Priten: Welcome to Margin of Thought, where we make space for the questions that matter.
I'm your host, Priten, and together we'll explore questions that help us preserve what matters while navigating what's coming.
Oftentimes we confuse following the rules with doing the right thing.
Today I'm speaking with Jessica Madre.
Jessica is an education researcher and consultant whose work tackles the gap between how education policies are written and how they actually play out in our schools.
In today's episode, Jessica and I confront the meaning of ethical policy, discuss the rise of surveillance culture, and dig into today's erosion of deep literacy.
So how exactly can we make our school's genuine environments for human connection instead of control?
Jessica and I had a lengthy pre-recording conversation or a rather commiseration session, and so today we get to start right away with our thoughts on reading.
Let's get started.
Jessica: You know, in school right now.
They really don't even, the kids don't get like a whole book I have feelings about that, obviously.
They are so busy breaking down the parts of a story that they forget the whole story so finally, well, and she's had some other really interesting experiences with the technology.
So she taught herself to read during COVID.
I would love to say it was like my great parenting.
it was not, she was bored, I
think.
And, and so that happened.
She was given a book because her reading level is much higher than her academic year, right, than her age.
And so it had all this slang in it, which is fine.
I am not opposed to slang, but also she spent the great majority of her childhood in the Middle East, so I isn't really on her radar.
She came to me with the book, well, I say book, it's on an iPad, and she's like, I, what is this word?
And I'm like, Ooh.
Right.
Context would be great, but it was very hard for her because like she was transitioning on the app to these appropriate reading levels.
But those reading levels also do not account for the fact that she was in third grade
it was hard enough for her to transition into the deep south having lived overseas for all these years and actually just understand the children in the deep south of Louisiana much less read what what they were saying.
So it was a really interesting transition for her.
But now because she's done all these AR points and whatever other compliance tool they've got set in place for this, she is allowed to read novels from start to finish, and it's only taken till fifth grade.
Priten: this has now come up in the last three conversations I've had that were recorded, like for our podcast.
And, this is the most frightening thing to me.
Like the not reading a book start to finish and, like, even this seems like the exception, I did a bunch of interviews this summer with college students and most of them, like the last time they remember reading a full
book was middle school at best, But like, high school is already so standardized, testing focused that it's passages like you're just like, can you read a passage and do what you gotta do with the passage because that's all
you're gonna be tested
on.
Like what's the point of reading anything more than that?
and when they are assigned a book, it's like, oh, if you're write a book report, I'll spark notes it.
I'll check.
I mean, you know, preach at GPT, but like, get a couple of things and then just bullshit my way through it because like, I don't really want to read.
Like there's just like that intrinsic motivation to read a book is not there.
Jessica: They don't have stories, like they don't get the joy of the stories.
And then I will tell you this, from spending the last week in a middle school and it reminded me a lot of, when I very first started teaching, which you know.
I was originally in drug courts.
I didn't start teaching until I had my first child and was 30 years old.
So my perspective was wildly different from probably the 20 something year olds coming right out of university anyway, but I was so shook because everybody needs to be silent all day.
And I'm like, this is wild.
Like why?
Why is like nobody talks.
and it's like that where I am now, like the compliance issues where even like my own child recently was suspended because he had his phone off in his pocket, but they could see the outline of the phone in his pocket, and it's supposed to be in his backpack.
I'm like, so we're criminalizing a behavior that is absolutely legal and in most places expected.
you are not his parent.
You don't pay for it.
And also your decision making process ends at 2 27 when he leaves here.
Priten: That policy is made in such a myopic way, right?
Like they've decided that cell phones are a distraction, probably some truth to it.
They have then created a policy that like it has to be in your backpack.
Okay?
Does something towards this, like avoiding the constant TikTok or whatever in class, but.
The necessity of enforcing that policy in that instance is not backed by the ethical reason by which you made the policy.
there is a circular process that needs to take place when you're making rules and regulations and laws and coming up with the ethical decision.
So it's like you have made a policy for a very particular reason.
If your punishment is not in service of that reason, then you're just punishing for the sake of punishing, right?
Like if the student has the phone off in their pocket.
It is still doing what the policy intended for it to do.
