NEW ORLEANS (WVUE) — Louisiana, along with the rest of the nation, is dealing with a severe shortage of teachers.
In the Jefferson Parish School District — the largest school district in the state — an estimated 3,000 children are without a teacher in the classroom on any given day, according to school superintendent James Gray. As the district tries to fill 140 vacancies, some of its schools are experimenting with a unique tutor: Artificial intelligence.
Zakiyatou “Zaki” Arouna is 10 years old and attends Phoebe Hearst Elementary in Metairie. We visited Arouna and her fellow classmates as they were developing their reading skills with the help of a tutor named Amira. It is not a typical tutor. It’s powered by artificial intelligence, and Arouna is all-in with AI.
“I see it as something that could really help you, and it can help you improve your reading,” Arouna said. “When I first started, I could barely read. Because when I first came to the country, I didn’t know how to speak English.”
Arouna came to the United States from West Africa and told us her primary language is French. With the help of Amira, Arouna says her ability to read and speak English is improving. Kearies Mays — Ms. Mays to her students — was the lone human instructor in the class of about 20 students.
“The program is tiered,” Mays said. “It’ll start at the lowest level, to help them learn anything they need, like the smallest phonics. It works on all of that for the students who are not comfortable with English yet.”
At a time when the Jefferson Parish School District is dealing with a deep teacher shortage, Mays says Amira and the ability of artificial intelligence to adapt to its user, can give kids one-on-one assistance. That’s something human teachers might not always be able to provide because of limited staffing and resources.
“It’ll assist, acting like a tutor,” Mays said. “The AI is basically a tutor. I don’t have to do much. Of course, I’ll monitor and walk around and just listen. But, it’s basically a reading tutor for them.”
Brian Wahl is the principal at Phoebe Hearst Elementary. It’s a school with specific a demand for bilingual teachers. About 65 percent of the school’s students are Hispanic, and English is not their primary language.
“I might have 32 students in a classroom with one effective teacher,” Wahl said. “But by using this program, I’ve got 32 reading instructors in that classroom, that are designing tailor-made reading activities and reading programs for the students.
“The majority of our students are developing their English language skills. With this program, students are able to receive reading instruction in both Spanish and English. The tutoring can be done in either English or Spanish.”
There’s a premium placed on certified instructors who can speak both English and Spanish, but those instructors can be difficult to find. Wahl says Amira’s ability to instruct in both languages gives dual language schools such as Phoebe Hearst an option it otherwise would not have.
The school has been using Amira for roughly two years. During the first year, more than 200 students who were mostly English-learning students were using the program. In year two, the program is being used campus-wide.
Special needs students also are using the software. Wahl took us into a special education class where we met 10-year-old Megan, who is on the autism spectrum. With her special education teacher watching over, she was getting guidance from Amira to pronounce the name “Phil.”
Amira was developed by a startup in San Francisco and is one of many reading tutors on the market. As part of a pilot program, the Louisiana Department of Education is spending roughly $1.7 million from federal COVID-19 relief money to give 35 school systems access to Amira. About 71,000 students are using the software.
“I’ll be honest, as any teacher probably would be, I was skeptical at first,” said Adam DiBenedetto, director of academic innovation at the Louisiana Department of Education.
DiBenedetto is the education department’s point person for Amira. He says artificial intelligence won’t replace real teachers. But, like many other industries, the education sector has to find ways to work with a form of technology that is rapidly affecting many aspects of life.
“This is a technology that will not go away in the future,” he said. “So, we have to be aware of it, and we have to know how to use it. We have to know, quite honestly, how students probably already are using it, whether we’re using it in the classroom or not.”
Mays said, “They’ve been playing all types of video games that use AI and everything online. They’re so accustomed to online and changes.”
Back at Phoebe Hearst Elementary, the school seems to be embracing Amira, and the artificial intelligence behind it.
“It’s not going to take jobs, not in my opinion,” Mays said. “I believe it’s going to help us, and help us with our instruction even more, because it can catch things sometimes that’ll help us help the students.”
Wahl said, “It’s picking up the students’ reading. It’s automatically identifying issues or problems that the child might have with the reading and then it changes its instruction to the needs of the child. And it’s a constant progress-monitoring cycle that’s going on. So, the kids are getting a developed, individual reading plan presented to them with an AI character.”
Since AI-based software can adapt to the input of its user, Wahl says Amira also is learning from students.
“I would recommend it for other kids,” Arouna said, “because if you don’t speak English or any language, it could really help you.”
It’s a lesson the fifth-grader learned with AI assistance.
Officials with the Louisiana Department of Education say an independent study is underway to see how Amira is impacting reading performance in Louisiana. On a micro level, Mays reports the program has improved her students’ ability to read by 72 percent.
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