Alix: [00:00:00] Hey there. Welcome back to Computer Says Maybe. I'm your host, Alix Dunn. Um, and in this podcast, we talk about the politics of technology with people that are experts in all kinds of ways. And before we get into today's episode, I wanted to share something exciting. Um, for years, we've been both sort of sharing tech politics content like this, and also creating little pockets of connection in our community when we see an opportunity to connect across disciplines and interests, um, uh, to actually do things to make a change, uh, in, in the world around us.

And now we're gonna try and bring them together. Um, and last week, we introduced the Maybe Collective, which is a membership community for tech politics people, or people thinking about the politics of tech, but who get it. You know, you read a lot about what's happening with companies, with concentration of power, with the use of technology in ways that just [00:01:00] we know instinctively are wrong, and we need to do something about it.

Um, but we wanna take these conversations beyond the pod, um, between experts, but also key knows who wanna learn and figure out what we can do about the state of these tech politics together. Um, so if that is of interest to you, if you find yourself listening to these podcast episodes and thinking, "I really wanna talk to that guest, I really wanna, um, brainstorm ways that my work might connect to what they're doing," or maybe in your community, you are encountering similar issues, similar problems, and wanna find opportunities to actually do something, then go to themaybe.org/collective, the link is also in the show notes, and come join us.

Um, we really want to create the space that we wish existed, um, to be able to have more dynamic conversations. So it's not just me and a guest, uh, sharing and recording into the world, but rather, um, a continued conversation about topics that keep coming back again and again. It's very much back to school season in my house, and I want to cast your mind to a [00:02:00] scenario.

Your five-year-old comes home from school, and they tell you they spent part of the day talking to a chatbot, one with a cute little face, perfectly designed to feel friendly and become their new best friend. Then you find out that the chatbot has been recording their voice as part of a training exercise to assess their literacy without your consent.

What do you do? Um, that is the reality behind Amira, the all-in-one app used for literacy assessments on school devices across the United States, and it's just one example of a much bigger wave of edtech moving into public schools, often with remarkably little oversight and even less visibility for parents and caregivers.

What makes this story slightly different is that it has been directly challenged by one of the most impressive organizers and advocates that I know of, Ifeoma Ozoma, a very well-known policy advocate, who, after being pushed out of Pinterest on the heels of her producing one [00:03:00] of the first medical misinformation policies on any platform, worked, um, with policymakers in California to successfully pass state legislation that makes it illegal for employees to include non-disclosure agreements in employment contracts.

Then she moves to Santa Fe, where a new fight with Amira finds her. This is a wild story about what happens when parents and communities lose visibility and control over the technology that their schools bring in, and what it looks like when they decide to take that power back.

Ifeoma Ozoma: My name is Ifeoma Ozoma.

I'm based in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and I'm a tech, uh, accountability advocate. But in this capacity, I'm a parent and a taxpayer who cares about parental consent and transparency.

Alix: Like, how do you, how do you sum up what it is that you do?

Ifeoma Ozoma: It, it really is a collection of side quests that are equity-driven and equity-focused.

And so starting from my [00:04:00] time at Pinterest when I was working on health misinformation on the platform and addressing it, that's not what they thought they hired me for, but it was one of the side quests that I ended up going down because as soon as I learned that three out of five American moms were on the platform, I'm just like, "Okay, so these incidences we're seeing of health misinformation are actually a huge public health issue."

Mm-hmm. Because moms make the public health decisions for their families, which mean they make them for society. And so if you have a bunch of moms on Pinterest who are seeing vaccine misinformation, of course you're going to have people making the decision not to vaccinate their kids. So that was, like, one of the side quests I went down, and everything else, my life is just a collection of them.

Alix: Do you wanna talk a little bit about what Pinterest thought they were hiring you for? Like, what kinds of... Like, what were some big achievements you had when working at Pinterest, or stuff that you look back now, [00:05:00] um, and think, "That was actually kinda cool that I was able to do that"?

Ifeoma Ozoma: So they thought they hired me to just help do basic policy work and government lobbying.

One of the things that I immediately was interested in was the content policy connection to public policy because my thought was, as a smaller company pre-IPO, there was the opportunity to actually lead on content policy issues. So health misinformation, hate speech on the platform. And so in my first quarter there, one of the things that I did was have us establish a health misinformation policy.

There wasn't one at the company at the time. And so then with that policy in place, working with experts at nonprofits, at the CDC, WHO Then we were able to actually move towards product integrations and ensuring that not only did people not see misinformation on the platform, but they were [00:06:00] directed towards good, uh, sources of information.

And so that, that really was, like, the crowning achievement of my time there. Uh, but because of how loud I was about that, that also contributed to some of the retaliation I faced when I raised the pay discrimination issues.

Alix: Okay. So you're like, you did a really good job, and then they force you out, um, and ostensibly, I imagine they framed it as performance i- issues or said you didn't do a good job or something?

Or that-

Ifeoma Ozoma: Oh, uh, insubordination was the term that- Insubordination ... they, yeah.

