During a recent visit to Acadia National Park, I saw a display describing how the National Park Service (NPS) is handling climate change. The plan, named RAD, an acronym, calls for them to RESIST change by maintaining some things as they were in the past, to ACCEPT change by accommodating new and different conditions, and to DIRECT change by choosing the future they want.
A New York Times article in 2021 described RAD as a form of triage, where park managers are encouraged to “think beyond resistance to change and begin considering transformation.” In Acadia, for example, some native tree species are struggling to survive while invasive plants that are more adaptable to warmer temperatures are quickly moving in. Since the growing season has already lengthened by two months in coastal Maine over the last century and a half, dense thickets of invasive plants overgrow the paths, make the woods unsightly and serve as a breeding ground for ticks that carry Lyme disease. The NPS is rethinking its longstanding ethos of “forever” preservation and trying to determine how to change the plant and animal species that might thrive and coexist as temperatures warm and habitat changes.
Artificial intelligence (AI), like global warming, is incremental, inexorable and irreversible. We’ve gone from an era when math teachers banned handheld calculators to one when the SAT allows their use on their entire battery of tests. Secondary students now routinely use computer spelling and grammar tools (which also guide me as I craft this essay) and increasingly use AI tools to write. Sadly, we may be entering an new era in which students are befriending AI chatbots to boost their spirits and help them through difficult circumstances.
It is dawning on parents and teachers that handheld calculators, the internet, word processing, cellphones and, yes, ChatGPT are not going away. It strikes me that schools dealing with these technologies are akin to the NPS dealing with climate change. Thus, as public schools look to the future they might consider using the NPS’s RAD approach.
Public schools clearly possess the ability to RESIST change. They cling to the agrarian calendar, 180-day school year, 6-hour school day, age-based cohort grouping, and segmentation of subject matter despite the 24/7/365 opportunity for learning and the increasingly blurred lines between content areas. And, despite the broad acceptance of technology, schools haven’t abandoned basic math computation or spelling instruction in elementary schools nor have schools abandoned the submission of written work.
Public schools can clearly ACCEPT change. They have done so in their classrooms and especially in their administrative and business operations. Student information in the form of report cards, attendance records, health reports and demographic data are computerized, as are the financial and operational documents maintained in school offices. At the district level, accounting transactions, employee records, and payrolls are all computerized. Virtually every school district in the country has a presence on the web and many schools use social media to promote their activities and athletics, post announcements and do fundraising that formerly was done face-to-face. Given the pervasiveness of computer technology in everyone’s lives, these adaptations came relatively quickly and easily.
However, because schools are governed based on the way things were in the past, when the roles of each level of government were clearly delineated, public schools have struggled to DIRECT change.
Before 1965, the governance of public education was clear: the Constitution delegated schooling to the states. States, in turn, delegated that function to local school boards. The federal government played a very limited role in public education before the passage of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) which was designed to provide equitable funding for all schools. After the bill’s passage in 1965, the Federal government issued regulations districts needed to meet as a condition for that funding. The subsequent passage of the Individuals with Disabilities Act (IDEA) in 1975, designed to assure that public schools offer free and appropriate education to students with special needs, expanded the footprint of the federal government in public education to the point where it now provides 8-10% of each school districts’ funding.
Consequently, local public-school administrators face three sets of regulations: the federal ones governing ESEA and IDEA; state laws and regulations; and local school board policies and regulations.
Our nation’s recent experience with COVID illustrates the challenges this structure creates. After the federal government initially mandated the closure of all schools in April 2020, it deferred to states. The states, in turn, deferred the toughest decisions to local school boards. As a result, students and parents faced a hodge-podge of guidelines regarding schools’ openings and closings, masking mandates, and quarantines. Under the existing governance structure for public schools, any adapting for AI poses a daunting challenge.
Like COVID and climate change, AI is not going away any time soon. We face a future where cellphones provide every student with access to the Library of Congress and to AI tools that they will need to master to succeed in the future. Policymakers like the Vermont Redistricting Task Force might consider using the National Park Service’s RAD model.
Wayne Gersen is a retired public school administrator. He lives in Etna.