As Wisconsin Teachers Grapple With AI, Trump Calls for Greater Use
His executive order pushes artificial intelligence. State educators have mixed views.
Artificial Intelligence. (CC0 Public Domain)
If you ask artificial intelligence what the significance of Romeo’s suicide is in William Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet,” you’ll quickly get a correct answer.
“Romeo’s suicide is a pivotal moment that carries profound thematic, dramatic, and symbolic significance. This tragic event not only marks the climax of the play but also encapsulates the central themes of love, fate, and the consequences of impulsive actions,” the answer states.
But for Milwaukee Public Schools English teacher Abbey Osborn, that’s not what she is looking for when she asks her South Division High School students the question.
“It’s very easy now to just copy and paste what pops up in Google,” Osborn said. “But the real goal is for students to think about the reasons Romeo committed suicide.”
Since AI emerged, teachers have struggled with how to approach the technology.
Should they ban it?
Should they incorporate it into their lessons?
Now the Trump administration is trying to make the decision for them.
On April 23, President Donald Trump signed an executive order called Advancing Artificial Intelligence Education for American Youth, which aims to teach students and train teachers to use AI to improve education outcomes.
Artificial intelligence enables a computer system to perform tasks that typically require human intelligence, such as problem-solving, decision-making, translation and written language.
Trump’s order establishes the White House Task Force on AI Education. The task force will establish “public-private partnerships to provide resources for K-12 AI education, both to enhance AI-related education but also to better utilize AI tools in education generally.”
In Milwaukee Public Schools, teachers have been encouraged to use AI tools. Osborn has a subscription to a service that allows her to use AI to create images for her classes.
MPS was going to block ChatGPT but later decided against it.
Osborn thinks AI can be useful for students at times. But when her students are writing, she turns it off.
“If you want to use AI to proofread something, I think that’s OK,” she said. “But if you want to use AI to write your whole essay, not so much.”
In July 2024, the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction released AI guidance for schools and libraries.
“Students are excited about AI, and we want to empower educators to embrace the opportunity to teach students how to use AI responsibly,” State Superintendent Jill Underly said in a statement. “In the coming years, AI is likely to influence our kids’ learning and society as a whole in ways that we can scarcely imagine right now. Ultimately, our jobs are to prepare Wisconsin’s kids for the future, and it’s likely that AI will play a large role in that future.”
Jan Ellestad is a middle school language arts teacher at St. Sebastian Catholic School in Milwaukee.
He said students are taught to use technology for research, typing and word processing.
But he is skeptical about any tool that removes the work of research, editing and proofreading, which are all skills that are vital to the educational growth of students.
In fact, Ellestad has integrated several practices that deter the use of AI in his classroom, including having students write the first draft of their essays by hand.
“My big concern is that students are going to lose some of the creative juices that require critical thinking, that require heavy revision in their writing and editing to make sure that their grammar is correct, their spelling is correct, that their ideas are presented clearly in their own voice,” Ellestad said. “We rely heavily on students being honest with their progress and with their language and their voice. I just struggle to see how using AI in the academic setting is going to move any of that forward.”
As Wisconsin teachers grapple with artificial intelligence, Trump order calls for AI to be taught in schools was originally published by Wisconsin Public Radio.
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The executive order is meaningless, like the majority of them.
That said, LLM chatbots (every AI tool a available today) could help bring the writing performance of below average students to average, but that’s about it. It would likely trend the overall student performance towards average as well, and reduce the abilities long term of the best students. The models are based on essentially all the writing on the Internet, which is average at best.
AI is just a tool in the toolbox, and not the be-all and end-all option that some believe it to be. Before we consider using artificial intelligence to do the thinking and writing for students, it is imperative that they learn the key principles of strategic, logical, and critical thinking skills the old-fashioned way.
These skills fall into the old adage: Give a man a fish and he can eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and he can eat for the rest of his life.
The kids should all be at the chalkboard practicing their cursive.
Regarding AI, I did a search using Yahoo, (I’m kind of old and Yahoo was what I started with and stayed with) and the AI search summary stated “As of 2023, approximately 90 million individuals are enrolled in Medicaid”. I went to Medicaid.gov and it stated “78,532,341 people were enrolled in Medicaid and CHIP in the 50 states and the District of Columbia that reported enrollment data for December 2024”.
Why wasn’t the “all knowing” AI able to just publish the numbers off the Medicaid website? I did it pretty easily without AI and maybe I was saving the planet as AI searches require more energy consumption than a normal search.
Duane:
Snarky, non-condescending, and very rhetorical question for you…
Are you sure you were utilizing real AI and not Secretary of Education Linda McMahon’s version that she calls A-1? 🤣