Alix: Okay.

Ifeoma Ozoma: Yeah. Um- "I'm a professional troublemaker" was their- Okay ... was their framing. The work that I did resulted in the surgeon general at the time calling out the company positively. My work on health misinformation resulted in the first front page Wall Street Journal article about the company, which came right before the IPO.

So not only was it just good to do and [00:07:00] good for the platform, it resulted in really positive press, which was to their detriment when they ended up pushing me out because I now had relationships with reporters at The New York Times- Yeah ... Wall Street Journal, NPR, Washington Post, because of the work I had done at the company, and they were even more shocked when I then came back to them and said, "Oh, by the way, while we were doing interviews, the company was threatening me through the general counsel who I sat across from."

Alix: And then you turn around and you're like, "I should draw attention to what just happened to me in, in an employment sense," and then you sue, and then win?

Ifeoma Ozoma: D- actually did not go to court because, yeah, so this is something that people, a lot of people think, but The time when our mediation took place was right at the beginning of COVID.

And from a public health perspective, not knowing what was going to happen, and at the time, the Bay Area was also a hotspot for COVID- Yeah ... [00:08:00] it was really scary professionally- That's super scary ... and- Yeah ... yeah, and physically and financially. And so I decided to, uh, settle in mediation with them. Yeah. And then a few months later was when all of the George Floyd protests happened, and the same people who had pushed me out, threatened my life, uh, by using health, uh, access and health insurance access as a bargaining chip, were then posting that Black lives and Black employees matter.

Right. And that was when I was like- God ... excuse my language, "Fuck it," and I'm gonna speak up about this, because this is insane.

Alix: God. Okay, so then, so then you speak out retroactively after having settled and say, "This was actually, like, what they're saying publicly during this moment of racial reckoning is actually so disjointed given what they have just done to me," and then what?

Ifeoma Ozoma: Yeah, it caused a firestorm. It caused a firestorm, because they were [00:09:00] not expecting me to speak up, because part of the strong-arming in the negotiation was not only we're going to hold health insurance as a bargaining chip, but we're going to force you to sign a non-disclosure agreement and a non-disparagement agreement.

Y- you can't talk about us in any way that we consider, uh, negative, even though what I had raised both internally and then in a complaint that I filed with the state was race and gender discrimination. Those are against the law in California. Can't do that. I couldn't do that at the federal level at the time.

Who knows now? But I, I had raised illegal behavior, and they still used the non-disclosure agreement and non-disparagement agreement, uh, to try to silence me. And so after I spoke up, and there was a lot of coverage about it, I was connected through my lawyer to lawyers who are also lobbyists in California who had been trying to [00:10:00] work on reforming non-disclosure agreement legislation in California.

And so what I did from that point moving forward was focus on reform of the law, which we were able to get passed and signed into law.

Alix: Unreal. Okay, and this is Silence No More,

Ifeoma Ozoma: is that the name? The Silence No More Act. Yeah.

Alix: Yeah. It's incredible. So then now basically the law says you can't use non-disclosure agreements as part of standard employment contracts to prevent disclosure

Ifeoma Ozoma: of- You can't use them to- Of, uh, of illegal conduct or conduct that an employee reasonably believes is illegal.

Alix: So the use case there is that, like, I'm employed. I am not a lawyer, so I don't know if something is illegal that has just happened to me. I need to be able to talk to someone else about what happened to, like, suss out if it was illegal. And to do that, I can't have violated an NDA because that then means that I'm [00:11:00] not able to explore whether something was illegal.

Is that, like,

Ifeoma Ozoma: that's the- It's even darker than that, honestly, because in many situations, NDAs, nondisclosure and nondisparagement agreements, were written so restrictively to prevent people from sharing with their partners, with their family, with their therapists what had happened. So you could have been really harassed in multiple ways in the workplace based on your identity and can't share that with your therapist because it could possibly violate your NDA.

And, um, because of the way the law was structured in California, it also affected housing, uh, agreements. So there were landlords, slumlords, who were using NDAs to threaten tenants. And you can imagine, like, the type of stress someone is under where their housing and their family's physical safety is dependent on signing a nondisclosure agreement with [00:12:00] a landlord who is harassing them daily and can show up in their home at any point.

The argument for the bill, uh, because there was a lot of pushback from the Chamber of Commerce and from companies about it, "Oh, we won't be able to settle out of court." Yeah. "This is just going to help, uh, trial attorneys and plaintiffs' attorneys." Mm-hmm. And the argument we made was you can still, uh, provide a settlement to folks.

Because what- Yeah ... you're settling and what you're resolving in an, in a separation agreement is someone suing you later. All we're saying, and why it was titled Silence No More, is that people are entitled to their stories. You are able to share what happened to you, and there are still remedies for someone who lies about something that's happened.

Sure. Yeah. Companies can still pursue actual libel, but th- that's not what we were discussing, and they knew that. And companies know that that's not what we're discussing. What they had been trying to do [00:13:00] is keep illegal misconduct quiet, and that's, that should never be okay.

