that the gifted label implies that being gifted or not gifted is an either/or condition. No one ever says, “My child is partially gifted,” or “The school says my daughter is 80 percent gifted.” Categorizing children as gifted (or not) implies that there is a stark difference between gifted children and others. But such unequivocal divisions do not exist in the general population. As education scholars have pointed out, any given ability lies on a continuum, and dichotomies are artificially imposed. Children just below the cutoff to be labeled gifted differ little from those just above the cutoff.

The same problem afflicts many diagnostic labels in clinical psychology. Depression, anxiety, and undesirable personality traits (for example, perfectionism and antisocial behavior) all sit on a continuum. Everyone displays these traits to some extent, with some people having very low levels, others very high, and most of us somewhere in between. When those characteristics reach a point where they interfere with a person’s functioning, psychologists label the person as having a disorder. Clinical psychologists have dealt with this reality by recognizing the existence of “subclinical” symptoms: mild symptoms that may cause some dysfunction but do not cross the line into a full-blown diagnosis.

The field of clinical psychology has standardized criteria and labels to help guide the process of diagnosis. Even though clinicians may not always completely agree on a diagnosis, classification systems such as the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual and the International Classification of Diseases ensure that psychologists have a common understanding of which symptoms qualify a person for a diagnosis such as major depressive disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, or antisocial personality disorder.

By contrast, the field of gifted education lacks this kind of standardized guidance, even for its most basic label. The scholarly discipline is highly fragmented, and experts disagree over which of the dozens of definitions of giftedness should be preferred. Some of the definitions even contradict one another. Whereas some scholars view giftedness as a solely intellectual trait, others see it as including an emotional component. Some contend that giftedness is exclusively a matter of academic aptitude (usually assessed through standardized tests), while others argue that giftedness can include motivation and interest in a given subject. These fundamental disagreements make it impossible to recognize “subclinical” levels of giftedness.

Even when experts agree on a definition of giftedness, there is no inherent cutoff point at which someone warrants the label of gifted. With mental disorders, it is at least clear that dysfunctional and maladaptive behaviors require treatment. There is no such obvious point at which giftedness should be “treated.” In the United States, the percentage of children labeled as gifted varies widely across districts and states, sometimes in nonsensical ways, if giftedness is supposed to be an enduring personal trait. When I conducted a study of six Utah school districts, the district with far and away the highest percentage of children labeled as gifted also had the lowest academic performance. Most of the “gifted” children there would not be considered “gifted” if they moved to one of the other districts.

Likewise, no one in clinical psychology would recommend that their patient be reassessed for depression solely because they move to a new town; in gifted education, children are often re-evaluated to determine whether the child “really is” gifted by local standards after a move. Experts in gifted education call this phenomenon “geographic giftedness,” which discloses the fact that being gifted is not a fixed personal trait.

This comparison to clinical psychology reveals a crucial difference between “gifted” and diagnostic labels such as “depressed.” Whereas depression truly exists, giftedness does not. When the gifted label implies that a person has a psychological quality of giftedness, intractable problems arise. This is because giftedness is always defined or measured in relation to other traits or behaviors. For example, the U.S. federal government’s 1972 Marland Report—still influential today—defined gifted children as those who have high performance, achievement, and/or ability in at least one of six areas: (1) general intellectual ability (intelligence), (2) special academic aptitude, (3) creative or productive thinking, (4) leadership, (5) visual and performing arts, and (6) psychomotor ability (athletics or fine motor skills).

Note that the Marland Report always stated giftedness was manifested in specific domains, never on its own. In other words, giftedness has no independent existence. No one has ever defined giftedness without reference to other psychological or educational constructs. Giftedness is always a parasite that depends on other traits for its survival.

Instead, giftedness is defined in the Marland Report (and elsewhere) as high potential or performance in some particular domain. What is inside people’s heads are characteristics like intelligence, academic aptitude, creativity, leadership ability, artistic talent, and psychomotor ability. When someone scores highly on a measure of one of these characteristics, they receive the label gifted. In contrast, when a diagnosis is applied in clinical psychology, there is a recognition that the underlying trait (for example, anxiety) has independent existence. Giftedness itself is the source of the problems in the gifted label.

