Springfield Education Association President Riley Hernandez speaks before the School Committee about the use of artificial intelligence in schools.
Photo credit: Focus Springfield
SPRINGFIELD — The debate around the use of artificial intelligence in education has become an outright controversy in Springfield with plans by the Springfield Empowerment Zone Partnership to pilot aspects of an AI-learning model named Alpha School.
Alpha School is a for-profit private school operating in 18 states. In Massachusetts, there are three campuses in the Greater Boston area. According to the school’s website, its proprietary model uses adaptive AI to create “personalized 1:1 learning” with “mastery-based methods.” It also touts its time management techniques. Alpha School claims it can teach all academic coursework in just two hours per day. The rest of the day is spent in life skills workshops.
Springfield Empowerment Zone Co-Executive Director Matthew Brunell clarified that the pilot was paused due to the cyberattack on Springfield Public Schools that occurred in the beginning of September. He said the pilot will likely not be in use this school year.
In comments made at the Sept. 24 School Committee meeting, Riley Hernandez, president of the teachers’ union, Springfield Education Association, said that Alpha School’s mission is to “replace teachers with guides.” The company’s website states that, under its model, “teachers become ‘guides,’ shifting from their traditional roles to mentoring and motivating learners.”
Hernandez also described Alpha School as looking to “use students in Springfield as their guinea pigs,” so it can market itself to other school districts.
Brunell said the pilot is “categorically different” than how the SEA has characterized it. He particularly objected to the Hernandez’s use of the term guinea pigs. “There is a pernicious history in the country of experimenting on those at the margins,” Brunell said. “Black and brown students, while they shouldn’t always be first, but should they always be last?”
The school’s teacher leadership team approved the use of the pilot, which is an adaptation of the Alpha School model made for public schools. Kiley Prep further adjusted the program for its students. One key adaptation is that rather than relying on guides, a Kiley Prep teacher would still lead the class.
“No great academic, holistic, social gains can be realized without a great teacher … AI can play a role in education but it cannot be the sole component,” Brunell said. “This is not a replacement for teachers,” he said. Rather, he said it gives them “the most precious thing in education: time with students.”
According to information on the pilot available on the Springfield Empowerment Zone website, students would spend “a concentrated portion of the day,” using adaptive learning platforms that tailor learning based on the student. When the students were not engaged with the platform, the teacher would work with small groups to provide more direct support. He explained that last year, 90% of students in the pilot teacher’s class could not read at grade level. When not with the teacher, students would participate in hands-on projects and real-world challenges.
Brunell said the pushback against this pilot as the latest example of the union resisting the flexibility built into the Springfield Empowerment Zone, and now, in the Innovation Schools.
Last year, eight empowerment zone schools transitioned back into the wider School Department after making sustained achievement improvements. To maintain the flexibility of the empowerment zone, the schools became the state’s first Innovation Schools, a designation created in 2010 to allow schools to take advantage of flexibility in areas including curriculum, budgeting, schedules and staffing.
At the School Committee meeting, Hernandez described the pilot as the result of “eroded democratic oversight” in the empowerment zone. He said the School Committee is the elected to provide that oversight. “You are the safeguard that stands between students in Springfield and the ongoing predation by for-profit corporations on taxpayer-funded education,” he said.
“Union leadership at the state level would much rather have schools doing things the same way,” Brunell said. He noted that despite more than 90% of teachers at the schools voting to become an innovation school, the union opposed it.
The Springfield Education Association planned to host a community meeting at Mt. Zion Batist Church on Oct. 14. According to the flyer distributed by the union, the goal was to “understand what is at stake when artificial intelligence companies enter Springfield classrooms.”