The student is not distracted by the phone.
Like whether it's in the backpack or in the phone is ethically irrelevant.
like that is not the thing of ethical importance.
That is not why you decided to sit down and write something.
You sat down and made a policy because it was a distraction.
It's not a distraction.
Ignore it.
Like
Jessica: People have gotten very lost in the difference between law policy and ethics.
Like those have all somehow merged into this single concept and I'm like, actually those three very different processes, you can have totally legal behavior that is also not ethically sound.
And then you have to start dividing out people's moral compass.
And that is really where I think like some of the start of these conversations has been missed.
I had a really great conversation.
I did a week on campus, for this PhD program, and there was a man there.
He spent eight years at the Vatican.
Very philosophical guy and we were talking about education amongst all the other things in the world that seem to be quite out of balance at the moment.
And I was like, you know, it's very strange because it feels like there are so few people who are like looking past their nose or even around the corner.
So sure we put this policy in place.
Sure.
We do all those things like job done, finished, like actually no, you're not.
Like in order to build something that's valuable, if you haven't thought this through on what this looks like in 5, 10, 15 years from now, then you are really not doing anybody any service by just putting these things in place.
Have you read about the School to prison pipeline.
when I start looking at some of the policies and things, it reminds me a lot of that.
And you know, when I had that situation with his phone, they literally said to me, well, his punishment is we take it overnight and take it for the weekend.
And I was like, you absolutely do not there is only one person in their world that parents them, and that happens to only be me.
So it's just me doing this thing, sir. So that's going back with me because also there are other things like when it comes to the cell phone policy, which is a huge one in schools right now.
They say, well, you know, we didn't have 'em when we were kids.
True.
But there were millions of payphones, like everywhere we went.
I don't know the last time I saw a payphone,
Priten: this is where I think like the, the disconnect is so, so deep because.
These policies are made in a rush.
They're made without full consultation with all the stakeholders.
and then the policies are served as the ends themselves, right?
I think most schools have kind of realized, just following the law is not enough, right?
Millions of examples of why the law itself can be very immoral, right?
So like, it is legal to be segregated.
so just saying something is legal is not a great interface to say it's a good idea.
but, and then like we, we need policies, right?
it's not like we can just operate just off of individual decisions all the time because the amount of decisions that we in a school make on a daily basis are innumerable.
If you had to reason through it every single time, we wouldn't have time to do anything else.
but those policies are meant to be guideposts.
They're meant to be shortcuts.
They're not meant to be like our legal constitution of , if you don't follow this rule by rule, like here's the prison cell in our school.
Right?
Like, it's like
Jessica: I've worked at a school that had one.
Priten: And it's, I mean, yeah, I mean, Most schools have some sort of like little prison system.
they won't call it that, but,
Jessica: Hey, call it what it is though, right?
Priten: Yeah, and so it's like, but the policies exist to help you make decisions on the fly, not to like make the decisions for you constantly, no matter what the relevant context is.
That is like the compliance versus ethical decision making, distinction that I think.
Folks are really not grasping because I think like all these like quote unquote zero tolerance policies and there's obviously context in which
a zero tolerance policy is good for the safety of our students, but there's a universal blanket idea that everything is a zero tolerance policy.
there's way too much nuance when you're educating a bunch of students with all different backgrounds and all different parents and all
different economic statuses and all different levels of , knowledge of the policy and uses of all the technology and non-technology.
I mean, there's just like.
You cannot have a zero tolerance policy for cell phone usage.
You cannot have a zero tolerance policy for speaking out in class.
You cannot have a zero tolerance policy for leaving the class without a pass.
Like those are not realistic scenarios where there's no nuance that you wouldn't even consider before you decide to punish the student or not.
And what does it do to our students They already hate going to school now.
They like just reinforce that they're going to school and being monitored and surveilled and they're punished.
Like school is a punishment when you phrase it this way.
I wouldn't feel good about going to a place where I was constantly under scrutiny and no one listened to me when I gave them a good reason for why I was acting the way I was acting.
it's just not conducive.
And then we're like, oh, absenteeism and engagement crisis.
It's like they don't like you like.
Everything's a crisis.
but they're making it into a crisis, right?
