NYC and LA are restricting student AI. We used it to expose what school missed—and repair two years of gaps in six weeks.
Between my husband and I, three of our parents were public-school teachers. Even the fourth one had worked, for a brief time, within the public school system. We had tremendous respect for the system itself.
I use past tense for a reason.
For twelve years we had assumed: we assumed that by being in a good school district, we would be safe from the decline of public education.
My son (“Bobby”) was an excellent student in elementary school, but had trouble adjusting to middle school. We decided to start touring the local private school, and was shocked at how far ahead they were of public schooling. The private school was mandating essays written in cursive by third grade, teaching algebra in sixth grade, and actually held students accountable from an early age on.
We realized we were failing our children as parents, and we had an emergency on our hands. We sent Bobby to be homeschooled by my parents for about six weeks, finishing out the remainder of his term learning cursive and sentence diagramming. Then we sent him to full time summer school at the private school, and hoped that would be enough.
One month before the year started, he took an admissions test. He was supposed to be entering seventh grade.
Bobby failed the admissions test.
He failed even the sixth grade placement, effectively putting him two years behind.
This was a blow to the entire family. Bobby cried and cried many tears over this – after all his hard work, and sacrificing a whole summer, he didn’t pass.
But the story has a happy ending. After six weeks, Bobby was able to pass the placement retest.
This is the story of how we used AI to fix two years’ worth of deficiencies in Saxon math and grammar.
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I applaud this approach and have already used AI in this way.
But as a veteran public school teacher, I am here to tell you the public schools have zero incentive to accomplish this level of individuation for YOUR child.
