LA Unified School District Electrifies Education with AI in Only 18 Months

The lines for distributed education have been laid

Some claim that AI is the new electricity and that it will define a new industrial revolution.

The initial introduction of electricity to London through the construction of early power stations such as the Deptford Power Station in 1889 laid the groundwork for a transformation of society.  By the early 20th century, electrification had made significant inroads in London, but it wasn't until the 1930s and 1940s that electrification could be considered widespread in the city. Rural and peripheral areas took even longer to fully electrify. Time-frame: 40-50 years.

There was incidental use of AI in education before the release of GPT3.5 in November of 2022, but these uses were almost entirely non-generative (coding being an exception), with AI powering applications such as Google search and Quizlet. ChatGPT3.5’s release, however, proved that text generation worked well. Generative AI was off to the races, producing sophisticated text and impressive images and videos and this opened up thousands of practical AI uses for many sectors, including education.

It took 50-60 years to get electricity in everyone’s hands, but we all had access to very powerful bots such as ChatGPT4, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity immediately as individual users. Developing and instituting such tools across organizations, especially educational organizations, however, has proven to be a challenge.

But not in LA.   As reported in the LA Times:

The Los Angeles school district on Wednesday unveiled a much-awaited AI tool, dubbed “Ed,” to serve as a student advisor, programmed to tell its young users and their parents about grades, test results, and attendance — while giving out assignments, suggesting readings and even helping students cope with nonacademic matters…. At its core, Ed is designed to give students immediate answers about where they stand, what they need to do to make progress or, more immediately, find out when their bus will arrive.

The bot can provide information in 100 languages; it is first being rolled out to 100 schools (54,000 of the district’s 520,000 students), with the neediest being involved in the first rollout.

The AI infrastructure — today’s “electricity” — is built and students are connected.

Time-frame: 18 months.

Presently, the bot is limited and only provides school-district information, but once you have a network – AKA “electricity” - anything is possible.

In the future, all the following could be provided through the AI bot network that students and families are now connected to –

*Academic recovery programs
*Programs for which the district does not have enough teachers, including debate, AI literacy, and entrepreneurship (these are just general examples)
*Tutoring for students in their existing school subjects
*Any AP course the district can’t make available at any school
*More individualized college admissions counseling
*More individualized K-12 course selection support
*Individualized instruction for all students, including an “Individual Acceleration Plan” the Superintendent had already been promoting.
*Any program they can’t otherwise afford, the costs of which will be trivial compared to live instruction.
*Opportunities for students with struggling attendance to learn content on schedules that work for them. Perhaps this could push the high school graduation rate above 71.5%.
*Opportunities for immersive learning environments and AR/VR charter (or District) schools.
*Real-time assessment across more learning points

LAUSD is unlikely to provide all of this programming on its own but will probably (my speculation) partner with other learning companies with particular expertise to provide it through their new network.

There will certainly be debates about this. The generic arguments about data privacy and security have already been made, and some concerns have been expressed about teachers being replaced and the amount of energy used.

Expansion into new programs will trigger more debates. Many critics will imagine that everything in the list above could be funded for in-person learning, ignoring the reality that in-person funding for these programs may not otherwise exist. Others will argue that students can only learn in school and that even those who aren’t showing up want to be physically present. Teachers will fear this will encroach on their jobs, though the best job security is really learning how to work with these tools.

There will be many debates and there will be opposition, just as there was to the expansion of electricity in London.  But just like the situation in London, expanding the delivery of academic programming and social-emotional supports through LA’s new AI electric wires will continue to grow, laying the foundation for distributed and comprehensive education that can be tailored to individual students, as well as an opportunity for students to develop skills interacting with bots.

We can debate forever what it is desirable to put into these new AI wires, but “the times, they are a ‘changing.”  LA just fired one of the first big shots.  They are AI-wired and ready to deliver any distributed education program they deem desirable and can convince the community to support, all at a relatively very low cost.

At least one student is happy.

The app “shows how we really want to prepare our students for the future,” said Karen Ramirez, a senior who is the student representative on the board of education.