The Brief

Your children could be some of a growing number of California kids having their writing graded by software instead of a teacher.

California school districts are signing more contracts for artificial intelligence tools, from automated grading in San Diego to chatbots in central California, Los Angeles, and the San Francisco Bay Area.

English teachers say AI tools can help them grade papers faster, get students more feedback, and improve their learning experience. But guidelines are vague and adoption by teachers and districts is spotty.

The California Department of Education can’t tell you which schools use AI or how much they pay for it. The state doesn’t track AI use by school districts, said Katherine Goyette, computer science coordinator for the California Department of Education.

While Goyette said chatbots are the most common form of AI she’s encountered in schools, more and more California teachers are using AI tools to help grade student work. That’s consistent with surveys that have found teachers use AI as often if not more than students, news that contrasts sharply with headlines about fears of students cheating with AI.

Teachers use AI to do things like personalize reading material, create lesson plans, and other tasks in order to save time and and reduce burnout. A report issued last fall in response to an AI executive order by Gov. Gavin Newsom mentions opportunities to use AI for tutoring, summarization, and personalized content generation, but also labels education a risky use case. Generative AI tools have been known to create convincing but inaccurate answers to questions, and use toxic language or imagery laden with racism or sexism.

California issued guidance for how educators should use the technology last fall, one of seven states to do so. It encourages critical analysis of text and imagery created by AI models and conversations between teachers and students about what amounts to ethical or appropriate use of AI in the classroom.

But no specific mention is made of how teachers should treat AI that grades assignments. Additionally, the California education code states that guidance from the state is “merely exemplary, and that compliance with the guidelines is not mandatory.”

English teacher Jen Roberts uses Writeable, an AI platform, to grade students’ work at Point Loma High School in San Diego on May 3, 2024.

(

Adriana Heldiz

/

CalMatters

)

Goyette said she’s waiting to see if the California Legislature passes Senate Bill 1288, which would require state Superintendent Tony Thurmond to create an AI working group to issue further guidance to local school districts on how to safely use AI. Cosponsored by Thurmond, the bill also calls for an assessment of the current state of AI in education and for the identification of forms of AI that can harm students and educators by 2026.

Nobody tracks what AI tools school districts are adopting or the policy they use to enforce standards, said Alix Gallagher, head of strategic partnerships at the Policy Analysis for California Education center at Stanford University. Since the state does not track curriculum that school districts adopt or software in use, it would be highly unusual for them to track AI contracts, she said.

Amid AI hype, Gallagher thinks people can lose sight of the fact that the technology is just a tool and it will only be as good or problematic as the decisions of the humans using that tool, which is why she repeatedly urges investments in helping teachers understand AI tools and how to be thoughtful about their use and making space for communities are given voice about how to best meet their kid’s needs.

“Some people will probably make some pretty bad decisions that are not in the best interests of kids, and some other people might find ways to use maybe even the same tools to enrich student experiences,” she said.

Teachers use AI to grade English papers

Last summer, Jen Roberts, an English teacher at Point Loma High School in San Diego, went to a training session to learn how to use Writable, an AI tool that automates grading writing assignments and gives students feedback powered by OpenAI. For the past school year, Roberts used Writable and other AI tools in the classroom, and she said it’s been the best year yet of nearly three decades of teaching. Roberts said it has made her students better writers, not because AI did the writing for them, but because automated feedback can tell her students faster than she can how to improve, which in turn allows her to hand out more writing assignments.

“At this point last year, a lot of students were still struggling to write a paragraph, let alone an essay with evidence and claims and reasoning and explanation and elaboration and all of that,” Roberts said. “This year, they’re just getting there faster.”

Roberts feels Writable is “very accurate” when grading her students of average aptitude. But, she said, there’s a downside: It sometimes assigns high-performing students lower grades than merited and struggling students higher grades. She said she routinely checks answers when the AI grades assignments, but only checks the feedback it gives students occasionally.

“In actual practicality, I do not look at the feedback it gives every single student,” she said. “That’s just not a great use of my time. But I do a lot of spot checking and I see what’s going on and if I see a student that I’m worried about get feedback, (I’m like) ‘Let me go look at what his feedback is and then go talk to him about that.’”

