Teachers lean further into obsolescence, using AI to grade and provide feedback on assignments

Americans' confidence in public schools has plummeted to all-time lows. The eagerness with which teachers' unions and school districts have subjected children to mask mandates, lockdowns, and radical propaganda in recent years likely didn't help.

It also doesn't help that teachers have been doing a poor job overall of teaching reading and mathematics compared with previous years, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

Unsurprisingly, homeschooling has become the fastest-growing form of education with nearly 4 million homeschooled K-12 students nationwide.

Rather than evidence their value in the face of record-low public confidence, poor assessments, and increasing competition, teachers appear to be offloading more of their duties onto their potential replacements.

According to Axios, teachers are increasingly adopting ChatGPT and other AI-boosted tools to do their jobs for them. Writable is one such tool.

Acquired last year by the education company Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Writable supposedly "scaffolds student learning and builds lifelong writing and reading skills for students in grades 3-12, while saving teachers time on daily instruction and feedback."

It works thusly: A student submits a writing assignment to a teacher electronically, then the teacher submits it to Writable. Writable runs the essay through ChatGPT. ChatGPT then does the work customarily performed by an engaged teacher, providing comments and feedback. The teacher is afforded an opportunity to review or adjust the chatbot's work, then sends it back to the student.

According to the Writable website, the RevisionAid feature will provide students with feedback and constructive criticism so that students can improve their writing. The GrammarAid feature will help students with grammar, mechanics, and style.

As for fleshing out a curriculum, teachers need only pick a lesson from one of thousands of ready-made plans, which they can then customize if they are feeling up to the challenge.

"We have a lot of teachers who are using the program and are very excited about it," Houghton Mifflin Harcourt CEO Jack Lynch told Axios.

There are various other AI tools besides Writable that spare teachers the onerous task of grading tests and papers. These include Gradescope, EasyGrader, and Canvas.

Blaze News reported last March that a poll commissioned by the Walton Family Foundation and conducted by Impact Research found that 51% of 1,002 K-12 teachers surveyed were using ChatGPT to perform their duties.

"Three in ten teachers have used it for lesson planning (30%), coming up with creative ideas for classes (30%), and building background knowledge for lessons and classes (27%)," said Impact Research.

Education Week reported last month that 73% of educators surveyed by the EdWeek Research Center said their districts do not presently prohibit the use of ChatGPT and other large language models powered by AI. Another 20% said there were prohibitions on such use but that the bans only applied to students. Only 7% of respondents indicated teachers were prohibited from offloading their work onto AI tools.

According to the same survey, 56% of respondents said they expected an increase in the use of AI in schools.

One unidentified Texas teacher told Education Week, "I frequently use ChatGPT to write lesson plans, syllabi, and parent letters. It can be a very effective tool, but I still look over and edit anything that looks off."

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