Nadav Zeimer calls for validated video portfolios and real audiences for students

You may begin.

Chair Dynowitz, thank you for, and committee, thank you for this opportunity.

I taught physics and led Harlem Renaissance Transfer High School through a period of turnaround.

The difference in our system was never talent and opportunity.

It's always been audience, and audience has always been rationed.

You saw, you have said yourself that the Regents create perverse incentives, and audience is what replaces them, is what I'm arguing here.

Assign an essay that only one teacher will read and the student lets AI write it.

Put her on stage defending her own work and no one can stand in for her.

Would you let your own children be assessed by an auditorium full of chatbots?

All students deserve an authentic audience.

Anything less and AI will lure them into offloading their learning and our public schools will crumble as a result.

The answer to AI is not more ed tech.

It's an expert human audience for every student.

Video is the new number two pencil.

Learning happens off screen and in the real world, and the camera comes out to capture their off screen learning for assessment purposes.

In video format, student work can be reproduced and distributed across space and time at zero cost, allowing an expert reviewer or college admissions officer to pull up a chair to each student's proudest moments.

I support the moratorium as a tourniquet, not a solution.

Portfolios for all is the solution.

It's the only solution since everything is downstream of assessment.

And the only way to offer an expert audience to all students is validated video portfolios.

Real work validated by experts at scale.

The first step is journalism, which gives students an audience, a deadline, and a reason to check facts.

Let's expand J4A and let student creators know that we support them.

For example, we can give student journalists a press pass within school that allows them to use electronic devices to create content, not consume it as journalists.

Let's ensure New York City students learn to be creators, not scrollers, drivers of AI, not dependents on it.

Give every student a real audience.

The research is in my written testimony with more detail, and you can find more at academiccapital.org.

Thank you.

Thank you.

And I'm sure you tuned into our hearing last week and the one in June where we discussed extensively screen time and AI.