Alix: You, in the last few months, uh, have become, how shall I put this, a thorn maybe in the side of some unsuspecting uh, public school officials who, uh, made the mistake really of, uh, thinking that they could very casually roll out technology in a school district, um, without much thought, um, to really anything it sounds like.

We're asking everyone we talk to this month if they can, like, describe or define in their words, like, what edtech is.

Ifeoma Ozoma: I think that my definition of edtech is very different from most people's because where I see it from is- My first year at Google in 2015 when I was working there, and there was a big push to get Chromebooks in every school.

Mm-hmm. And internally, the understanding was not only is this a way to buy [00:14:00] goodwill with policymakers in the school districts and states where these are passed out, but this is a way to develop lifelong Google users. Because the earlier you are introduced to a platform, uh, or hardware, the harder it is for you later on to switch to something else, which is, in my opinion, I've never worked at Apple, but part of the reason why Apple was like, "Oh, shoot, all of these schools are using Chromebooks.

Now we need to get iPads in the schools" because if all of the kids- They had the Macs before ... are used to... Exactly. Like, when I was- If all of the kids- Like, when I was in high school ... are used to using Google- I remember. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Alix: The big bubble-

Ifeoma Ozoma: Yeah, and- ... Mac

Alix: computers. It was the only time you used a Mac was in school.

Ifeoma Ozoma: Exactly. And those were devices that you had to go either to a separate space like a computer lab to- Mm-hmm ... d- to use, or you had one in a classroom, and kids- Yeah ... would have to share. Those were not one-to-one devices. Yeah. [00:15:00] But what one-to-one device use does, uh, even though the claim from the companies was, "Oh, equity, and we're getting devices in front of kids whose parents wouldn't be able to afford them," is ensure that these kids become loyal users for whatever platform- Yeah

is in front of them and, and presented to them as young as five. And so for me, when I think of educational technology, edtech, I think of ways that companies have figured out to funnel public funds towards massive contracts that are rarely vetted, where there's rarely transparency and almost never consent from the individual users.

Because you have consent being provided by a district usually because usually that's the lowest level of consent. You're not even getting consent from individual principals or individual teachers because- Mm ... God forbid we ask teachers what they think and what they, uh, believe is helpful in their classrooms.

Yeah. So you have [00:16:00] district-level consent, sometimes state-level consent for massive contracts, and this to me at the end of the day is about money. Are there instances where edtech may have been helpful? Sure. Is that a fair trade-off for the amount of money in our public school system that we all pay for, whether you have kids in the system or not?

If you are a taxpayer, you are con- you are contributing to these contracts that are going to companies that have been the good guys in the tech industry from the beginning, but really have fewer checks, honestly, than some of the biggest tech companies, because they're seen as being additive and helpful, and there's no questioning those claims.

Alix: Um, when did you first learn about Amira?

Ifeoma Ozoma: This was something that I learned about In April, I think, March or April of this year when I was talking to parents who were concerned [00:17:00] about screen time in schools across the state. This has become a conversation in school districts across the country. I don't think there's a single state where parents aren't raising concerns about it, and my, the thing that kept on coming up for me was just thinking about levers for action- Mm-hmm

and what, uh, the response would be from the state education department and the school districts for why they had to have kindergarten, first graders, second graders on one-to-one devices, so individual Chromebooks and iPads that are assigned to them. I was wondering, what are the actual programs they're using?

What are the programs they're using and paying for? What are the reasons why you would be so invested in doing this? And Amira is the name that kept on coming up. After looking into it a little bit, I was like, "What the F is this?" How is it possible that you have five to eight-year-olds who are being recorded, voice [00:18:00] recorded, by this app with an AI avatar whose name is Amira?

They've named this, like, racially ambiguous with- ... purple hair avatar Amira, and she, and I'm gonna use that in quotes because this is not a real person. This is an avatar that, uh, kids are developing relationships with.

Alix: Do they use she/her pronouns? Like, is it actually

Ifeoma Ozoma: anthropomorphized? Yes, yes, they use, they use she/her pronouns.

They, yeah, uh, Amira is a person to many of these kids because again, we're talking about five to eight-year-olds who from the first weeks of school are sat in front of a computer and told to read to Amira, read to her. She wants to listen to you. She needs to hear you. So this is the way they've anthropomorphized this AI character.

Um, but anyway, d- the part that was the most shocking to me, if all of that isn't bad enough, was that there was zero parental [00:19:00] consent or notification. So parents didn't even know, for the most part, what Amira was, that it was AI-enabled, that it was voice-recording their kids, that all of these voice recordings were living in the AWS cloud somewhere, that this company is not even based in New Mexico, and that the company is likely in violation of federal law under COPPA because parents who are supposed to provide affirmative consent for a private company- collecting data from their kids, and this is biometric data, full stop, that is being collected from these kids for this platform that has said publicly and put in writing publicly that they use the voice recordings to improve their models, which they then go and sell use to via contracts in districts and states across the country.