The Marland Report also exposes another flaw in the concept of giftedness: With so many ways to be gifted, how can one term apply to all of these domains? If the Marland Report is taken seriously, then a school’s math whiz, its star basketball player, and the lead actress in the school play should all be labeled as gifted, even though their talents and abilities are vastly different. While its advocates may see this understanding of giftedness as “inclusive” or “non-elitist,” a better term would be “incoherent.” It is not clear what is gained by applying the same label to these different abilities. Unsurprisingly, the field’s leading scholars are aware of this problem.

All these problems with the concept of giftedness illustrate how the study of giftedness entails reification, which is defined in the APA Dictionary of Psychology as “treating an abstraction, concept, or formulation as though it were a real object or material thing.” Scholars and educators would benefit from understanding that giftedness has no real existence and instead studying the underlying traits, abilities, and behaviors that have utility and value in education or society. Basing the label of gifted on a hypothesized underlying giftedness is incoherent and creates philosophical and scientific problems that scholars and educators have been unable to resolve.

In short, giftedness as a psychological construct is a phantom. The administrative label gifted has many of the same problems and also needs to go. But getting rid of these labels is not enough.

In the grand tradition of educational rebranding, I propose that educators and scholars replace “gifted” with the term “advanced.”

Long Live “Advanced” Learners!

The idea of giftedness as a scholarly topic arose out of the education system, and many of gifted education’s scholars and practitioners work in the context of that system. Seeing giftedness as a psychological construct causes problems, but understanding the practice of gifted education reveals a valid need for the label of advanced.

The fundamental premise of gifted or advanced education programs is the same philosophy that underpins special education. Both sets of services arise from a perceived mismatch between a child’s aptitudes or needs and the classroom lessons aimed at the typically developing student. As a result, the child requires accommodations or adjustments to learn productively in the school environment. Educational psychologists have long recognized the similarities between special education and advanced education, and they understandably see both services as natural products of individual differences in learning speed and cognitive ability.

If some students will receive special services and other students will not, it is necessary to distinguish between those two groups of students. This is where the advanced label becomes useful. Teachers, administrators, policymakers, and others need to know which children have a mismatch between their abilities and the instruction offered in a typical classroom. Without that knowledge, it is not clear to whom schools should provide an accelerated alternative.

Recognizing this need for a label solves many problems. First, it resolves the reification problem that “giftedness” produces. If the term “advanced” merely signifies that a child qualifies for special services, then advanced does not imply that the student has a condition or trait that exists independently. Likewise, a child being labeled as advanced implies they are ready for more complex material, but it does not imply that this readiness is innate or that the child is part of a special subtype of the student population. This label also does not suggest that the child will necessarily remain advanced permanently. Perhaps the state of being advanced persists for a given child, or maybe their peers eventually catch up and the mismatch between the advanced child’s needs and the standard classroom is eliminated.

Understanding advanced as meaning “eligible for services” also accommodates the heterogeneity of abilities among advanced students. Depending on the local definition of advanced and available program offerings, advanced educational services can take the form of full-time special classes, part-day enrichment experiences, Advanced Placement and dual enrollment classes, the International Baccalaureate program, accelerated classes in each subject, experiences in all the performing and visual arts, magnet schools, leadership opportunities, full and partial grade skipping, and more. Treating the advanced label as qualification for services does not imply that students enrolled in these different programs are similar—beyond the fact that their needs are not met in the typical classroom. The label simply means, “These children qualify for the services that our school is able to offer.”

That understanding of the advanced label also solves the problem of geographic giftedness. If a child who participates in an advanced program in one town moves to a new location that offers different services—or that has different standards for qualifying for the same services—then of course she or he is no longer advanced, in the sense that the child no longer qualifies for services. The standards and the environment have changed, not the child, which is why the child loses the advanced label when they are no longer out of sync with their new classmates or the local curriculum.

