AI is everywhere. NYC schools want to keep it away from young kids

0:01WBWAR Podcasts, Boston.

0:06Joseph Winters:Kids need to learn to think for themselves. They need to work alongside their peers. They need to learn how to ask better questions. And they need to learn what it feels like to not know the answer. Getting AI out of the ABCs. It's Wednesday, September 2nd, and this is Here and Now Anytime from NPR and WBWAR. I'm Chris Bentley.

0:35Joseph Winters:Today on the show, the fossil fuel and petrochemical industries know they've got a bad rap for plastic pollution. Part of their solution is pushing curricula for school kids about the positive sides of plastics, PR, or propaganda. Also, the mobile game Candy Crush makes a billion dollars in a typical year. How did it get so profitable?

1:00Jill Barshay:Industry analysis suggests that only 4 % of players ever spend money, and that's millions and millions of players, so you can do the math there.

1:09Joseph Winters:Before we get to that story, though, New York kids and teachers are going old school. For one year, the city will ban the use of artificial intelligence for its youngest students in public schools. Kids won't be allowed to use the technology until they enter high school, and even then there will be some restrictions. The new rules also limit screen time and stop schools from handing out phones and tablets to students until they reach third grade. Mayor Zoran Mamdani said it'll apply to about 600 ,000 students and their teachers. Kids need to learn to think for themselves. They need to work alongside their peers.

1:46Joseph Winters:They need to learn how to ask better questions. And they need to learn what it feels like to not know the answer. This is what learning is all about. And it is what city government is determined to protect. Jill Barche is with The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit education news outlet. She told Scott Tong more about how this will work.

2:05Jill Barshay:There are a lot of exceptions, and then there are a lot of questions about implementation. The fine print says that centrally approved instructional software can still have AI, including e-books and coding software. Standardized tests can still use AI. Students with disabilities can still have AI. English learners can. And teachers are allowed to use AI for lesson plans, translating from foreign languages, and even writing messages to parents and colleagues. Wow.

2:42Joseph Winters:Okay. So it is complicated, as you're saying. Are there any bright lines, say, whether for teachers or students, certain uses or certain kids of a certain age where the answer is no?

2:57Jill Barshay:Well, the one thing that the regulations are saying is teachers cannot use AI for grading. And they can't use it for deciding who will graduate. And they're not allowed to use it to help children with mental health issues. So there are some specific bright lines in it. The other thing that's really interesting is that so many educational apps have already embedded AI in them. Google has embedded AI in its product. PowerSchool, which is used by many schools in New York City, has embedded AI there. There are many apps that use it. Khan Academy has AI embedded in it. And so it's interesting how that's going to work in practice.

3:46Jill Barshay:Will the companies take AI out or will it sort of slip through anyway? Yeah.

3:55Joseph Winters:So I guess you're suggesting how is this going to be implemented? How is this going to be enforced? Those are still big questions out there for New York City?

4:04Jill Barshay:Exactly.

4:05Joseph Winters:Yeah, yeah. Now, I mean, schools everywhere in this country beyond New York City are debating AI. Jill, you attended a number of education conferences in California. What did you glean about the nature of this conversation, the contours of the debate?

4:23Jill Barshay:I think we need to distinguish how AI can be independently used by students using commercially available AI apps. So, for example, a student can go to ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini and have it do its work for them. And we've seen well-designed rigorous studies showing that this is harmful to learning. When AI does the work for you, you don't learn. And there have been really well-designed randomized control trials showing, say you use AI to help you with homework, and then later you take a test. Those students do much worse on the test. They're not building the skills. But what's complicated about it is we're also seeing researchers come up with very specific uses of AI with a lot of guardrails.

5:16Jill Barshay:And they're experimenting and using AI in different ways. and they're starting to see some benefits on how it might be able to improve learning. There was one experiment recently in Tennessee where it was used to help students go over their mistakes in math and kind of slow things down and look at the problem step-by-step. And there was actually a learning benefit to it. So I think we have to hold in our head that two realities can be true. AI can be very harmful to student learning, but maybe there are discrete uses where it's helpful.