Alix: Did the parents have to consent to the device usage?

Ifeoma Ozoma: Not in many cases. So that's what is odd to me [00:20:00] as well, that you, you should be seeking that sort of consent, but in New Mexico at least, there are no student data privacy protections at the state level. And so there is no legal obligation for a district or a school to provide data use agreement or a device use agreement.

And in many cases it really is just the, the agreements that I've seen for the Chromebooks are not about the data sharing that's taking place or the data collection. It's about asking the parents to make sure that the kid isn't, is responsible and doesn't break the device which, which is a completely separate issue and doesn't touch consent at all.

Alix: What do you think was the motivation of the school district to roll this thing out? Like, what was the problem that they were, you know, ostensibly trying to solve?

Ifeoma Ozoma: Amira was mandated by our state education department, which makes us one of only two states that has done that. It's New Mexico and [00:21:00] Idaho are the only two that have mandated from the state level that districts use this program.

And what's so funny i- for the timing of this conversation is that after pushing and pushing and pushing for public records requests to be, uh, furnished, from the public education department late last night, I got the first tranche of documents, and one of the documents that they included, although there was a lot of filler, was back and forth with a school and multiple school districts actually, who had raised concerns early this summer before I even got involved, about the state education department pushing more and more uses of the Amira platform and different products within the Amira platform.

And so a- a- at the district level, although I do hold them responsible for not, uh, providing parental notification, for not [00:22:00] seeking parental consent- Yeah ... which was still within their power, this really was a state level issue and a state level mandate, and what they claim is that they want consistency in assessment and consistency in metrics, regardless of whether the metrics are independently validated.

They have not been. These are metrics coming straight from the company that has a vested financial interest in showing improvement. And an important bit of context is New Mexico is 49th or 50th, depending on the year, in literacy and math for our students. So we are at the very bottom. No

Alix: idea.

Ifeoma Ozoma: Yeah. We are at the very bottom.

I found out that, I thought

Alix: we won all of those contests. I didn't

Ifeoma Ozoma: know that we- Usually, usually Yeah ... and part, part of the issue in the state is we have a population of students, 75% of whom are native or Hispanic, and so predominantly in households where English is not the first language. So if you have assessments, [00:23:00] they are going to result in skewed results for these students, not because they are any less capable, but because the assessments were not made for kids whose- ESL kids

first language isn't English. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Exactly. And so that really is where our assessment data is coming from. We are a very rural state. We have the fifth largest land mass for states, but one of the lowest population. So we have school districts that have 400 kids in them. There's a school district in Eastern New Mexico that was one of the first to join on in the opt-out campaign that I started, and opted out of the use of AMIRA, 400 kids in that district, where all of the administrators in the district are also ranchers and farmers, and are doing their work part-time while also running a school district.

So we have access issues that the most good faith interpretation of what the state education department was [00:24:00] doing was how can we get one uniform assessment that can reach everyone? And in theory, that is a good goal, but in practice what that looks like is you have an assessment made by a platform that is not even based in the state.

Mm-hmm. That, of course, is using training data that does not reflect the state, because even, uh, the, there's a Spanish accent here called the Norteno accent in Northern New Mexico. That sounds completely different from Spanish spoken in the southern part of the state. In fact, it's its own regional dialect that is recognized as its own regional dialect of Spanish.

So you cannot have an AI platform or an ed tech platform that does anything but flatten education. Right, right. And one of the points that I try to make when I'm, I've met with the state education department, with the districts, I talk about this with reporters [00:25:00] regularly, is that- Ed tech companies love to advertise, I'm sure you've seen this, uh, terminology, individualized learning and, uh, individualized teaching as if teachers weren't teaching to the individuals in their class, as if that hasn't been- So offensive

how teaching has worked. But what they're actually providing is the opposite. Because in order to sell a product in every state and every district in the country, which is the goal of all of these, uh, companies You have to standardize it. You cannot actually have a product that is individualized to Santa Fe and also to Farmington, which is in the, in the northwest of the state, has a large, uh, Navajo population, and then to Roswell, which is in the southeast of the state and nearer to the Texas border, and have three different platforms that you then are able to sell and market, and then also sell it in New York, and [00:26:00] also in California, and also in Alaska where I grew up.

Alix: Okay, so let's say Amira is, like, perfect and incredible, which clearly it's not designed to be possible for that to be the case. Um, w- what would they do with this assessment? Like, what is the purpose? Like, what are they trying to do?

Ifeoma Ozoma: The purpose is not actually, in my opinion, and everything is that I'm saying is my opinion- Of course

is not actually to, uh, assess learning, it's just to have better metrics. To, to me, like, at the end of the day- But to do what? ... what this comes down to... Well, to claim that they're not 50th anymore, that they're not at the bottom. And, uh, so this is the state education department's aim, to claim that there has been improvement regardless of whether kids can actually read better or not.

