The Maine Department of Education stirring fear of AI? The suggestion is anything but accurate.

A recent opinion piece headlined “Maine’s Education Dept. should not be stirring fear of AI” missed the mark and was far from hitting its own target. For anyone in touch with the changes in education over the past several decades, it is clear that students of today have very different needs from those of five, 10, 20, 30 or more years ago.

Workplaces have changed, too. Advanced technologies have radically altered many industries, and even changed the direction of many people’s careers. As we think about the possible impact of AI, should we not be ready for that, as well? Part of that readiness is the intelligent, calculated ability to discriminate between information that is accurate and factual, and that which is filled with errors or made-up material. That accuracy is critical to making sound and informed decisions.

Maine schools use the Maine Learning Results Parameters for Essential Instruction to develop curriculum guides that teachers use to craft classroom lessons. Included with the Maine Learning Results are a set of guiding principles. The guiding principles state that each Maine student must leave school as, among other things, “a clear and effective communicator who demonstrates organized and purposeful communication in English and at least one other language; uses evidence and logic appropriately in communication; adjusts communication based on the audience; and uses a variety of modes of expression (spoken, written and visual and performing including the use of technology to create and share the expressions).”

The Maine student, according to the principles, should leave school as “a self-directed and lifelong learner” who “recognizes the need for information and locates and evaluates resources; applies knowledge to set goals and make informed decisions; applies knowledge in new contexts; demonstrates initiative and independence; demonstrates flexibility including the ability to learn, unlearn, and relearn; demonstrates reliability and concern for quality; and uses interpersonal skills to learn and work with individuals from diverse backgrounds.”

The above offers just a flavor. These principles are clear: students should be persevering, ethical and self-directed. And they are not at odds with the typical standards of literacy and numeracy. I don’t see any movement by the Department of Education away from the need to learn to read, to compute and calculate, or to make and test hypotheses in a scientific framework. I also don’t see any desire to not have these areas of knowledge and skills tested.

What is needed, now more than ever, is a means to assess and measure how students are performing in the area of the guiding principles – skills that will help students thrive in today’s and tomorrow’s businesses. It is these skills that I feel the MDOE is both helping to identify and reach agreement, so as to develop a system of measurement that “Measures What Matters.” It doesn’t mean giving up on assessing traditional knowledge and skills that students should know. It doesn’t mean shying away from AI, as the author of the op-ed inferred; it means determining how AI can enhance the opportunity to learn, safely using this robust source of information that routinely needs to be checked for accuracy and reliability.

The “Measure What Matters” tour by the MDOE is an effort to discuss how schools are preparing students for the future. This should be the work of us all. Determining how the state can measure and recognize this work is also a goal of this tour. The department indicates it hopes to change the narrative of solely relying on test scores to measure school success, and instead use the conversations to “develop a portrait of a great school in Maine based on what the people of Maine value for our schools.”

The characteristics of the guiding principles should be included in this discussion, and certainly this discussion does not create a fear of AI.