Dan Meyer recently published an article on his Substack titled “Everyone in Edtech Should Show Their Cards” about the current backlash in schools against edtech, specifically citing the draft plan at LAUSD to limit screen time, particularly for elementary students. This and similar initiatives lumping all edtech together as useful distractions has led to a social media tag of #notalledtech, particularly among providers that want to argue that their products shouldn’t be banned. Dan, who is a vice president at the edtech company Amplify, argues that these companies need to put their cards on the table and post videos of how their products are being used to back up their claims with demonstrable evidence (and then he does exactly that).
At least some of this backlash appears to have been triggered by concerns from parents and educators of AI technologies (specifically generative AI) being used on their students with little oversight. Though AI might be the flavor of edtech that is most concerning, many are questioning the entire edtech industry, not just AI. Most notably, the American Federation of Teachers recently described edtech as “a huge experiment on kids, and experiments can go wrong” before noting that “teachers, parents, and school districts cannot manage the tech juggernaut on our own.”
We’ve been here before
The Student Data Privacy Consortium (SDPC) was founded roughly 10 years ago under similar circumstances. At that time, districts either proactively realized that they needed stronger privacy provisions in their contracts with edtech vendors, or their state legislatures passed legislation that mandated that certain contracts appear in contracts. Without a consortium though and standardized agreement, it was too much work for districts to manage on their own. In the past 10 years, we’ve gone from having state-specific privacy agreements to a National Data Privacy Agreement (NDPA). I believe the NDPA addresses both of these concerns–it provides for transparency (on the data side at least) for a school to better understand how these systems work and also helps school districts manage the edtech they bring into their schools.
AI and the future of the NDPA
I bring this all up because one area we anticipate the NDPA evolving once we complete the v2.3 community review is AI. Since this is a broad umbrella term that covers lots of different use cases, we’ve recognized that we need to get better input from our community on what reasonable requirements are. To address this, in May we kicked off a new project team–the AI Policy Team–which is a group that is open to any member of the A4L community, both vendors and alliances to help provide recommendations of what these requirements should be.
We know one major opportunity is going to be with transparency, specifically figuring out what information a vendor can provide about their AI tools that can help a school district when vetting their technologies. Transparency isn’t always a more is better sort of thing though. If we ask a vendor to provide too much information, is there someone at the district who can accurately interpret it (let alone have the time and bandwidth to analyze it). Some information will also undoubtedly be of more value than others. We need input from both our vendor community and alliances to know where to find the right balance.
I’m excited for this new group for a few reasons. First, I am hopeful that it can help accelerate our passage of an AI addendum to the NDPA. Our process up to this point has been very focused on the NDPA project team working on proposed updates and then sending the language out for a lengthy community review. By bringing the most interested members into the process earlier, I am hopeful we’ll have a proposal that will quickly pass a broader community review, meaning we’ll ultimately be able to get this update to districts sooner. I’m also excited because this is going to be a group where both our vendor and alliance members can meet face-to-face and ultimately understand each other a little better. I am also hopeful that this can be a productive model where we have more calls where our vendors and alliances meet together and work on mutually beneficial solutions.
Please join us at the AI Policy Project Team!
So if you are interested in any of what I’ve talked about–figuring out what cards a vendor should show when it comes to AI tools or getting to meet with some great vendor and alliance leaders who want to solve these problems, then I’d invite you to join. You can sign up for the group on the A4L Community Site, and we are currently scheduled to meet monthly on the fourth Tuesday of the month at 3pm ET.