AI tutors could revolutionize education, lawmakers say

Lawmakers predicted that AI tutors will revolutionize education in the United States during The Hill’s “Making the Grade: Solving the U.S. Math Problem” event Tuesday evening. 

Rep. Bill Foster (D-Ill.), a member of the House Financial Services Committee, said artificial intelligence will revolutionize education with startups deploying emotion recognition to create AI tutors. 

“I think the big thing that’s coming out is AI tutors because it is going to be revolutionary,” Foster told The Hill’s Editor-in-Chief Bob Cusack. “You can use emotion recognition that is a feature of artificial intelligence to make a spectacular AI tutor and places like the Khan Academy and probably a hundred startups have latched on to that concept.” 

The congressman cautioned that AI tutors should not be mistakenly programmed to spread cultural biases that could affect student success. 

“It’s going to be very important that we look at the cultural biases that are being injected by those,” Foster said. “At the same time, it’s well known to educators that you get the best performance of the students if you have a cultural match between the tutor and the student. That can very easily devolve into the soft bigotry of low expectations. And so trying to make sure that isn’t inadvertently programmed into what we do.” 

Rep. Jim Baird (R-Ind.) agreed with his colleague on the promise of AI, but he cautioned that people still need to be able to independently think and have sound judgment. 

“I think Bill’s right about artificial intelligence,” Baird said. “Make sure you use your head to be able to think through a process and that’s compatible with what Bill just said. So I think it’s very important that we learn techniques on how to analyze something and how to use the brain that God gave us.” 

During the rest of the event, which was sponsored by Collaborative for Student Success, advocates and educators discussed the nationwide issue of math proficiency and said personalized learning would be an important piece of the solution.

“The answer is to begin to think differently about how we solve this by providing students with individualized pathways that connect where they’re starting from, to where they need to be – personalized, competency-based learning,” said Joel Rose, the CEO of New Classrooms, a non-profit providing personalized learning nationwide.

“This is something I could have never done when I was a teacher. The idea of assigning, tracking and supporting each student on their own path would have been impossible to do.” 

The former 5th-grade teacher pointed out that some states have implemented the new personalized method of instruction. 

“California just adopted a new math framework that moves from grade levels to grade spans and North Dakota and Montana have recently launched math innovation zones for schools that want to explore personalized competency-based learning,” Rose said. “But to be clear, most state policy and most federal policy is oriented around top-box instruction.” 

Rebecka Peterson, the 2023 National Teacher of the Year, said she supports personalized learning, and recalled how the pandemic spotlighted that every student has different needs. 

“I think that as a system we are starting to really embrace the idea that we need to personalize education,” Peterson said. “I think that the pandemic exposed that more than ever, so I am really so happy to see this shift of, again, learning our students’ stories, knowing what they need as individual learners. We know that this one-size-fits-all isn’t going to cut it.”