They want to be able to claim that the metrics are better. And then when you look at Amira and their larger goals, their aim, from what I've seen, is to make the case [00:27:00] that Amira and these AI-enabled voice recording assessments are the future of assessments for the entire country. And what their argument is is if we could improve literacy in New Mexico, which has been 50th for a long time, which has a very tough distribution of students and demographics that make it a lot harder to improve metrics quickly, if we can do that in one year, from 2025 to 2026 we can improve by five, eight, 13, uh, basis points, they are then able to sell this to the federal government, which is the pitch that they're making right now, that Amira and assessments like it and platforms like it should replace NAEP.

NAEP is the national assessment that all third graders take. So when you see the list every year of this is where your state ranks, these are where all of the states rank, that is based on the third grade assessment that is taken [00:28:00] for math and literacy that basically every district in the country participates in.

So it is the most widely used assessment. It's a multiple choice assessment. It- so much research has been used or has been put into it- Yeah ... to design something that is actually... It's not perfect But is going to be as useful in Northwest Alaska as it is in Southeast Florida. It is the, the most standardized that a test can get.

Alix: Is NAEP, is it a product of a startup?

Ifeoma Ozoma: No. No. No, no, no, no. So, um, so of course it's trash to this startup, and it's trash- Yeah ... and this startup, it's funny because the CEO of Amira came in what now I have documentation proves was coordinated with our state education department, presented to our state legislature.

The CEO sat next to the assessments, uh, manager for our state education department and [00:29:00] presented to our state's legislative education committee, and made the argument that, "Oh, we're, we're just a small company," like they're a mom and pop. Failed to mention they have VC funding from Google and Amazon. This is not a small company with small money.

Their goal is to, uh, they have a white paper that I found and read as a result of weirdness with, with the company trying to affect my own professional work, and I, I will use this opportunity to make clear that I'm doing all of this in my personal capacity. I'm doing it on personal time. This is not work from my work.

This is a side quest for me, uh, my advocacy as a parent, uh, on behalf of kids in our state. And what I found in this white paper is they are making the case to our federal education department, which is very pro-AI, and to state education departments across [00:30:00] the country that this is the answer. This is the future of assessments.

This is the future of individualized learning because they also have a tutoring platform, and they sell, uh, their products as a bundle. They have a dyslexia screener. Like you name it, they're doing it, and they can sell it to you tomorrow.

Alix: I don't know. Okay, let's dig into more their messaging about this.

So apparently a co-founder compared a teacher's use of Amira like a doctor using an MRI. Um-

Ifeoma Ozoma: Oh, that was the CEO. I cannot get into, uh, the mind of, uh, this person who has never been an educator, he admit- he admits himself, who is interested in returning value for his shareholders and his investors, who again include Google and Amazon and large publishers like, uh, Houghton Mifflin.

And so I, I would not even try to get into [00:31:00] whatever was going on in his head when he made that analogy. Don't understand it because also, uh, radiologists are who interpret MRIs, and the funny thing about radiology and AI, if you want to go down that analogy path, is that there have been studies that have shown that using AI as an assistant Results in cognitive offloading for radiologists where they then miss things in the scans that they would've found themselves if they weren't relying on AI for cognitive offloading.

So if you wanna make that an analogy, Mark Angel, that's his name, the CEO, what you should be turning to is the fact that by introducing AI and cognitive offloading, what you're doing is resulting in teachers not catching as much as they would before the use of this technology. That's not, I think, the selling point that he was making.

Um- No. Yeah ... but that's the [00:32:00] only, that's the only- Yeah ... direction I go when I'm thinking of that analogy and where- Yeah ... and why it doesn't, it doesn't work, doesn't pass the sniff test. But what a lot of these companies do is both try to say, "This is so simple, you gotta get it in every classroom," and, "This is so complicated, there's no way you could understand it enough to reasonably criticize it."

Like- Yeah ... "Don't worry your little head, you angry moms," which is really the tone that they've taken in addressing me, addressing other parents in the state, addressing folks with concerns in other places. Like, "AI is too complicated for you. Even though you worked in the industry, you worked for the actual companies deploying this, you don't get it.

You couldn't possibly get it. You can't understand data privacy." Like, oh, they, they love to throw out FERPA. FERPA is a federal law that regulates the use of data by districts. So yes, it does, uh, and, and local education [00:33:00] agencies. Yes, it does apply in this case, but to the district. When you have a private company come in, you're looking at COPPA, which is very clear about parental consent and that being necessary.

But they love throwing out terms. Let me talk about MRIs because most laypeople don't understand how they work. Let me talk about a doctor using an MRI. My doctor actually, my PCP doesn't use an MRI because she's not a radiologist. A radiologist interprets scans, which she then provides in information to my doctor to then provide a course of treatment for me.

So even in the analogies that they provide He's throwing out terms that make me wonder whether he understands what he's trying to say.

