Education Week - April 19, 2017 - 8
DIGITAL DIRECTIONS > Tracking news and ideas in educational technology www.digitaldirections.org Algorithmic Bias a Rising Concern for K-12 Ed-Tech Field RAND study shows tech industry trends By Benjamin Herold & Sarah Schwartz From criminal sentencing to credit scores, algorithms and artificial intelligence increasingly make high-stakes decisions that have big implications for people's freedom, privacy, and access to opportunity. Despite the almost-blind faith people can put in such "artificial agents," it's no secret that they are often biased, according to a report from the RAND Corp. that has implications for education. More than ever, RAND researchers Osonde Osoba and Bill Welser said in an interview, it's important to raise awareness about the role that algorithms play and to push for a public accounting of their impact-particularly in areas that involve the public interest, including K-12 education. "For the longest time, any time questions of bias came up, hard-core researchers in artificial intelligence and algorithms dismissed them because they were not 'engineering concerns,' " Osoba said. "That was OK for commercial toys, but the moment the switch was made to applying algorithms to public-policy systems, the issue of bias no longer became a triviality." The new RAND report, "An Intelligence in Our Image: The Risks of Bias and Errors in Artificial Intelligence," does not focus on education. Instead, the authors lay out examples such as the algorithmic bias in criminal sentencing and the problems with Tay, a chatbot developed by Microsoft that was supposed to learn the art of conversation by interacting with Twitter users-and quickly began spewing racist and vulgar hate speech. Artificial agents can process the immense streams of data now running through society in ways that humans can't, making them a necessary tool for modern society, the RAND researchers write. But too often, they say, the public ascribes objectivity and neutrality to algorithms and artificial intelligence, even though most function as a "black box" and some have been shown to result in different outcomes for different groups of people. Origins of Digital Bias Where does such bias come from? The individual humans who program the artificial agents, who may have biases they are not even aware of; a pool of computer and data scientists that is far less diverse than the populations their products eventually affect; and biases in the data that are used to train the artificial agents to "learn" by finding patterns, RAND concluded. All those issues are present in the ed-tech field. One example: the growing field of "curriculum playlists"-educational software programs that rely on algorithms to choose what types of instructional content and learning experiences students have each day in the classroom. Algorithm-driven Ed-Tech-Leader Survey Pinpoints Top Priorities Open vs. Proprietary Resources The "2017 K-12 IT Leadership Survey Report" also highlights shifts in other district technology priorities. Improving mobile learning, which has been listed consistently as a top issue for district officials, notched the highest spot this year. Increasing broadband and network capacity, the No. 1 priority in 2016, took the second spot this year. Rural districts in geographically isolated areas face an especially great challenge, said Weeks. Despite the recent scaling-up of the open educational resources movement, the report found a "slight" shift in district officials' preferences for proprietary digital resources. CoSN's survey shows a decrease in the percent of respondents planning to evenly divide their use of OER and proprietary digital materials within the next three years, from 46 percent to 43 percent. At the same time, the share of respon- 8 | EDUCATION WEEK | April 19, 2017 | www.edweek.org The Consortium for School Networking conducted a survey of 495 school and district ed-tech leaders to identify their top priorities and challenges for this year. TOP PRIORITIES 1 2 Mobile learning 3 Broadband and network capacity Budget constraints and lack of resources Cybersecurity and privacy Staffing Only 13 percent of IT leaders report staffing is matched to needs. IT leaders said this was their top challenge for the third year in a row. RESOURCES Efforts to improve mobile learning, boost broadband capacity, and tighten cybersecurity are the three top priorities in 2017 for educational technology leaders in K-12 school systems, according to a new survey by the Consortium for School Networking, which represents school district chief technology officers around the country. For the third year in a row, leaders identified budget constraints as the No. 1 challenge facing their districts. Leaders' top priorities reflect the increasing digitization of the learning environment, said Tracy Weeks, the executive director of the State Educational Technology Directors Association. "We want to make sure that students have access to the content, to [technology] tools, both inside and outside the school building." CoSN has tracked districts' tech priorities via its IT Leadership survey since 2013. This marks the first year that cybersecurity has ranked