Jessica: And Then they're like, I don't know why they can't communicate or why they have poor mental health.
Well, I don't know.
They're not allowed to talk all day as teenagers, Probably you grew up closer to what I did.
But I mean, we worked it out on the playground when people didn't like each other and somebody got into a fuss.
You figured out what was gonna happen next, and That was that.
It was called problem solving.
Priten: I remember explicitly that we had, . I guess a school social worker or a guidance counselor who started the year off with what they called kelso's choices.
I don't know if this was a model of conflict resolution that schools were pushing at that time.
and it was like a little wheel and it had a little frog, and the frog had to make decisions in really difficult situations.
Like would it walk away, would it talk to an adult?
it was so infantilizing, and I guess we were young enough where it didn't feel infantilizing, but it stuck.
but I mean, you know, this is like pre SEL being an actual term of art or, term of industry.
But most of it was choices you make on your own, in your social situations without an adult present.
It was like one choice was to go talk to an adult.
The other like 15 segments of the wheel, where like, do I respond in this way?
Do I like go talk, get a friend?
Do I just walk away from the situation?
Do I pick up a book?
Right?
Like there was just like all of these other like.
choices that empowered the student to gain control of a situation where they were uncomfortable or there was conflict.
and I feel like these days it's either , we're just, we're just gonna pretend that these conflicts don't happen and when they do, they're just gonna be explosive because I say bring back the frog.
Like right there is some level of like empowering our students to do these things and not just like blanket follow policies, like when someone's being mean to you.
The response can be something different than oh, you broke the rules, I'm gonna tell on you.
Again, there's context in which, yes, students should feel empowered to report to adults when their safety is in, in, in danger.
but there's that every conflict that a student has has to be like, I'm gonna go get my adult.
Jessica: that will be very annoying if that turns out to be, and adults will have zero time, nor are there enough of them in a single place to manage that.
But you know, it makes me think about actually was having this conversation with my oldest the other day and they're viewing things like policy.
And it's like, policy says don't do this thing.
So you either don't do it or you're wrong.
there isn't any leeway into like now, okay, it's a problem.
Now you're in trouble.
But cell phone in the pocket example, tell 'em to put it in the bag.
Also, what the policy said, and I kind of started to argue with the person who called me about it and I was like, what?
He is like, well, I mean, have you read, have you read the policy?
And I was like, I have.
And it's like, well, it says in their backpack.
I was like, actually, it says out of sight which also is inside of his pocket.
He's like, well, no, we could see the outline.
I was like, why are you looking at his pockets like that?
That's weird.
why are you checking out my kids like that, man.
I'm just saying that's creepy.
Priten: that's the real policy violation.
Like,
Jessica: Yes.
Stop looking at people's pockets so quick.
But you know, that's cause they're looking for things
Priten: That's the culture that it, it's become, right?
Like, And it's not any individual teacher's fault.
I just feel like we're moving in this general direction of like a very draconian environment where we're so afraid that the kids are being spoiled by the latest technologies like there is some autonomy that like, and how old is your child?
Jessica: 15 and 18 are the high school ones.
Priten: Yeah, like and at 15, you want them to develop some level of self, like their own decision making.
If he has decided that the cell phone in the pocket is not distracting, like he should be allowed to make that call for himself, right?
And now, like what does that do to his relationship with the school as a whole?
the next time he walks into the school, how is he feeling?
Is he feeling like he's in a place that's supportive?, I mean, I can't imagine if someone did that to me the next day, walking in and being like, oh, this place is meant for my growth.
Like,
Jessica: Yeah.
Super excited to be here.
Let's do good work.
I don't have a phone to distract me.
Priten: the cell phone policy obviously is, is a, is is one where there's a lot of this because I think students are obviously very tied to their phones.
I think parents are split on what the right thing to do is anyways.
and then I think schools are so scared of the distraction.
I think they are coming down very, hard on it.
but this is true of all sorts of policing in schools, right?
we've talked on other conversations about the AI detectors and how they're used, but it's the same thing, like creating this culture of , let's catch the students to punish them.
It does do something to the fabric of a school that I think is like, is damaging of course to like, you know, the, the teacher's own wellbeing, Students don't wanna be in an environment like that that is not conducive to learning.