Alix: Yeah, I don't, I don't get the sense that he does. It's also interesting to use the r- the kind of radiography field, because there's also been racial disparities in the effectiveness of AI diagnostic tools too.

There you go. So it's making like all of the, all of the same things that you're describing in terms of regression to the mean is actually a [00:34:00] deeply inequitable way of thinking about providing these products, that like that's already happened in, in imaging.

Ifeoma Ozoma: Oh, let's bake in the bias, and let's bake- Yeah

it in in a way that you will never be able to disentangle what it was that was fed in that resulted in the bias. Uh, one of the things that was the most disheartening, there's so much that's disheartening, but at the legislative hearing that the CEO was at, he and the state education department's assessment manager decided to go on a tangent denigrating teachers, and making the claim that teachers somehow are incapable of assessing literacy properly, consistently with five to eight-year-olds.

I have never met a kindergarten teacher who isn't in a classroom with 20 to 30 kindergartners because they hate their job, because they're incapable, incompetent. These are people who are the most dedicated in the teaching field. Yeah. They love kids. Part of what they [00:35:00] love is starting the year with a kid, getting to know them, and then seeing how they've improved by the end of the year.

To try to take away that relationship from kids is harmful, from the teachers is harmful. You're pushing away teachers who care about kids, and telling them, "Really, there's no place for you in this profession. There's no place for you in the lives of these kids." Instead, we'd rather have them talk to this AI avatar, uh, which introduces other dangers as well, because what does it mean to groom five to eight-year-olds to be comfortable talking to a stranger on an app at school, a stranger they are being told to trust?

And then what does that look like when they turn eight or nine, and now the school is saying, "Oh, your kid is on Roblox talking to strangers because you're an irresponsible parent," not connecting it to the habituating that they have introduced of seeing [00:36:00] an, a, a character online, an AI character, and developing a personal relationship with it.

Alix: Yeah. Independent of the adults surrounding them also.

Ifeoma Ozoma: Correct.

Alix: God, that's so grim. I hadn't thought about that.

Ifeoma Ozoma: So I was talking to a school board member here 'cause I'm on everyone's neck. Um, and she, she tried to say, "Well, how are we supposed to be experts on this?" And I said, "Great. You're not an expert. So then why did, why are you deploying it?

If you're such a non-expert on this, it shouldn't be deployed." Your response to, "This is a technology that we're being told we need to use," should be, "I don't know anything about this, so we're not, we're gonna wait until we have actual experts. We're going to wait until we know more to deploy it first." And then also, I know for a fact That there are many schools in this country where this isn't being deployed in this way, where it's not harming [00:37:00] kids, and those are private schools.

Those are schools where parents who have tons of money, many of the parents who actually make money working at these tech companies- Yeah ... and at ed tech vendors are sending their kids for a hands-on experiential learning-

Alix: Yeah ...

Ifeoma Ozoma: experience, where kids are learning from a teacher. They are learning from conversations they get to have with their classmates.

Mm-hmm. So this is an equity issue on top of everything else. Why is it scaling at all costs? Why is it metrics at all costs for the kids who we're all paying for, for them to get a quality education? But for the kids who can go to private school, they, they don't have screen- they don't have the one-to-one screens in kindergarten through third grade.

They're not getting recorded at school without their parents' consent. There is more that's going into validating every single thing that is put in front of them in [00:38:00] schools. And also, I'm a taxpayer, and I w- one of the issues that I have in Santa Fe and in cities like this is we have a very large retirement population.

This is a very nice place to retire. So we have a healthy tax base, but we have a healthy tax base of folks who are so disconnected from the public school experience that they aren't showing up at board meetings, they aren't really engaged on how funds are being spent, and that means that the school district is able to get away with a lot more, and that to me is a civic concern.

And so I'm trying to get the older folks in our community to understand that the closest relationship you may have to public school is your grandchildren, who may even be in another state, but i- if you're not coming to it from a parent or grandparent perspective, please come to the table as a taxpayer.

These funds are being wasted when they could go to human beings in [00:39:00] classrooms.

Alix: I just wanna remind people, you went from a toxic employment relationship after being wildly successful at building frontier policy approaches to new platforms on incredibly complicated things, to, like, passing state legislation in California, um, to make, uh, what happened to you impossible to happen to other people in the future.

You are not someone to be trifled with, and I am curious, what have you pulled out tactically? Like, what steps have you taken to try and, like, and what is the ultimate goal? Is it to get Amira out of state schools altogether? Like, what is the So, like, take, take us through it. So you find out about it.

You're basically like, "I wanna know everything." What's your next step?

Ifeoma Ozoma: Uh, within a few weeks, I built a website on Google Sites. Okay, great. Uh, AmiraOptOutSFPS.com. So it's a very simple site, but the goal of that was to push parents to opt out because it was about six weeks from the time I launched the site until school started.

I wanted parents [00:40:00] to have power back in their hands immediately. Show up the first- Yeah ... week of school with this opt-out form. And the reason for that was also the next trigger, that when you create administrative burdens for schools, all of a sudden it becomes a priority. So not only would the teachers and principals have to deal with individual opt-out forms, pieces of paper from parents, they would then have to figure out, "How do we operationalize this?"