in the top three, according to the report. Sixty-one percent of district technology leaders reported the concern as more important than it was last year, and 30 percent said it was "much more important." Experts point out that cybersecurity is a growing concern as criminals increasingly target schools. A recent study of IT infrastructure in several industries by BitSight, a security ratings company, found that K-12 and higher education experienced the highest rate of ransomware, an approach in which hackers insert a virus into a computer system and then ask for ransom payments to get rid of the virus. (See Education Week, Jan. 11, 2017.) The CoSN report also points to a recent warning from the IRS about phishing scams-which are attempts by scammers to get personal information such as bank-account numbers- targeting school districts. In trying to help districts, CoSN has developed a cybersecurity selfassessment and planning template for IT leaders looking for a strategy to address such issues. "Cybercriminals are getting very sophisticated," said Keith Krueger, the CEO of CoSN. algorithms will never replace a human teacher's evaluation. "It's not to say that you can't use artificial agents to help you identify particular potential gaps in instruction and learning," Luftglass said. The ed-tech product-development process provides opportunities to detect bias that are unavailable to companies in other industries, said Bridget Foster, the senior vice president for the Education Technology Industry Network, a division of the Software & Information Industry Association. "In education, developers are right there in the school, in the classroom, working with educators," she said. Foster's organization recommends that ed-tech companies figure out how to mitigate bias from the early planning and development stages onward. Welser said it's too early to try to regulate the field or mandate bias testing across the board. But, he argued, it is time for a conversation to begin in K-12 about how to address the potential biases in algorithms. WHAT'S ON SCHOOL TECH ADMINISTRATORS' MINDS TOP CHALLENGE By Sarah Schwartz tools are also use by some districts to provide career and college guidance and to hire teachers. What if such tools are biased against students of color, or students with special needs? How would educators, parents, and students even know? Such questions are both realistic and important for the field to be asking, Osoba and Welser said. "Educators need to not cede complete control to the computer," Welser said. That means being aware which products used in the classroom, school, or district rely on algorithms and artificial intelligence to make decisions; understanding what decisions they are making; and paying attention to how different groups of students are experiencing the products. Maribeth Luftglass, the assistant superintendent for information technology for the Fairfax County, Va., schools, said it is the district's responsibility to make sure digital tools driven by algorithms remain bias-free. When it comes to assessing students, she said, adaptive SOURCE: Consortium for School Networking dents who predicted use of proprietary materials that are "only" digital increased, from 31 percent to 36 percent. Krueger said that while there has been some "overhype" around OER, districts are still interested in the free resources. Seventy-nine percent of survey respondents, for instance, indicated that OER was a part of their districts' digital content strategies. OER is an important piece of curriculum, said Krueger, but it's unlikely to replace all proprietary digital content in the near future. BYOD Loses Ground Bring-your-own-device initiatives were at their least popular in the survey's history, in last place on the priorities list. Though the proportion of districts with fully implemented BYOD programs increased to 24 percent this year, from 16 percent in 2016, the percent of districts with no interest in BYOD reached a high of 34 percent. "Device prices have dramatically come down, and so you see much lower [priced] options-Chromebooks and things like that-that [have] changed the economics for school districts," said Krueger. He predicts that districts will gradually move to a dual model, in which students are invited to use their own devices and the district provides devices for those who are not able to bring their own. Henry County Schools is implementing a version of this dual model. The 42,000-student dis- trict in Georgia has emphasized BYOD over the past several years, said Brian Blanton, the assistant superintendent for technology services. Next year, a local option sales tax will fund a 1-to-1 program in the district, but students will still have the choice to bring their own devices. Budget constraints were identified by district officials as the top challenge in the report, for the third year in a row. Though a majority of leaders, 59 percent, said their technology budgets remained the same over the past year, more district officials are reporting decreases in their technology budgets. Since 2015, the percent of districts reporting budget decreases has gone up each year.
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