If you're constantly feeling like you're about to get in trouble, your brain like, like I am not a neurologist or a psychologist, but I guarantee you there is
research that if you're constantly under surveillance and threat of getting in trouble, that you are not able to access the learning centers of your brain like
Jessica: it's on your basic hierarchy of needs of feeling safe basic human needs.
and the truth is like it also really skews my view of the school and as we move into a new era of school choice if you want my feedback on that,
I'm like, I can come up with 10 different ways that you could curb that behavior if it's problematic before you take them outta school for a day.
And if we're saying like, school is this valuable and this is all the things they need, except for if you don't do.
These few minor things like don't speak, put everything where I said to do it.
Like if you're happy to just show up in your best robotic mode and go through and break down those passages and keep everything.
It's a very compliance driven thing, which we're seeing the pendulum has reached hopefully the peak.
Of this compliance era because we're just stuck in such a time of like, when it comes to AI and education, you are either pro AI and everything should be AI for every single age, for every single subject all the time.
It should just be open source, go for it, or anti.
So ban it and there is no.
There's really nothing in between those.
And the truth of the matter is most of us live somewhere on a spectrum of, in between a lot of these things.
Like for me, the ai, I don't think the little kids need to really do it.
'cause right now their energy should be spent on reading, writing, playing outside, and working out social issues with friends.
As they get a little bit older and they begin to feel confident in writing, then they can use AI like you have with give me feedback about how this is gonna be perceived by people that are not me, because I can't see outside of my own perspective.
So it's like an instant feedback tool.
Totally useful for middle school and high school kids.
And as they get to high school, you can really start looking at breaking down the things that they've written on, like, how good is this gonna be?
Is this gonna match my, which I think Grammarly, I keep seeing these Grammarly commercials that Grammarly's already gotten on to Submit your rubric and we'll fix it for you.
I'm like, oh my gosh.
Priten: In the last four years, Grammarly has gone from my favorite tool to my least favorite tool, and it's so sad.
So pre ai, we used to have like, the nonprofit that I run, We used to have a nonprofit Grammarly for everybody, and everybody loved it.
It was like it was in your browser all the time.
And so we were on WordPress and we were working on Google Doc.
You got some like good feedback.
I was a huge fan of it.
And like the minute they started introducing AI features, we scrapped it.
We're just like, this is not how we think about writing.
This is not how we think about our voice.
None of it is productive.
It is like, what is the most conducive thing we can do to make this as difficult as possible for educators?
And then.
Turn it in.
On the other hand, like it's pretending to be this like benevolent player and they're just like, let's reinforce this idea that we're gonna just catch our kids some days.
I was so annoyed this summer when they put out there, I'm sure you saw the, like the humanizer detector.
Jessica: I'd like to meet the human that humanized the ai.
Priten: It's like, it's like, so now, okay, so someone put out an ai, detect an AI generator.
You put out an AI generated text detector.
Someone else put out an AI generated text detector, bypass passer, to which you put out an AI generated text detector bypass, or detector, and it's like, how long is it gonna take?
And I wrote this in a comment on their CTOs post, and it was probably a little bit too like off the cuff, but like.
I was like, well, the next step is for somebody to put out an AI generated text detector bypass, or detector bypass, or like, this is just like a never ending circle.
Like this is not like, stop chasing this.
this is not productive in any way.
Like you're gonna go down to your student and be like, oh, like I know you use an AI humanizer because this Turnitin thing told me to, but I have like zero evidence of it.
Who's chasing this?
I mean, yeah, they're multimillion dollar companies, so maybe they know something that we don't, but like the snake oil does sell, right?,
Jessica: Well, there is a disconnection from purchaser all the way down to classroom because like when we get board members who may or may not have any educational background may or may not be embedded in some of their own initiatives.
All the way, like this trickle down effect, and I'm like, by the time it gets to the people who are actually using it, nobody has a clue why the person purchased.
It's all about money, but this is a service driven industry and I think sometimes people forget that.
So we're not really training teachers coming outta university, assuming that their College of Education has made it this far.
We're not training 'em on how to manage classroom behavior, which if that is not under control, everything else ceases to exist.
