Today RPS is Quietly Rolling Out the Second Phase of an AI Literacy Coaching Pilot
Is AI Instruction truly the vision we have for our district?
Update: Though School Board Purchasing Policy 3–3.4 states that the School Board must approve contract over $250,000, thus excluding the Amira contract from required approval, it does also state, “Awards of sole source contracts shall be reported to the School Board at the next regular meeting for informational purposes” and “All contracts in excess of $25,000, regardless of type and term, must be reported to the School Board at the next appropriate meeting in written form in a format agreed upon between the division superintendent and the School Board.”
Amira Learning is “the first intelligent reading assistant that listens, assesses & tutors. Amira accelerates reading mastery,” according to its website. Essentially, students read to a robot that uses artificial intelligence to assess a student’s literacy. Amira partners with both TPRI and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH) to distribute its products, and is currently partnered with HMH to pilot Amira in RPS. According to RPS emails obtained by Freedom of Information Act request, elementary schools across the district will roll out a pilot of this program for 2nd and 3d graders today—February 24, 2023.
How did this come to be? How is it that RPS is piloting yet another expensive program to help our students read instead of just letting our teachers teach them? Why is it investing more money in flashy technology when it has already invested millions in 2020 in EL, a scripted, standardized curriculum meant to solve our literacy crisis (it did not), and invested millions more in a July 2021 moonshot literacy initiative. In fact, the EL purchase was so problematic that on October 4, 2022 our School Board voted to form a task force to reevaluate the program.
At the same time that the School Board was moving to reevaluate our boxed curriculum, the RPS Administration was making moves to purchase boxed technology with Amira. It appears that Superintendent Kamras and Eboni Massi, the RPS Manager of Literacy, met with Joe Siedecki, the Chief Impact Officer of Amira, on October 4, 2022, after which Superintendent Kamras immediately committed the district to purchasing Amira for the district, stating, “I was very impressed with Amira. I did a little research this afternoon with folks in the literacy world I trust and love, and they’ve been impressed, too….I’d like to make Amira available to all of my elementary teachers as soon as possible.”
While Eboni Massi showed excitement for the program, she also seemed to express some reluctance to immediately launch Amira without investing RPS stakeholders in the process of committing to a new AI- literacy platform. She noted on October 5, 2022, “Although we are at a natural part of the implementation process, we’re at a low point…how might we work in partnership with our various stakeholders (teachers, RPS School Improvement team, Academics, school leaders, and families) as we consider incorporating Amira into our literacy footprint….although our moves forward don’t have to be perfect, perhaps they can be a bit more collaborative, inclusive, and considerate.”
This helpful insight from Eboni Massi was apparently not pursued, because what parent or caregiver has been surveyed about Amira? There are many questions that could have been considered with all stakeholders. For one, who is looking into whether the HMH privacy policy for students from Amira and HMR really protects student’s private information? Do we actually know what happens to recordings of our students’ voices? (Privacy policy for Amira generally indicates that recordings of children’s voices for 24 hours RPS did not provide terms of service for users despite a FOIA request for these terms.) Were all elementary RPS teachers surveyed about this pilot program?
Nevertheless, RPS signed a $70,400 sole source vendor procurement contract with HMH for its Amira pilot on December 20, 2022. Based on the School Board meeting agendas since that time, the school board was not informed of this purchase (the School Board has to approve all purchases over $250,000). This is unfortunate since transparency is always preferable in the acquisition of new education technologies.
Additionally, for some reason, in response to a FOIA request for the contract with Amira, RPS also provided an April 2020 contract with HMH that the School Board did vote to approve — for a Read 180 Universal (another adaptive literacy intervention platform!) contract. That same contract for Read 180 Universal was renewed for another year in May 2022 without mention of Amira. It is confusing that RPS provided this HMH contract for a FOIA related to Amira — perhaps suggesting that RPS Administration considered itself to have implicit board approval from this seemingly unrelated contract with HMH?
Regardless, on December 28, 2022, Eboni Massi started planning the piloting of Amira, inviting schools to apply for the pilot program on January 2, 2023. The invitation email described Amira as an “artificial intelligence personalized learning tool to support students with fluency using brain-based reading approaches.” (Side note here: all reading is brain-based.) Based on emails, it appears that 10 elementary schools rolled out Phase I of the Amira pilot: Fairfield Court, Bellevue (3rd grade only), Overby Shepphard, Westover Hills, Mary Munford, Woodville, Chimborazo, Ginter Park, Miles Jones, J.L. Francis, and Blackwell.
By February 2, 2023, it was announced that the remaining elementary schools would start their own pilots of Amira for 2nd and 3rd grade on February 24 as a part of Phase II. RPS decided to order test dividers and headphones to facilitate the use of Amira in the classroom from Amira on January 6. RPS officials were not sure if one-time federal funding or curriculum and instruction funding would pay for these test dividers and headphones. The dyslexia screening function of Amina was disabled in late January. Allegedly, this pilot project will continue until May, with RPS looking at student data for results starting in March.
Our 3rd grade students have been tested beyond belief in RPS. Whether it’s a district assessment, a state assessment, a curriculum-required assessment, MAPS, or i-Ready, it seems like all students do is take tests and cram in rote information for the next test. It is crushing to see the district turn again to flashy technology based in AI and with a high price tag when RPS continues to devalue its greatest literacy resource: teachers, actual humans trained to help our kids read, love to read, and be seen as individuals instead of data points into perpetuity. Education research regarding AI in schools points to issues with racial bias; increasing racial inequities in education; exacerbating educational inequities; and prioritization of profit over quality education.
At bottom, it seems that the RPS Administration is yet again ready to sell our students and their private data to yet another technology platform to address a literacy problem they have been unable to fix. Why must teachers spend their precious planning time learning yet another unproven education technology platform in the middle of the school year? What if the solution for RPS isn’t a robot assessing reading across a digital divide, but space, time, and independence for teachers, reading coaches, and specialists providing the tools and attention known to help students learn to read? RPS children should not again serve as guinea pigs for a start-up AI platform that has not been shared transparently with the public.
