Dear Editor,
Kendra Rickerby’s letter of Aug. 12 about the Vermont Department of Education encouraging the use of AI in Vermont school systems and in the classroom is built on deceptive grounds. She has succumbed to one of the ploys the Wall Street gamers use to keep the AI bubble from bursting.
It was Wall Street hedge funds that invented “Democrats for Education Reform” when George W. Bush instituted the “Race to the Top.” Its purpose was not to promote better education, but to profit from the creation of the standardized testing industry. It is now the tech industry which is seeking to find some sort of profitability in a consistently unprofitable wild goose chase by tapping into the last vast reservoir of public funding: the public education industry.
The first test of AI as a help to students proved it a massive failure. A UMass study showed so, www.gazettenet.com/2025/11/07/use-of-ai-in-the-classroom-doesnt-lead-to-higher-grades-umass-study-says. And, to quote Elizabeth Laird, director of the Equity in Civic Technology Project at the Center for Democracy and Technology, “Our research shows AI use in schools comes with real risks, like large-scale data breaches, tech-fueled sexual harassment and bullying, and treating students unfairly.”
As for using it in school administration, there are two fatal flaws.
First, just like driverless cars, it will never have the subtlety of information processing that the human brain has. Just like the Waymo taxis on the streets of Los Angeles, it will need a human operator to correct its deficiencies from moment to moment.
Second, to even promote AI as a solution is to completely miss Vermont’s real problem with education: The system as it is focuses on cost effectiveness rather than educational effectiveness. Nobody educates anybody well by focusing on costs. Humans are too diverse in essence to be treated like parts on an assembly line. The individualized approach to each one is necessary, and the people who understand that are teachers. Rather than prioritizing costs, we should give the teachers what they need.
One of the few high government officials to realize the value of education was Reagan’s Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinburger. When strategists suggested that Head Start be eliminated so the money could be used to build more missiles, he squashed the idea. He knew how valuable Head Start was. Thirty years later, a study confirmed what Weinburger had felt: Adults who had attended Head Start programs in their toddler years had led far more law-abiding lives than their peers, consistently.
It is time to break the Wall Street profit-and-loss shackles. We must stop evaluating education by a balance sheet, empower teachers to use their professional skills, and judge by the long-term results: where the children arrive decades later.
Sincerely,
Chuck Gregory
Springfield, Vt.