Month: September 2023

This opinion column about climate and design was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.
Tempers get short. Test scores suffer. On the worst days, schools close, and students lose days of learning while parents’ schedules are disrupted.
Yorkwood Elementary in Baltimore, before it finally got air conditioning last year, was subject to closure by the district on any day the forecast hit 90 degrees by 10 a.m. And the number of those days has been rising over time.
“I remember one year we literally had seven [closure] days before we were able to have a full week of school because of the heat,” said Tonya Redd, the principal.
July 2023 was the world’s hottest month on record. And America’s schools weren’t built for this. According to a 2021 study by the Center for Climate Integrity, more than 13,700 public schools that did not need cooling systems in 1970 have in..

Six years ago, Harvard withdrew admissions offers from 10 high school seniors it had previously accepted. School officials had gotten wind of jokes circulating on the students’ private Facebook group — memes that made light of school shootings and found hilarity in the Holocaust, among other repellant takes — and reversed course. After the George Floyd murder in 2020, more young people who had posted racist or apparently bigoted posts in their youth faced similar punishment when sleuths unearthed and shared their online offenses. A prominent New York Times story spread the word to ambitious kids and anxious parents: be careful what you say online, because it never goes away.
Author and media/technology guru Devorah Heitner heard all about it. Panicked parents approached her and asked, how can I keep my kid from going viral for all the wrong reasons? Heitner’s latest book, Growing Up In Public: Coming of Age in a Digital World, addresses these and other concerns related to kids’ use a..

A high school English teacher recently explained to me how she’s coping with the latest challenge to education in America: ChatGPT. She runs every student essay through five different generative AI detectors. She thought the extra effort would catch the cheaters in her classroom.
A clever series of experiments by computer scientists and engineers at Stanford University indicate that her labors to vet each essay five ways might be in vain. The researchers demonstrated how seven commonly used GPT detectors are so primitive that they are both easily fooled by machine generated essays and improperly flagging innocent students. Layering several detectors on top of each other does little to solve the problem of false negatives and positives.
“If AI-generated content can easily evade detection while human text is frequently misclassified, how effective are these detectors truly?” the Stanford scientists wrote in a July 2023 paper, published under the banner, “opinion,” in the peer-reviewed ..