What The Microphone Was Also Doing

On July 30, Santa Fe Public Schools Superintendent Christine Griffin told her school board the district would not use Amira Learning this fall, at least until the state clarified something.¹ Three other New Mexico districts have joined her. Los Alamos, Farmington, and Clayton have all filed for exemption from the state's K-2 reading requirement.² Two weeks earlier, in a different part of the country, Katy ISD's new AI framework had named Amira, by product, as one of two AI tools it would keep in its elementary classrooms.³ The tool was the same. The reads were opposite. The reason is the second question about tools of this kind, and until this week most districts had only been answering the first.

Two Questions About A Listening Tool

The first question about Amira is pedagogical, and it is the one the country has spent the summer arguing over. Does the tool do the child's work for her, or does it coach her while she does the work herself? Amira, by design, listens to a first grader read out loud, catches the syllable she stumbled on, and offers a small intervention on that specific error.⁴ It does not read the passage for her. Katy's framework read this as the good kind of AI, the tool the district was willing to name.

The second question is what Santa Fe and Los Alamos are asking now, and it does not have anything to do with pedagogy. A tool that listens is also a tool that records. The child's voice, saved as an audio file, is a biometric signature. It has to be stored somewhere, for some length of time, and used, if at all, for some declared purpose. Los Alamos Superintendent Jennifer Guy sent a letter to New Mexico's education secretary asking, in effect, three ordinary questions. Where are the recordings kept. For how long. Who can access them.⁵ A parent quoted by the Albuquerque Journal put it more plainly. Her child's biometric data had been collected for a year, without her knowledge or consent, and she did not know where it was stored or what was being done with it.¹

Two Answers The Vendor Has Not Written In Plain English

The parents' concern, in the most sober version, is not that a company is recording their child. It is that the recording is a new kind of asset in an education market where AI vendors have a use for training data and a competitive incentive not to say too much about their sources. Amira's use is mandatory in New Mexico, from kindergarten through second grade, and the state's Public Education Department has approved its use up to eighth.² That is thousands of small children reading aloud on the same platform every week for at least three years. If the parents are wrong about how those recordings are being used, it is worth being able to say so, in a sentence a superintendent can read out loud at a school board meeting. That sentence has not yet been said. A department spokesperson has told reporters that updated guidance is "forthcoming."²

Santa Fe has proposed the workaround that is most legible right now. If the state does not clarify by August 14, the district will use i-Ready for reading assessment, which does not incorporate voice recordings at all.¹ Los Alamos will use DIBELS, an older assessment administered by a human teacher. Neither is more sophisticated. What they are, is quieter.

What A Design Question Becomes When Nobody Answers

A year ago, this same story would have been called a technology story. It reads better now as a governance story, and, eventually, as a design story. In a good future of school technology, a tool that listens to a child would come with a receipt. The receipt would say, in a sentence a parent understands, what data is being kept, where it lives, when it disappears, and whether any of it will ever leave the room in which it was made. When that receipt does not exist, the responsible move is the one Santa Fe made. Pause the recording. Use the assessment that does not need one.

The Layer That Belongs To The Child

At Koan we think about the layer of a student's work that survives contact with a tool. Yesterday's version of that question was pedagogical. Whose paragraph is this. Today's version is quieter. Where does the record of the child's thinking go, once the tool has read it. A workspace can be honest about that, if it is designed to be. The record of a fifth grader's writing revisions can belong to her and her teacher, and to nobody else. The record of a first grader's voice, learning to read, can be legible enough to help her tomorrow morning and not present enough to be anywhere else, ever.

What the four New Mexico districts are asking for is not against AI. It is a proper receipt. That is a reasonable thing to want, and a hard thing to withhold, from a first grader.

If a district could see, this week, every place its children's voices had been sent since kindergarten, would it still be running the same reading program on Monday morning?