The only downside with understanding “advanced” as merely referring to eligibility for services is that it makes the label tautological. But at least a tautological definition is internally consistent and avoids the problems that arise from reification and interpreting giftedness as a psychological condition.

Consequences of Killing Giftedness

Dispensing with giftedness in favor of an advanced label clearly confers philosophical and theoretical advantages as well as administrative benefits in school systems—but it also has practical consequences. First, this understanding of the advanced label means that there can be no gifted or advanced adults. If the advanced label is only applied during K–12 schooling when students receive services from their local school district, then there is no need to label adults as advanced, let alone gifted. Even if an adult test-taker obtained the maximum score on an IQ test, they would not be considered advanced, because there are no special education services for them to receive.

The second practical consequence arises from the philosophy behind selecting children for advanced academic programs. When giftedness is considered part of a child’s inherent psychology, the goal is to “identify” the gifted. As a result, gifted education scholars and policymakers often fuss over false positives (the incorrect labeling of children as gifted when they “really” are not) and false negatives (overlooking children who “really are gifted”). This is why one group of authors said that “determining who is and who is not identified as gifted is a fraught subject.”

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The problem with a focus on gifted identification is that it results in what I call the “treasure hunt model.” Identifying advanced learners turns into a hunt for the “truly” gifted. The problem is that, in reality, giftedness does not exist independently inside a child’s head. Therefore, there is no objective standard of giftedness that school officials can use to determine whether the children selected for a program are “really” gifted or not.

In contrast, if being advanced only refers to whether a student qualifies for advanced academic programs, then the entire concept of gifted identification no longer makes sense. The process should instead be called “program selection,” because it only entails choosing which students can enroll in a more challenging educational offering. The concept of program selection reduces anxiety over false positives and false negatives because advanced students are just a group who are judged to qualify for a particular academic program.

A third consequence of aligning the advanced label with program eligibility is that the standard way of providing special educational opportunities gets reversed. Traditionally, school personnel are first tasked with identifying or finding gifted children and then serving them with accelerated educational experiences through the appropriate gifted program. However, when labeling a child as advanced is a function of program fit, educational programs take on primary importance. This matters because no school district can offer every possible advanced learning opportunity; limitations of budgets, space, expertise, and personnel require every district to pick and choose which advanced programs to offer. When district personnel do not feel constrained to offer a traditional gifted program, it frees them to create a program that can flourish in the local context—which is then later filled with children selected to populate it. Some education experts already advocate for this program-first perspective.

Saving Education from “Giftedness”

In short, the gifted label has endured partly out of tradition but also because it remains useful in distinguishing students who qualify for advanced learning opportunities from those who do not. The problem is not with labelling per se, but rather with conceptions of “giftedness” that imply that it is an enduring quality inherent in a person’s mind. These conceptions fly in the face of psychological and educational reality.

The solution is to discard the ideas of “giftedness” and “being gifted” and to focus on challenging “advanced” learners. This will help the scholarly field of advanced education to shed its historical baggage and the incoherent philosophical underpinnings that have troubled scholars and administrators for decades. Thinking and speaking about “advanced” students in the context of specific learning opportunities solves semantic and scholarly problems that have had unfortunate practical implications for far too long.

It is time to let “giftedness” and the “gifted” label die the quiet death they deserve. The label “advanced,” properly understood as nothing more than a bus ticket to more complex coursework, can and should live on, unapologetically useful and finally free of philosophical baggage.

Russell T. Warne, formerly a psychology professor, is the chief scientist at Riot IQ and the creator of the Reasoning and Intelligence Online Test.

The post “Gifted” Is Dead. Long Live “Advanced” Learners! appeared first on Education Next.

If you’ve ever walked through a bookstore with an author by your side, you may have noticed something peculiar: writers don’t check out new books the way normal people do. Your average reader, when they pick up a book, will first inspect the cover, then they will read the synopsis, and finally they will glance at the author photo, cruelly appraising the hair and skin and posture of a subspecies of human (Homo scriptor) that largely prefers to remain out of sight. In other words, they will never actually open the book before they buy it. A writer, by contrast—wise to the Draperian deceptions of jacket copy—tends to open it to the first page, take a quick sip of its prose, and if they like it, then and only then will they endeavor to learn what the book is actually about.