5:52Joseph Winters:Yeah, yeah. But does that, this research and some of this I imagine is pretty new, how does that, does it interact with the public, the political conversation, the pressure from say parents in New York City to really push the city to put a lot of limits?

6:10Jill Barshay:Right. I think it makes sense because this, like you say, this research is new and we haven't proven things and we haven't replicated enough, maybe it does make sense to postpone widespread usage of AI in schools until we have rigorous evidence showing when it's useful for children, for which children and when. And that's going to be a long research process.

6:37Joseph Winters:Yeah, yeah. And briefly, on screen time, New York City says public schools cannot give devices to the youngest students and then they want to limit screen time for older kids. Is there important data here on screen time?

6:51Jill Barshay:This is really interesting for me. There have been a lot of research studies on the cell phone bans that have been spreading around the nation. And I just personally, as a parent, was so for them. I didn't want my daughter having a cell phone in school. And what's been fascinating with the rigorous research on it is it hasn't been the home run that we thought it would be. study after study is showing no benefits to the cell phone bans in school or really minuscule ones that you can't even notice. And I think there are a couple reasons for that, if you'd like me to talk about that.

7:29Joseph Winters:Yeah, real quickly, please. Yeah.

7:31Jill Barshay:So one is that students are finding workarounds. If they don't get their emails and apps on their phone, they're able to route them through their laptops because they have, at least right now, they have other screens. And the second is maybe the great harm to learning is not during the hours of the school day, but it's during the 16 hours a day that they're home. Maybe they're using the cell phone late at night and not getting enough sleep. Maybe the scrolling is substituting for reading time. So the harms could be happening outside the school day. And I think it's a good analogy for AI because maybe the harms can be happening at home and not at school.

8:09Joseph Winters:Of course. Jill Barche, reporter with the Hechinger Report, the nonprofit education news outlet. Jill, thanks so much.

8:16Jill Barshay:Thank you for having me, Scott.

8:30Coming up next, another development in the classroom

8:34Joseph Winters:is your kid being taught plastic propaganda. More in a minute.

8:47Joseph Winters:To quote the 1967 film The Graduate, one word, plastics. Just one word. Plastics. There's a great future in plastics. But that off-putting career advice is not that different than what some plastic industry PR people are pushing in American schools. According to a new report, the plastics industry is writing lesson plans and curricula for teachers. Critics call it propaganda, masquerading as STEM education. Joseph Winters is a reporter with the environmental news site Grist. He told Peter O'Dowd what kids are learning. So there are a few different ways that materials targeted at children show up in classrooms from the plastics industry.

9:33Joseph Winters:Some of them are alterations to learning materials like textbook chapters that are about the, quote, advantages of plastic bags. Sometimes you see lesson plans and experiments that are being offered to teachers about things like the durability of plastic bags or the density of different kinds of plastics. Um, sometimes it looks like gifts or donations to schools that are a sort of almost quid pro quo where plastics companies donate stuff in exchange for incorporating, uh, incorporating plastics, recycling, uh, lesson plans into the, into the curriculum. So it sounds like, uh, these lesson plans or these experiments might focus more on the benefits of plastic and not really so much on the problems of plastic.

10:14Joseph Winters:What's the goal of getting this material in front of kids? Do we know? Yeah, well, I would imagine that the goal is to sort of whitewash the concerns people have about plastic pollution. According to the report, there are a few different talking points that show up in these lesson plans and materials. One of them is that plastics are cheap and necessary to modern life. So they highlight things like the inexpensiveness of plastics compared to other materials like metal or glass. or how they make it cheaper to transport things since they don't weigh as much as those other materials. Another talking point is that plastics are safe and sanitary, like they can be used to store foods for longer or in medical settings, they can prevent the spread of disease and contamination.

