With the rise of programs such as ChatGPT, the expectation to use these types of programs has made its way into several fields. For example, people in software development can use programs such as ChatGPT to check over their code for mistakes. For many, these programs have been changing the course of the work people are doing for the better.
However, one space that has often been cited as a good way to use AI is education. From creating lesson plans to grading homework, AI based tools have been growing in popularity. However, this may be a bad sign for many teachers and a bad thing for the field as a whole.
When using AI tools, it’s easy for an outsider to see a generated response and take that as being finished. However, the person who uses the generated content, may need to do some fact checking. Often, there are missing or changed names, wrong dates, and other blatant errors in these responses. So for a piece to be factually correct, it takes time and knowledge to update the information as needed. However, many teachers aren’t paid for this extra time.
On average, teachers are underpaid, earning 73.4 cents per dollar earned by similar degrees as reported by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI). According to the EPI, the rate of pay of teachers has, on average, not kept track with inflation. In fact, in 1996, the pay per dollar compared to other degree programs was 93.9 cents per dollar.
Being underpaid is a constant problem teachers face and, as RAND wrote in an article, “for years, they have found that teachers work longer hours, earn lower salaries, and report higher levels of job-related stress than other working adults.”
With increasing implementation of AI for teachers, this could cause several problems. First of all, the pay could decrease more. With the in-class materials taking a shorter amount of time to make, classes could have more sessions with less periods with the assumption that teachers do not have to work as much. However, with the necessary fact checking teachers may perform , this would result in even longer days for teachers and more work crammed into each day. In addition many teachers may not want to use AI generated classroom material, for their own varying reasons.
Another issue that could arise as a result is the lack of teacher to student interaction. If a teacher has more classes to teach with the same amount of time expected to work outside of classes, then teachers would be either staying later than they already are, or be forced to engage less with students. This could manifest in the form of less time available after class, less intense feedback to students, or less time with individual students who need their teacher’s support, while in class. This would lead to a more impersonal feeling from the students, as the teacher would have to commit more time to these extra tasks.
Further, the lack of flexibility a teacher would be able to have, would be another source of consternation. If everything is created through use of an AI program, there would be a certain amount of uniformity in the created materials. This uniformity would hurt students who may need a different form of explanation. For example, an AI powerpoint would be strictly in English in many of the core subjects, so a student who may need help with English would have a harder time understanding the content, and since a teacher would have less time available to make materials, that student would struggle more.
A decision to focus more on AI in the classroom would ultimately hurt both the students and the teachers more than it would help. Because many people already undervalue teachers, as seen through the pay rate, forcing tools that would reduce time a teacher would need would most likely reduce the amount of time a teacher is given. And all of this together could result in a dramatic decline in education performance and teacher’s ability to perform their jobs.
