I Don’t Want a Learning Dashboard for My Child

Often debates about education are framed as non-tech versus AI approaches, but too often, AI ed tech just magnifies the same failures of traditional school. Against quantification As part of a select group of parents whose children homeschool in part with online resources, we met with an EdTech entrepreneur. Our children were already spending time daily on math apps, reading apps, and zoom calls. “I want a dashboard to track what my child is learning, their proficiencies in different areas,” one of the parents brainstormed. “I actively do not want that,” my husband Jeremy countered. Despite embracing the use of screens, we did not want to quantify our child. Our goals for her are more holistic. Outsiders may have expected that we would care more about quantification. Jeremy and I have both built our careers in data and machine learning. We use AI regularly. Yet I know, both personally and through my research, the harms of overemphasizing metrics. Not everything that matters can or should be quantified. We are more interested in whether she can get wholly absorbed in activities she enjoys. She spends hours lying on the carpet of our living room, unable to put down an exciting novel. She can’t turn away from her coding project when she is in the middle of debugging. She focuses intensely when working on digital art, paper crafts, and pottery. We have interesting discussions about science and history together as a family, and she has deep relationships with a diverse set of friends and tutors. Decomposing everything into granular skills For the most popular language arts curriculums in the United States, 3rd-6th graders go the entire year without reading a whole novel. That is because reading is no longer about a suspenseful story, a set of fascinating characters, or an alternate world you become immersed in, losing track of time. Rather, reading has been reduced to a discrete set of tasks: decoding words, summarizing, making inferences, identifying main ideas. These skills can be tested in isolation from short passages, divorced from the context of reading actual books. These short passages can be compiled in “basel readers” which are more profitable for textbook companies. Fewer children are reading independently in their free time than ever before. From 2012 to 2022, the percentage of 9 year olds who read for fun almost daily declined from 53% to 39%. The percentage of 13 year olds reading for fun almost daily dropped from 27% to 14% over the course of a decade. Atomized reading “skills” are taught without sparking a love of reading. The part is less than the whole. Sadly, this has long been how math is taught. A collection of facts to memorize, strategies to drill, no coherent picture of building towards anything more beautiful and meaningful. The birthplace of high stakes standardized tests I grew up in the birthplace of high-stakes testing: Texas under Governor George W. Bush. Texas state policies of the 1990s went on to be the blueprint for the disastrous…