Authors understand that every book is, in truth, two books. There is the book a writer writes, which is to say the actual words on the page, and then there is what I call its hologram—the shimmering, ethereal version of the book that the author must pitch to their publisher, and which their publisher then pitches to the public. Writers tend to find this process—reducing a complex, nuanced work of art down to a tidy cartoon version of itself—excruciating. But we are forced to do it, because no one can read a whole book before they buy it.

Put simply, people don’t buy books. They buy holograms, and they hope the book matches up.

Some of the great books throughout history have had a hard time finding a wide readership, at least at first, because they had a faulty hologram: The book itself is brilliant, but the title, the synopsis, even the cover image leave buyers cold. Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass famously took six years before it reached the Times bestseller list, where it now resides more or less permanently. Some of my favorite novels—Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, Norman Rush’s Mating, Toni Morrison’s Beloved—are ones I put off reading for years, simply because the title sounded fusty, even though the books themselves are anything but. Eventually, truly great books tend to outgrow their drab holograms and reach a wide audience, but it takes time, labor, and good luck.

Sometimes, the inverse is true: the book itself is drek, but the hologram is a work of art. I recently ran across a book called Infinite Jeffs, which is the reductio ad absurdum of this phenomenon. In it, the author replaces every word in the novel Infinite Jest with the word “Jeff”: the result is 776 pages filled with nothing but “Jeff jeff jeff jeff,” and so on. It isn’t a book any human alive will ever read from front to back, but as a hologram, it’s devilishly clever.

Readers are swiftly losing any regard for the line between hologram and book, between map and territory.

It is no secret that publishing is currently experiencing a crisis. One genre of books—“serious nonfiction,” or, more colloquially, “dad books”—seem to be especially hard hit, as readers retreat en masse from the gnarly complexities of history into works of cozy fantasy. “The trend couldn’t be clearer,” the publisher Jonathan Karp told the Wall Street Journal. “This is a sea change and people should wake up and realize we’re living in a new world.”

The pat explanation for this shift is that people are just too busy, too broke, and too brain-melted to read serious books any more. On top of that, the wider media ecosystem is going through what is being called a “discoverability crisis.” Book review sections are evaporating; NPR has been eviscerated; and social media followings no longer seem to be reliably converting into book sales.

However, I suspect that the source of the problem is both stranger and deeper than that. I fear that readers are swiftly losing any regard for the line between hologram and book, between map and territory. The trouble is not that the publishing industry has failed to create compelling holograms in order to effectively market books; it’s that the holograms have become so effective that we are unconsciously training readers not to want to read. Instead of book reviews—which, by dint of their brevity, are forced to strike a balance between describing the book and giving it all away for free—holograms now reach readers in the form of podcast interviews, which chew over the contents of a given book for one or even two hours, sucking every morsel from its bones. Some authors even go a step further, agreeing to flay and anatomize their own books, breaking them down into a tidy list of “key insights” aimed at busy professionals. I recently performed one such act of ritual self-cannibalism, known (aptly) as a Book Bite, distilling a work that took me nine years to write into a listicle that takes mere minutes to consume. (Then, for good measure, I took that Book Bite and posted a nibble of it on my Instagram.)

Increasingly, and far more insidiously, holograms come in the form of AI. Amazon has instituted a feature called “Ask This Book,” which allows you to interrogate the app about the contents of the text, and then, if you so choose, skip reading it altogether. A few months ago, the author and podcaster Tyler Cowan launched his new book, The Marginal Revolution, onto his website, in full, along with an “integrated AI assistant” that pre-digests the prose for you, like a mother bird regurgitating food into the maw of her chicks. As of the time of this writing, almost four months after its publication, the text still contains a typo in its opening lines, suggesting to me that no one close to the author has even bothered to read it with care.

