Could artificial intelligence improve special education?

0:00It's Consider This, where every day we go deep on one big news story. Today, how AI is helping special education teachers. More and more students are qualifying for special education, more than 8 million students. But there aren't enough teachers serving them. Special education teachers have for years been in short supply all around the country. And they say one reason they feel overworked is the paperwork. Here's special education teacher Paul Stone. This job is this year. It's, I don't want to say killing me, but it has put a huge stressor on my mental health, to be honest. It would be kind of nice if there were two jobs, like one paperwork job and one working with the kids.

0:42Now, special education teachers are using AI to help them with the mountains of paperwork they are legally required to do. Consider this. Could artificial intelligence help special educators spend more time with their students? From NPR, I'm Scott Detrow.

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1:34It's Consider This from NPR. Millions of students qualify for special education, and they need qualified teachers to help them. But burnout for these teachers has caused many to leave the profession, and one reason is the paperwork. Now a growing number of special educators are using AI to speed up that paperwork, and some research shows that despite the risks, It could help them spend more time with students. NPR's Jonaki Mehta spoke to special educators around the country using AI, including one California teacher. Good morning, princessita. Hi. Mary Acebu has been a special education teacher at Riverview Middle School for a decade.

2:12Good morning, Jade. The school is in a small Bay Area town and largely serves low-income students. Today, Acebu is talking to her 7th and 8th graders about pollution. So what is one small problem in our school that you could help fix? Jade. The trash. What about the trash? Talk to me. The trash is like everywhere so you can help pick it up. Very good. Every student in a Cibu's class learns differently. To track how they learn and if they're meeting their goals, she creates a unique document for each student in special ed called an IEP. It's an individualized education program. So an IEP indicates the disability, the goals that they're working on, services that they need so they can become successful.

2:58IEPs require parent approval. And as those families know, these individualized documents are required by federal law to help these students get a quality education. And, you know, the key term is individualized. No two kids are the same. That means depending on the students' needs, a single IEP can be dozens of pages long, require hours of meetings, and a grasp of complex laws. It's part of what leaves special ed teachers feeling overworked and leaves schools around the country struggling to keep enough of them. I used to come here to work, 6.30, leave work at 5. I don't do that anymore. That's because Asibu started experimenting with AI a couple years ago.

3:36Since then, she's taken courses on how to use it responsibly and says it's changed the game. I think I have more time to talk to the kiddos and really build those relationships instead of like sitting here in front of my computer anymore. So Mary is an amazing teacher. That's Paul Stone, another special educator at Riverview who's been here 22 years. And he was skeptical about AI, but this year the number of students he's serving went through the roof. This job is this year. It's, I don't want to say killing me, but it has put a huge stressor on my mental health, to be honest. It would be kind of nice if there were two jobs, like one paperwork job and one working with the kids.

4:17So last month, Stone decided to try out a custom chatbot Mary Asibu trained for her school. Like, for instance, I did some testing with a student. I took the test. I took a template of a report, put them both in the AI, and it was able to produce the report for me. It put the numbers in the right spots. It would have taken me hours, and this took 10 minutes. Stone says he still exercises his decades of experience for quality control, but he and Asibu say AI could seriously help them avoid burnout. They aren't alone. The Center for Democracy and Technology, a nonpartisan think tank, found over half of special educators they surveyed nationwide used AI to help develop special ed plans in the 2024-25 school year.

5:00But the report lists a lot of risks, especially because 15 % of the teachers they polled use AI to entirely write these plans. Here's a researcher of that study, Ariana Abulafia. To build an IEP in full without human oversight poses really significant concerns with the individualization requirement of federal disability laws, but also with privacy requirements and then things like accuracy. She also says AI can be biased and sometimes just flat out wrong. At the same time, other studies have found when used responsibly, AI can help create IEP goals of equal or even higher quality than humans alone.

5:41Abulafia at CDT says risks or not, more and more teachers are using AI. So she has lots of recommendations for using it ethically. Like districts giving teachers proper training, making sure teachers are closely checking their work, and... We recommended that teachers do not put personally identifiable information into any tool for which their school does not have an agreement. Mary Acebu agrees with those recommendations, and her district does have privacy agreements with companies like Google and a popular tool called Magic School AI. Acebu gave me a demo of the custom chatbot she built. So student A is an eighth grade student who has grade level strengths in math, but struggles in decoding and reading fluency.

6:28Sibu is describing this child's strengths and struggles in detail without naming them to protect their privacy. I need you to write three goals in the areas of reading. The AI spits out some IEP goals, but Sibu tells me one of them isn't quite right. So here's the human touch, right? These are hard for the student. So I'm going to say, can we narrow down the words into more common affixes? After five minutes chatting with her bot, Isibu thinks she has three strong goals for her students. How long would something like this have taken you before AI? Oh, gosh, at least 30, 45 minutes for three to four goals.

7:12Asibu says IEPs aren't just important because they're legally required. To her, the point is to turn what's on paper into reality for her students. She tells me about one of her eighth graders, King. And we're only using his first name because he's a minor and we're discussing his learning disabilities. He was a non-reader beginning of seventh grade. He's reading now. And that kid is in general ed math with no support. So, you know, that's the dream of every special ed teacher is to get the students where they need to be. But guess what? There's a lot of work that needs to go with that. Asibu says this last year, she's had more time for that hard work.

7:48She walks over to King as he puts finishing touches on a project he's submitting to a science fair. What you got here? All right, so this is my game, Turtle Catastrophe. So the pieces, I made all three of them by hand. They're turtle sculptures made out of clay. In King's game, turtles swim across the board, picking up trash in the ocean along the way. He reads aloud the rules that he wrote. The objective is to be the first player to reach the finish line. Reading aloud like that, he says that wouldn't have been possible a couple years ago. It makes me feel very proud. It doesn't even feel like anything.

8:28It's just natural now. Acebu clutches her chest as she hears him say these words. This, she says, is why she'll try just about anything that lets her spend more time in the classroom teaching her students. Janaki Mehta and Pear News, Bay Point, California. This episode was produced by Tyler Bartlom. It was edited by Stephen Drummond, Nirvi Shah, and Courtney Dorney. Our executive producer is Sammy Yannigan.

8:59It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Scott Detrow. We flush a lot of things down the toilet. You know, the obvious ones. But drugs like cocaine are also going down the drain and into our waterways. That's changing the animals that live in it. It's definitely present in most ecosystems on Earth now, unfortunately. We're only sort of really starting to scratch the surface into understanding the potential consequences of that. Forget cocaine bear. Learn about cocaine salmon on Shortwave. In the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.