Now we've gotta reach out to the superintendent. So it was a way of triggering responses and action at every step, and the opt-out camp- campaign and the success of that is what resulted in then the state education department saying a week after school started, "Oh, wait. Even though we love Amira, we think it's amazing, districts can opt out."

So now as of today- Interesting ... 15 districts, one charter school across the state have opted out, [00:41:00] and that means opting out entirely of the Amira assessment. Santa Fe Public Schools is one of them, which I think is an update since I last spoke to you, the- Incredible ... 15 districts- Oh my God. Yeah, have opted out now, which is amazing.

So casual. Um, and this- Yeah ... and this still also isn't the end of the line for what I'm- Yeah ... pushing because I think that if there had been student data privacy protections at the outset- Yeah ... you don't have this sort of thing in the end. Districts, the, it, student data privacy protections wouldn't, uh, prevent districts and the state from making bad vendor choices, but they would put the ability to consent in front of parents, and that to me is the first step.

For any biometric data collection, there has to be affirmative parental consent and a standalone notice, like, that you cannot put it in a bunch of things that parents receive at the start of the year. You can't hide it in, like, a device use or a data [00:42:00] use agreement at the beginning of the year. For every instance of biometric data collection, you should be letting parents know, and that feels like a pretty low bar to set, but it's a bar that doesn't exist currently.

Alix: It is so wild that, like, how egregious the violation is on top of the fact that the technology is a poor, potentially a poor use of funds and actually doesn't do what the providers say it does, et cetera.

Ifeoma Ozoma: Well, what you're saying is part of why, and this is, goes back to the ed tech and what is ed tech conversation and why always highlight money and the contractual relationships.

If you had to sell this product in the open market- You couldn't ... I don't know that it would be a success. No. Because first of all, are you getting parents to have their five to eight-year-olds recorded by your app? And then the second parents realize, "Oh, this thing can't even understand my kid," they're done.

They're done with their subscription. They're done with whatever it was that it was the exchange of funds. And [00:43:00] so you skip the public market entirely by going towards populations where you can deploy without consent, and that's what all of this is about.

Alix: Okay, so you set up this site, get all these parents to opt out.

State says, "Actually, now districts can opt out 'cause this is really annoying." Districts start opting out. Snowball is downhill. You've also been going to school board meetings, doing op-eds-

Ifeoma Ozoma: Filing public records requests Uh, all of it. All of it. Yeah. And connecting with activists outside of the state, too, because this is not happening in a vacuum.

Yeah. This is happening in the same environment where parents from LAUSD, who are incredible, uh, Jodi and Lila are the two parents who started the activism in LA, uh, and Schools Beyond Screens, which is now a national organization, got LAUSD to change their one-to-one device policy and screen [00:44:00] time use for elementary grades.

Wow. And then today, there was a New York Times story about NYC public schools deciding not to use AI in elementary through middle school. Like, common sense things. Like, kids go to school to learn, not to have their brains smoothed. Like, that i- That's not what we should be doing or what we should be paying for.

Oh, man. It's kind of like- So this is part of- Yeah ... larger work that is happening- Yeah ... across the country Uh, what I try to have people imagine is, so say you are middle-aged. I'm like, "Why should I care about public school?" At some point, we are all going to need care from someone other than ourselves, our partner, our children, our immediate family.

You want that person to be able to read. You want the people who are driving down the street with you- Yeah ... which some kids will be at the ages of 16 through 18 when they are still legally [00:45:00] children, uh- We want them to read ... to be able to read. Yeah. I, like, I would just love- And like think critically ... to live in a society with people- Yeah

who can read, who can think critically, who are going to be able to vote, and should be able to deduce that what is in front of them is garbage or not. Mm-hmm. I personally want that, and I think it's actually selfish and good to want that, to want to be in a society full of people- Right ... who are functioning, and we're paying for it.

So why are we paying for things that aren't working? But I, I try to remember I'm not the first, I won't be the last. Like, before there was surveillance tech that folks were fighting, I put Amira in the same bucket as Flock when it comes to surveillance tech. You are collecting biometric data to then conduct some analysis that the individual whose information is collected is separated from.

There was new technology that was displacing workers in factories, and a term was [00:46:00] used to, that ended up becoming a slur, Luddite, but those were folks who were using collective power towards collective bargaining for labor conditions that they saw were making it impossible for people to eat and impossible for people to continue to work, to survive in capitalist hell.

And so this isn't new, and I'm encouraged by that, that I, I'm not the first person to put together a website with information. Deflock is doing the same thing. There are folks who are create, who created, uh, guides for filing public records requests related to Flock. It's no different for filing public records requests related to Amira.

And so when parents have asked me like, "Where do I start?" I ask them, "What are you interested in? What are you good at? Like, are you, do you have time to send some emails? Here are PDFs of the emails that I've sent. Copy, paste whatever's useful for you." Like, "This is who you send it to." No one has to recreate [00:47:00] anything or create a wheel from scratch.