I recently embarked on a month-long book tour from Vancouver to Los Angeles. Along the way, I stopped off to meet up with friends and colleagues, some of whom I haven’t seen in years. What nearly everyone I spoke with told me, in one form or another, is that they are feeling the effects of a holographic crisis that extends far beyond the publishing industry. I spoke with a friend who, unable to find time to read whole books, has begun to run PDFs through an AI program that converts them into podcasts, complete with two chatty humanoid voices. I talked with a literary agent who said that her clients, fearing their book proposal will be read first by AI before it ever encounters human eyeballs, are tweaking their proposals to suit robotic tastes, much as magazines tailor their headlines to game social media algorithms. And I talked with a Hollywood producer who caught a studio exec pretending to have read a script, when it was clear he’d used AI to summarize it. (She knew this for a fact, because the LLM had mistaken the plotline of a novel within the script for the plot of the film itself.)

In Simulation and Simulacra, Jean Baudrillard famously explored the perils of living in a world of holograms. The book opens with an epigraph from Ecclesiastes: “The simulacrum is never what hides the truth—it is truth that hides the fact that there is none.” This, as any reader with a functioning brain cell left in their skull knows, is not an actual quote from the Bible. Baudrillard is playing a little textual prank on us, inserting the simulacrum of a quotation into a book about simulacra. But he is also, I think, making a deep, if deeply cynical, observation about the nature of truth itself.

Holograms are not a product of the digital or even the industrial age—people were creating them in biblical times as well, each time they spoke in concrete terms about the ineffable nature of the divine. There has always been a temptation to give up worrying over questions of falsity and authenticity, because isn’t everything a hologram, really, when you think about it? Baudrillard gave into that temptation so fully that he made an art out of it. But I refuse to, and I hope you do, too. Down that road, darkness lies.

Nearly every author and editor I know feels that our present holographic crisis is merely a wan prelude of what’s to come: a tsunami of texts wholly written by AI, flooding the earth with books without authors, holograms piled atop holograms, with no ground-truth beneath them. “A fool also multiplies words,” the author of Ecclesiastes warns. “At the beginning their words are folly; at the end they are wicked madness.”

There are people who go for runs, and then there are runners. Going for a run requires a pair of running shoes. Being a runner is a lifestyle, complete with social run clubs, non-alcoholic beer, influencers, gadgets, and even its own social media platform. This summer’s European heat wave has not stopped the runners from venturing out, either in the early morning hours or after dark, and the Strava feeds are full of sunsets and excess sweat. In fact, there are more of these runners today than ever before. The London Marathon released its stats for 2026, and boasted its highest number of entries ever, as well as a significant increase in the number of women trying to get a spot on the start line.

Women’s embrace of running might be seen as a feminist advance, a step beyond patriarchal standards of beauty that saw women as mere ornaments, rather than active beings. Online influencers promote running as a form of self-care that gets you off your phone and into the real world, something that is good for you—and not simply for your dating prospects. With an air of approachability, they invite you to follow along with the progress of their first half or full marathon, or maybe even a full Iron Man. The more extreme the pursuit, and the more “normal” the influencer, the higher the engagement. The treadmill is out, performance goals are in.

But the running itself is not exactly analog. Many of the charming influencers who are taking up the sport are being sponsored by digital apps such as Runna, which provides tailored training plans and comes with a bustling online community. The app tracks the workout via the Garmin running watch. Clearly the sponsorships are working—the women who used to track calories are joining the ever-growing happy crowds at the world’s biggest marathons. 

Even I have been bitten by the bug. Inspired in part by my friend who is training for an Iron Man—and because I miss the days where I was easily able to consume a whole pizza—I have signed myself up for a half marathon. The tailored training plans, subscriptions, and electrolytes are lined up to welcome me into the fold.

Suddenly, even recreational exercisers are acting like athletes. The affliction was on full display recently when Steven Bartlett detailed to his audience of young and ambitious billionaire hopefuls the perils that had ensued when he consumed three glasses of wine one evening, and was promptly told off by his Whoop armband. The running watches are also not just made for running. They tell you how you’ve slept, whether you should be taking a rest day, whether you’re drinking enough water, and even adapt your training to your menstrual cycle. Suddenly you’ll start to feel like a workout you haven’t tracked doesn’t count.