11:00Joseph Winters:Another one that showed up quite often was the jobs connection. They highlight that there are good jobs to be found in the plastics industry, almost as a sort of like recruiting strategy to get kids to consider eventually working for one of these industries. Do you have a sense of how many districts are teaching this material around the country? Yeah, it's hard to say. Although some of the reporting from the initiatives themselves say that they've reached over 132 ,000 students in total over the past several years. There's an annual conference that's sponsored by one of these plastics industry organizations.

11:36Joseph Winters:So it's pretty widespread. One of the examples, too, was a textbook that's used across California. That's the one that includes a lesson plan specifically about the advantages of shopping bags. I see. Well, teachers are overwhelmed, they're busy, and you could see why they might welcome the chance to get a lesson plan that looks like it's based in science. What are you hearing from the schools and the educators about this? Sure. I spoke with some teachers who said that, yeah, they're pressed for time, they're pressed for money. And so when the plastics industry comes to them with these materials that are either free or cheap, it can be pretty enticing.

12:15Joseph Winters:Teachers said that they felt confident in their ability to exercise good judgment and not just blindly repeat the talking points of the plastics industry. But they did say it was probably better to choose materials that are coming from an independent source. Even if it's a nonprofit, you know, recognizing that it has its own agenda, at least there's not that sort of profit incentive associated with it. Grist reporter Joseph Winters, thanks so much. Thank you. And we reached out to the Society of Plastics Engineers behind some of this content we haven't heard back.

12:59Joseph Winters:we've got one more story for you coming up about something you're definitely not supposed to be doing in class though many students have i'm sure playing candy crush the game has been mind-bogglingly successful, some would say concerningly so, pioneering tools of the trade that have become ubiquitous in mobile gaming since the app launched 15 years ago. Scott goes for a high score after the break.

13:37Joseph Winters:That is the sound of Candy Crush Saga, the game you play on your phone still going crazy after all these years. In fact, it's now in its 15th year. And if you want one takeaway from this story, Candy Crush makes$1 billion in a typical year. Writer and game designer Alana Okun wrote about this for Bloomberg. She's a research resident at New York University. Alana, good to have you. Thank you so much for having me, Scott. Some of us, believe it or not, have never played Candy Crush. You write that there is a hypnotic simplicity to it. What do you mean?

14:10Jill Barshay:So the way the game works is using something called a match three mechanic. If you picture Tetris, it's sort of along the same lines. You, the player, are just trying to line up candies of a similar color. Once you do that, they explode, they create this chain reaction, you get points, you feel satisfaction. It really is about as, as I say, hypnotically simplistic as I think a game mechanic can possibly be.

14:33Joseph Winters:Yeah, yeah. Now, Candy Crush and its spinoff games have been installed more than 5 billion times, a number I can't even really process. Many players, according to your piece, do not even call themselves gamers. Is that important here?

14:49Jill Barshay:Yeah, I think that's actually a key to the success of this game and its longevity. And industry analysis suggests that the demographic bears that out, too, that it's often older people, it's women, it's people who don't necessarily play any other games. And I think that the sort of low barrier to entry is a huge part of that, that you can download this game for free, you can immediately start playing, there's, you know, very little sort of friction, there's very little you need to understand. I swipe this, that happens.

15:16Joseph Winters:Yeah. Now, as you describe it, it seems so easy. And yet, as you write, some of the magic here is that there's kind of a Goldilocks level of difficulty. Not too easy, not too hard.

15:28Jill Barshay:Yeah, absolutely. I've seen players who have completed what the company calls end of content, which is reaching the end of Candy Crush levels.

15:36Joseph Winters:Every level. Yeah.

15:37Jill Barshay:And that's amazing. Every week they're adding 45 to 60 new levels. So it's hard to keep up with. I think there's 23 ,000 plus at this point, although honestly, it could be even more than that.