And so I think a lot of it is, uh, rejecting gatekeeping because that's how we- feel overwhelmed and feel as if we're alone. A- and so why I started with a website first for Amira is, here is me dumping the information that I know. Anyone, anywhere who can access the internet can access the site. Mm-hmm.

Create your own thing, run with it. Take from it, run with it. Whatever is helpful, here it is.

Alix: Any final words, um, for parents? Or, to your point, people that are interested in how tax dollars are being spent on public education, even if they're not parents, and they want to be in a society where, uh, you know, people can read and think, um, which feels important, uh, regardless of if it's your kids reading and thinking.

Um, any final sort of word for them on, um, how to get involved, um, or what step they can take?

Ifeoma Ozoma: The most encouraging thing for me is there's more of us than there are of them, [00:48:00] always. Whether it's Flock or Amira or whatever other nonsense, there are more of us than there are of them, and all we have to do is make a little bit of noise to get action.

And it may take a little bit of time, but I promise that, like, we, when we work together, can actually get things done, and it will shock them every single time. I, I believe that a large part of the disjointed response from a company like Amira, and even Flock, has been they're just- they did not expect pushback.

They expected easy money and easy exploitation. And parents, taxpayers, everyone who doesn't want this for the future and for our society has to- we have to do our best to make sure we're not easy marks. Yeah.

Alix: Yeah. I think that's, that's a great place to end it. Don't be an easy mark. Um, I really have so much admiration for all the ways that you have made [00:49:00] impact in...

And using your sort of lived experience to drive impact is something that you just don't see it very often, th- this tangible of results. And I'm just like, really, your side quests, carry on. Uh, thank you- ... for the work that you do, and thank you specifically for, um, all this work on Amira.

Ifeoma Ozoma: Thank you. Thank you so much for also having this conversation, because a big part of advocacy is getting the word out.

Like, people have to actually know that things are happening, and so I really appreciate it.

Alix: A huge thank you to Ifeoma for joining us and for doing this sort of determined practical work of helping communities push back when technology is imposed on schools without enough scrutiny or evidence. It's up to all of us, I think, is my main takeaway from this conversation, to engage in the process of how we're making these kinds of choices to have our kids spend time with these kinds of technologies and what kinds of oversight we want.

This is a really great example where learning about this topic can feel kind of, I don't know, [00:50:00] demoralizing because you're like, "Oh, yet again, a tech company, um, kind of comes in and says, 'We're going to do this really innovative thing,' and you know, in expensive contracts that overpromise, um, that don't involve consent.

You know, we see our kids experimented on." And I think that demoralization and sort of learning about these topics really has to be the first step. Like, we can't Continue to just learn about these things and feel helpless and hopeless. So one of the things we're gonna be doing is trying to find opportunities like this where we can be inspired and supported by people like Ifeoma, um, to better understand what it is we can actually do about these things.

So when you see her encounter this project, she doesn't just talk analytically about how harmful it is or how much of a problem it is. She finds a way in, you know? She finds something specific she can do to mobilize her community, to learn more, to sort of force, um, and use the accountability mechanisms at her disposal.

Um, so that is really what The Maybe Collective is about, um, is trying to learn more about what's going on in the world, and also [00:51:00] find really tangible ways of doing things in your backyard. Uh, we will drop a link in the show notes to The Maybe Collective. If that's of interest to you, please do join us.

We want more people. We want more people that are switched on in this way to be in conversation about what we can do. If you missed last week's episode, do give it a listen. Um, it's Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath, who is a, um, neuroscientist and former educator who wrote a book called The Digital Delusion, that tries to, uh, make sense of the ways in which edtech does and doesn't assist in kids' cognitive development and educational outcomes.

Um, it was really eye-opening for me. I mean, it, it kind of confirmed certain things I have assumed about screens. Um, uh, there is some disagreement about certain parts of the argument he's making and whether or not, um, some of his claims about the quality of education overall, um, are backed up by sufficient evidence.

Um, but a lot of the, uh, work that he has done to assemble the [00:52:00] evidence base around how kids learn and the effect that screens have in educational environments is so hard-hitting, and he also makes loads of recommendations in the book about what parents, teachers, and students can do to improve the quality of their education amidst all of this push of edtech and screens.

So if that's something you wanna learn more about, do check out that episode with Jared. Um, and next week, we are gonna get into the law, because as in many of these conversations, I kept coming back to, how is it legal? How is it legal for a tiny startup to roll out, um, a literacy assessment that's recording the voices of kids without getting parental consent?

It turns out it probably isn't legal, but it's complicated, um, as most things are. Um, and there's loads of court cases and sort of history of the law as it's developed, and legal strategies around kids and edtech. Um, and so we are gonna dig into all that with Andrew Liddell from the EdTech Law Center next week, and we will see you [00:53:00] then.

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