Dinowitz presses on timeline for holding ed tech vendors accountable
Dinowitz asks if there is a timeline for holding companies accountable and canceling ineffective contracts. Giunta agrees it's an important next step, and Laura Lai describes the five high school AI pilots as a first step toward independent assessment.
What I'm interested in is in addition to data provided by the company itself, of course they're going to say their products are good.
Is there third party verification?
Right, or any research or even internal research by the DOE that demonstrates the growth, the effectiveness of it, or lack thereof, and that you'll cancel the contract and take away their vendor license.
I think that is an important next step for us to be stronger in.
Is that part of your...
goal, is there a timeline for actually holding the companies accountable and honestly holding all of us accountable to what we're putting in the classrooms?
Yes.
Laura, did you want to jump in?
Yeah, I just wanted to uplift the five pilots that we're doing in high school.
That is exactly the purpose of those pilots.
It's our first step towards
This question that you, that parents, that many advocates have, that is, where's the data?
Show us the data.
And we want to be responsive to that, and we want to better understand not just what the vendor believes these tools are capable of or what their research in Oklahoma shows, but
how are these products working in New York City public schools?
How can we take a first?
our step towards measuring that ourselves.
That's why we're doing the five pilots in high school.
We have basically three classes of tools that are going to be part of those pilots, very low dose.
You know, I'm talking about like 15 minutes of interaction with the tool at a time.
Five different kinds of pilots.
Five pilots, three different kinds of tools.
One's a project-based learning tool.
One's a tool that teachers use to design customized solutions for their students.
And one is a writing supplement, and one is a math tool that we made sure don't have any gamification properties that allow students to do their own thinking.
And we want to take a look in a structured way at how students use these tools and what impact they have on student learning.
And that's going to be happening over the course of this year, that we implement those pilots to help begin that question of how can we independently assess whether
educational technology tools work in our classrooms.