Trust Depends on Seeing the Process

This week, teachers, students, and researchers described a growing trust problem around AI. Much of that problem comes from making judgments about work while having almost no information about how the work was produced.

What Happened This Week

On May 20, NPR reported that fifty-seven percent of America's special education teachers are now using AI to help draft Individualized Education Programs, up from thirty-nine percent the year before.¹²

Three years into the ChatGPT era, most districts are still working their way through one question.³⁴

On Saturday, Euronews published a long look at the Estonian schools experiment most American superintendents have not yet read.⁵⁶

On Tuesday, David Marshall of Auburn and Tim Pressley of Christopher Newport published an op-ed reporting that eighty-five percent of the nearly six hundred American teachers they surveyed in May believe students spend too much time on screens during class.⁷⁸

On Friday, NPR and Ipsos released a nationally representative poll of 545 K-12 teachers.⁹

On Thursday, Matt Barnum at Chalkbeat published a column with a question most school boards have not yet asked out loud.¹⁰¹¹

On May 29, the dean of Boston University's Wheelock College and the executive director of Just Horizons Alliance signed a three-year agreement to build something the field has been quietly missing.¹²¹³

What These Stories Have in Common

Teachers are being asked to distinguish learning from assistance by looking at a final document. Students are being asked to prove honesty after the fact. That arrangement creates suspicion even when both sides are acting in good faith.

Koan starts from a simple premise. The final answer is no longer a reliable measure of learning. Schools need to understand how students reached that answer and whether the work made them more capable.

What Schools Can Do

A better system makes AI use and revision visible while the work is happening. It gives students a clear way to explain their choices and gives teachers evidence they can use for coaching instead of accusation.

Trust is easier to preserve when neither side has to guess what happened.