 “Even professional athletes didn’t use to be this neurotic.”

Even professional athletes didn’t use to be this neurotic. Suzanne Lenglen had cognac in the middle of her 1919 Wimbledon final to soothe her nerves. My old figure skating coach used to reminisce about the wild parties that were thrown on the Friday night before a competition. Perhaps he was exaggerating when he claimed that skaters used to down a glass of vodka for the nerves before a program—the tipsiness wouldn’t set in before the end of the three-minute routine. Instead, our generation of figure skaters was drowned in sports psychology and SMART goals. Now, professional athletes get their bloodwork done, test their VO2 max on fancy machines, and tailor their schedules to eliminate all inefficiencies. The amateurs go as far as they can with wearables and AI-driven personal training plans.

Gen Z might be getting into running, but we are still bored, lonely, and anxious. Perhaps it is no accident that we neurotics are drawn to running, a uniquely trackable sport, where every minor improvement incrementally increases your predicted race times on Strava. Every element of your diet, sleep schedule, and social life can be adapted to it. “Healthy is beautiful” is repeated ad nauseam and we become walking public health campaigns. We are slowly outsourcing intuition to optimizable metrics. Every unforeseen life event or ingested substance can throw off the regimen; complete lack of resilience to any outside stimulus is reframed as health. “Holistic” just means adapting everything to fit your workout routine. 

Decades ago, feminists imagined a utopia where women have no scruples about our looks. But the aesthetic approach at least had a vision of a life to look good for. Instead of exercising in order to be able to eat, drink, and enjoy life, “health” has become the whole lifestyle. Too many glances at the ever-present online finger-wagger is a reminder that every cigarette or glass of wine is creating a bodily inefficiency that ought to be eliminated.

There is of course some deception in many people’s super-optimized new fitness regimens—a little hope that the new performance goals will also bring about the perfect body. But it is no more noble to be a metrics obsessive than to want to look good in a bikini. The runners in my life have told me it gets easier over time, that the heaving and panting is only temporary. Hopefully, I won’t need a watch to tell me that I’ve crossed the finish line. And I’ll get through my race with the knowledge that there’s a well-deserved pint and pizza at the end.

As parents scrutinize the quantity and quality of screen time in classrooms, edtech developers, funders, and commentators plead with them, “Please do not go too far! Please do not throw out the baby with the bathwater!”

Forming school policy around bad examples of edtech “is throwing the baby out with the bathwater,” says the CEO of the Digital Learning Collaborative in District Administration.

“Educators do not want to throw the baby out with the bathwater,” claims The Week.

“The conversation is missing nuance and it’s a little bit like throwing the baby out of the bathwater,” says Tony Wan of Reach Capital on Alexander Russo’s The Education Show podcast.

Well what’s the baby, then?

Edtech developers all seem to think that they are the baby, not bathwater, and I am very sorry but you cannot all be baby. Last week, Lina Eroh from the Overdeck Foundation made similar pleas for moderation in Education Week, and offered several questions districts can ask that she believes will help districts separate baby from bathwater:

Is there credible evidence that this tool is the best way to address the problem you’re hoping to solve? If so, what is the expected impact on student outcomes?

When implemented well, does the tool support, rather than replace, strong teaching?

Does the tool connect to and enhance current instructional approaches and curricula? Is it developmentally appropriate for the age band?

Once procured, is there a process in place for tracking and evaluating impact on student outcomes? What is the plan if impact is not detected?

Can educators clearly explain to families what the technology is, and is not, being used for?

Look: 99% of edtech companies know how to answer “yes” to all of those questions.

Everyone has an evidence page. Everyone talks a great game about supporting teachers, even the companies that would dearly like to replace them with a few hundred thousand output tokens from Anthropic. Everyone has a dashboard. Standards alignment. Etc. That includes the products that parents really hate right now.

Those questions don’t separate wheat from chaff, baby from bathwater. Here is a question that does:

After using this product for 30 minutes, do students feel more or less like they belong at this school?

Do kids feel more or less known by their teachers after using this product? By their classmates?