So I don't know why we don't start there.
You have people who are like purchasing things that are meant to do a thing that in their mind is what's supposed to be happening in a classroom.
And I'm like, you haven't been there for a minute, because I can assure you, last week I, there's a kid that came between classes.
One second, she was fine, and the next second she was in a beetle position on the floor and sobbing uncontrollably.
Sometimes people just forget that, we're dealing with children in the K to 12 system.
I don't care if they're seniors, they're still children.
And the only people who can help with that is other people.
Priten: That's true beyond children years, right?
Like my favorite college professors were all the ones who were like caring human.
Like they weren't the ones who, everything was about the syllabus and the assignments.
Like they was joy of the learning.
They cared about you, they cared about what the class meant for your larger prospects.
Professor who I'm still in touch with, 10 years later, like she and I cried after an election together.
Like it was a human moment.
Like we all sat there and we were taking a class on educational justice and we were all just like.
What's the point of talking about all this when the real world is this far away from like our philosophical ideals?
And I st stuck around class and I was like, I just don't know what to do with my career.
I was a sophomore in college.
I was just like, I don't even know, like how to find meaning in like what I want to do anymore because it's so far fetched from like where we are in the world and we cry
and like, that's just not, that's not replaceable.
That stuck with me like that.
And I took six more classes with her, And there I learned so much and it shaped me as it was.
It was a person and it was one of the most formative experiences of my life.
But that was not because she enforced her syllabus policy and said, oh, the day after an election that shook the campus, we're gonna stick to the syllabus because it's on our policy.
Like she's like, we're scrapping class today and we're all just gonna talk and see how we feel.
To an outsider that's like, oh, like,, snowflakes and like, you know, you're there to learn.
But so much was learned in that moment and everything else we learned the rest of the semester was built on a foundation of trust.
We could trust this professor to be a human, to know who we were, to take us seriously as people.
And then that one quote unquote lost class made up for so much more in dividends across the rest of the semester.
But on paper Like people just are just like, you know, this fetal position student just needs to go to the nurse and deal with it.
But, sometimes they need their teacher who they have an existing relationship with, to step out with them for five minutes and ask them what's up.
It is not all policies, it is not all like fixable by these other things.
It's not , oh, maybe if we had an AI facial detector, we would've known less period that she was about to cry.
It's such a dystopian world that we're pushing towards.
Pretending it's utopian.
it is so sad because I think fundamentally like the value of education is the relationships
Jessica: I, I don't know what's gonna happen with the sense of community from that.
Priten: And that's been eroding for years, right?
Like I think the standardized testing push has definitely done a lot of damage towards that.
I think COVID accelerated this, like, , oh, everybody's on a screen all the time, and that does something towards it.
And AI is definitely pushing us even farther in that direction.
I was speaking to uh, two nephews in California whose schools, have major cuts because they're in like the Palo Alto area and everybody's going to private schools.
The public schools are like starting to shut down 'cause they can't keep enough of them open.
So class sizes are going up, resources are low.
These are both elementary school students, I believe third and fifth grade, if I remember correctly.
I saw them over the summer.
But they spent the entire day on their tablet From the moment they step into the school, to the moment they leave the school, it is all tablet mediated in service of differentiation.
Like, oh, they get to learn at their own pace.
It hits all the learning targets.
But I'm like, can you tell me what the kid who's sitting next to you is like, best friend?
Like what, uh, favorite toy is, like, what they wanna be when they grow up.
Jessica: That breaks the, you're supposed to be silent rule
Priten: Exactly And it's like, what are you learning?
Like yes.
Now you have learned like
basic arithmetic very, very well.
Jessica: You are learning How to sit in a cubicle and not bother other people.
That's what unfortunately,
Priten: It's so dystopian to me, and I don't, and it's scary.
And I know we started with the book reading, but that's the, like that I can't sleep at night.
Thinking about the fact that , reading a book has become a privilege.
We went through a phase where it was a privilege historically, it was a massive privilege and we fought, very, very hard and technology helped us get to the point where it was no longer a privilege, right?
Like great technological advancement, great social advancement.
We were able to put a book in every single household like that was, and the scheme of human society, like a major development for progress.
