The state's charter school board approved an application on Monday from Unbound Academy to open a school with a two-hour per day academic curriculum set by AI.
By a 4-3 margin, the Arizona State Board for Charter Schools on Monday approved an application from Unbound Academy to open a fully online school serving grades four through eight. Unbound already operates a private school that uses its AI-dependent “2hr Learning” model in Texas and is currently applying to open similar schools in Arkansas and Utah.
Under the 2hr Learning model, students spend just two hours a day using personalized learning programs from companies like IXL and Khan Academy. “As students work through lessons on subjects like math, reading, and science, the AI system will analyze their responses, time spent on tasks, and even emotional cues to optimize the difficulty and presentation of content,” according to Unbound’s charter school application in Arizona. “This ensures that each student is consistently challenged at their optimal level, preventing boredom or frustration.”
Spending less time on traditional curriculum frees up the rest of students’ days for life-skill workshops that cover “financial literacy, public speaking, goal setting, entrepreneurship, critical thinking, and creative problem-solving,” according to the Arizona application.
Online charter schools are horrifying. There is no expectation that the teacher know or understand the material they are teaching your child. High school is basically working through an online work book by yourself. Teachers use AI to “look up” answers they don’t know yourself.
As someone who is extremely hands on and learns basically nothing from lectures, this actually sounds like a decent idea if it is executed well, especially the Khan Academy integration. I'd rather just sit down and read a textbook and do practice problems and be graded on them than be stuck in a lecture for 7 hours only to have to relearn everything anyways because I lose track of what's being said in like 5 seconds of the lecture starting.
I also think this sucks massively, yet the possibility of a well made curriculum focused on one Person dies sound enticing. So much less time wasted on stuff one child has no problems with vs another that's just stuck at some logical step. Ofc no social interaction is such a big - it almost can't be fixed.
This seems like a great machine to create republican voters, purposefully undereducated and perpetually frightened - the school to joe rogan pipeline
Arizona State Board for Charter Schools
Imagine the AMAZING individuals that must make up this group.
In its Arizona application, Unbound says its bold claims about how much its students will learn are based on the experiment it’s running on students in Texas, inspired by Elon Musk.
How long until the AI starts trying to sext the children, that seems to be a common theme across every article I read about AI and chikdren after its been running for a few months.
Kids aren't being taught how to read, use a computer, or math. Now they're not going to be taught at all through grades 4-8? I imagine if the parents are involved, it may do something, but what about kids with working parents? Whose going to make sure they're actually retaining information? It's kind of fucked up that they'll be reintroduced into the "normal" system, and possibly be severely behind kids who had to go to class everyday.
I'm sure an AI babysitter won't be immediately and utterly broken and bypassed by every single kid in these "classes".
(Seriously: we're talking about 8-12 year olds here and the absolutely are smart enough and incentivized to break the ever-loving crap out of this stupid idea.)
The annoying part is that some time of self paced computerized curriculum is genuinely a good idea that I've been supporting for ages. But the whole premise is that this allows the teacher to spend more time in one on one instruction to get students over the hump when they have questions.
It doesn't work as an excuse to throw out the teacher.
As students work through lessons on subjects like math, reading, and science, the AI system will analyze their responses, time spent on tasks, and even emotional cues to optimize the difficulty and presentation of content
This will be a nightmare for any neuro-divergent students, or really any student with atypical learning needs.
the AI system will analyze their responses, time spent on tasks, and even emotional cues
That means every student is going to be recorded with a camera and microphone? Is anyone else horrified by the fact that the AI software is going to be actively watching and listening to these kids?
Or is it going to analyze typed responses only? (which is still creepy AF, btw)
Keep kids dumb so they turn into dumb voting citizens and a big fuck you to teachers too! Whomever came up with this really deserves to get rich. This embraces so many modern American ideals all at once. If they haven't thought about helping to lower the cost by placing ads into the platform, I would like to take credit for this idea.
From what I’ve heard, they were basically allowing anything with a pulse to teach in AZ, so who knows, being taught by an occasionally hallucinating wiki engine might be an improvement over the wife of some national guard dude.
Let the charter schools try this first. Eventually something like this will be integrated into common education, but the first attempts are guaranteed to be disasters. Let those fall on 1/4 of learning time of a small subset of Arizonian charter school students and not "all California public school students" or the like.
I learned a whole year of highschool math in a week of holiday with KhanAcademy. Owned-paced curriculum would make school interesting for smart children and improve overall education. However it must be done wisely