Belonging, for many students, predicts and is a prerequisite for learning. Out of a battery of motivation and belief measures studied by Barbieri and Miller-Cotto “sense of belonging to mathematics was the only significant predictor of learning.” Disbelonging plays a significant role in our crisis of chronic absenteeism. (Washington’s state education agency calls it “lack of connection to a caring adult.”) Parents also rate school climate among their top priorities in a school.

Most edtech companies can produce a PDF that is evidence-flavored. Far fewer can claim with any credibility that their products knit students and teachers together, especially within core academic instruction. In 2017, when RAND studied personalized learning models in schools—many of which plunked kids behind computers by themselves for extended periods of time, distilling all their ideas and brilliance into line graphs and bar charts—they found decreases of up to 10% on questions of safety and belonging compared to national averages.

If you lead a school and want to play with that kind of technology, you need to be sure—like ESSA Level 0 sure—that it is going to send some other key indicator to the moon because it is likely to drag other important metrics to the ground. It is likely to diminish your school’s climate, disconnect your students, and sour your parents.

Just visit a class, okay.

Ask edtech companies for evidence, yes, but know that you need more evidence than the kind you get in a PDF. The PDF is necessary but insufficient. Visit a class. Ask yourself what the product is doing to teachers and students? Do they know and appreciate one another more or less afterwards? Does the product waste or make good use of their gifts? Would you be proud to have a parent walk in and see this class? This is how you tell the bathwater from the baby.

Odds & Ends

¶ Alexander Russo had me on his Education Show to talk about the digital backlash (can’t bring myself to use “techlash” yet but I’m getting there) and how we got here.

¶ Russo asked Tony Wan this same question: “What is the baby then?” I’ll recommend Tony’s response because he basically listed off the last ten years of my resume. Thanks, Tony.

¶ I’ve been sitting with this study (pre-peer review) for a couple of weeks now—Generative AI Can Harm Teaching—and I think it’s important enough to share.

Halfway through the school year, a researcher gave a bunch of teachers (randomized at the school level) access to a localized ChatGPT wrapper for teacher support. Lesson planning. Homework support. Exam prep. Etc. Then the researcher surveyed the students on several questions like, “Compared to the fall, how enjoyable is [subject] class these days?”

Certain combinations of those questions, which the researcher called “intrinsic motivation” decreased by .11SD for the experimental group. USC professor Stephen Aguilar critiqued the arbitrary nature of those combinations and doesn’t think .11SD is all that much to get excited about. Me, I don’t want to see any combinations of those items decrease because of a technology we voluntarily introduced into schools, particularly one where the upside for learners really has yet to reveal itself.

Also: I don’t know what to make of the finding that the median depth of conversation between teacher and chatbot was two or three teacher messages (p A20) but I don’t like it.

You can’t one- or two- or three-shot your way to good teaching materials with AI. Maybe the teachers are modifying the AI output heavily afterwards, but that kind of observational research has yet to be conducted, to my knowledge.

(See Jill Barshay for more on this study.)

¶ The University of Chicago Law School is banning not just AI but laptops from first-year classes. I wish this quote from their press release was more deeply understood by edtech industry professionals:

The relationship between AI and school is very different from the relationship between AI and work, Hubbard said. “The idea that AI creates shortcuts, saves time, and avoids effort; these are all things that could be very beneficial in the professional context where you want to maximize efficiency. But they are very, very damaging in the educational context, when the whole point is to do things the hard way—because that’s how you learn.”

¶ An interesting sign of the edtech times and a new 5% problem for Khan Academy. Back in May, Michael Lee, the Majority Leader of the North Carolina Senate added a $10M no-bid contract to Khan Academy in the state budget. Following parent and legislator critique (Sen. Sophia Chitlik: “I’m struggling to find the evidence that shows that this is a better investment than, say, $10 million in instructional assistants.”) Lee’s final budget cut that proposed outlay by 95% to $500,000, making me think the market is starting to get soft for bathwater.

Tech titans claim the genre inspired them. But all they’ve done is graft their politics onto stories of a better future

- by Ali Rıza Taşkale

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