And now we've decided we're all gonna take that for granted
Jessica: I would like to go at least in another direction from this current direction.
And the thing
is like they don't talk about the books.
Oh my gosh, I remember reading.
So many books.
my mom was a teacher and we always had books, so,
Priten: Yeah.
Jessica: she's retired and writes them.
I'm pretty sure it's a really good reason for her to convince my dad that she needs to travel some in her older years.
Priten: The diaries are gonna travel.
Like retired
Jessica: Well, the first book that she and her friend, so she writes, they co-author everything was, was, uh, Louisiana Christmas, where they just went from town to town around Louisiana, where all these different settlements were.
The German settlements that, and collected everybody's grandmother's best recipes.
Priten: But there's something so human about that, right?
could you get ChatGPT to like fake these recipes overnight?
110%. I could probably do it in the middle of our conversation.
We won't have any sort of emotional response to it.
Right.
And like, this is, this is a concept that I've been trying to figure out how to like, get into a formal, like written piece.
But, there's this.
Sanskrit aesthetic philosophy.
So it studied like how humans consumed art, poetry, plays.
and it talked about this concept of a shared heart.
And so it said like, when an artist produces some sort of work, it's best received by somebody who can share in some of the initial emotive response that like fueled the art., the example I go to is like, There's this religious song that was sung in India.
pre independence movement as a religious song, and it was based on selflessness and giving and, taking care of your community.
And then Mahatma Gandhi like reclaims it as a patriotic song for the independence movement.
And so he capitalizes on a lot of the same themes.
He says, oh, the self-reliance, the taking care of our people, the like, um, taking care of our, the weakest members of our society.
And, and they're, that, that it's received well.
it functions as a, as a battle cry for independence.
Then, the current administration in India is a little bit more, populist.
they tried reclaiming it three years ago and they used it for like this military ad, and they were like talking about the force of the Indian military.
And I saw it and I'm like, something is wrong, right?
Like, because then it, the, the actual emotion by which this was generated is not matching how we're experiencing I think there's something similar that
happens when you're consuming like AI generated art because that emotional response that generates it is missing, and so you have nothing to relate to.
So even if the words on paper are the same, like that shared human connection that's like, oh, I feel what you felt when you were writing this or creating this, or drawing this, that's missing.
And I think that that's the problem, right.
When we hear the story about your mom going like house, to house during Christmas and getting Christmas recipes, there is something very human about that.
we can put ourselves in those shoes.
We can imagine what our grandmothers would say in those situations or remember our favorite recipes.
Think about the real humans behind their who share those recipes for decades with their families.
And then you have ChatGPT generated a second, and you're like, well, this is just words.
Like there's no, there's no substance that makes this like.
Meaningful to me, right?
Like The example that I use with students always is like if you had like a poem about the survival written by a Holocaust survivor versus one written by Chad GPT and
you read both and initially you read both and they both had all the hallmarks of a poem and they had all like beautiful rhyming schemes and you know, perfect poetry.
And then you look at the bottom of the byline, for one said, someone who survived the Holocaust and with a ChatGPT.
You will have a different emotive response.
Can I like document that on paper?
No.
But like you can do a test of every human on this planet and I guarantee you that there is something intrinsically different about those experiences and I, I don't wanna lose that.
And I, I am really, really scared that we're in a direction of like moving towards, completely losing our ability to appreciate that.
Jessica: my hope is that actually this will have the opposite effect okay, great.
Can we use this now to initiate an era of the next great philosophers and scholars and artists because the things that they're making
and creating by hand and with their own minds will be valued so differently seen directly what it looks like to handed off to a tech.
Priten: Jessica's perspective reminds us that the policies we develop become real for students.
Whether we're discussing cell phone bans, or the loss of personal writing, we have to ask ourselves, are we using technology and policy to build relationships or instead to enforce silence?
Keep listening as we continue the season exploring the ethics of education technology from every angle.
And don't forget to pre-order my upcoming book, ethical Ed Tech, for more on how to make policies that build those relationships by visiting ethical ed tech.org.
Thanks for listening to Margin of Thought.
If this episode gave you something to think about, subscribe, rate, and review us.
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Until next time, keep making space for the questions that matter.