First: A student uses Magic School, an AI platform, to help generate ideas for a classroom writing prompt. Last: A student reads their writing out loud. Point Loma High School in San Diego on May 3, 2024.

(

Adriana Heldiz

/

CalMatters

)

Alex Rainey teaches English to fourth graders at Chico Country Day School in northern California. She used GPT-4, a language model made by OpenAI which costs $20 a month, to grade papers and provide feedback. After uploading her grading rubric and examples of her written feedback, she used AI to grade assignments about animal defense mechanisms, allowing GPT-4 to analyze students’ grammar and sentence structure while she focused on assessing creativity.

“I feel like the feedback it gave was very similar to how I grade my kids, like my brain was tapped into it,” she said.

Like Roberts she found that it saves time, transforming work that took hours into less than an hour, but also found that sometimes GPT-4 is a tougher grader than she is. She agrees that quicker feedback and the ability to dole out more writing assignments produces better writers. A teacher can assign more writing before delivering feedback but “then kids have nothing to grow from.”

Rainey said her experience grading with GPT-4 left her in agreement with Roberts, that more feedback and writing more often produces better writers. She feels strongly that teachers still need to oversee grading and feedback by AI, “but I think it’s amazing. I couldn’t go backwards now.”

The cost of using AI in the classroom

Contracts involving artificial intelligence can be lucrative.

To launch a chatbot named Ed, Los Angeles Unified School District signed a $6.2 million contract for two years with the option of renewing for three additional years. Magic School AI is used by educators in Los Angeles and costs $100 per teacher per year.

Despite repeated calls and emails over the span of roughly a month, Writable and the San Diego Unified School District declined to share pricing details with CalMatters. A district spokesperson said teachers got access to Writeable through a contract with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for English language learners.

QuillBot is an AI-powered writing tool for students in grades 4-12 made by the company Quill. Quill says its tool is currently used at 1,000 schools in California and has more than 13,000 student and educator users in San Diego alone. An annual Quill Premium subscription costs $80 per teacher or $1800 per school.

QuillBot does not generate writing for students like ChatGPT or grade writing assignments, but gives students feedback on their writing. Quill is a nonprofit that’s raised $20 million from groups like Google’s charitable foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation over the past 10 years.

English teacher Jen Roberts explains to her students how she uses Magic School, an AI platform, for classroom exercises and grading at Point Loma High School in San Diego on May 3, 2024.

(

Adriana Heldiz

/

CalMatters

)

Even if a teacher or district wants to shell out for an AI tool, guidance for safe and responsible use is still getting worked out.

Governments are placing high-risk labels on forms of AI with the power to make critical decisions about whether a person gets a job or rents an apartment or receives government benefits. California Federation of Teachers President Jeff Freitas said he hasn’t considered whether AI for grading is moderate or high risk, but “it definitely is a risk to use for grading.”

The California Federation of Teachers is a union with 120,000 members. Freitas told CalMatters he’s concerned about AI having a number of consequences in the classroom. He’s worried administrators may use it to justify increasing classroom sizes or adding to teacher workloads; he’s worried about climate change and the amount of energy needed to train and deploy AI models’ he’s worried about protecting students’ privacy, and he’s worried about automation bias.

Regulators around the world wrestling with AI praise approaches where it is used to augment human decision-making instead of replacing it. But it’s difficult for laws to account for automation bias and humans becoming placing too much trust in machines.

The American Federation of Teachers created an AI working group in October 2023 to propose guidance on how educators should use the technology or talk about it in collective bargaining contract negotiations. Freitas said those guidelines are due out in the coming weeks.

“We’re trying to provide guidelines for educators to not solely rely on (AI), he said. “It should be used as a tool, and you should not lose your critical analysis of what it’s producing for you.”

State AI guidelines for teachers

Goyette, the computer science coordinator for the education department, helped create state AI guidelines and speaks to county offices of education for in-person training on AI for educators. She also helped create an online AI training series for educators. She said the most popular online course is about workflow and efficiency, which shows teachers how to automate lesson planning and grading.

“Teachers have an incredibly important and tough job, and what’s most important is that they’re building relationships with their students,” she said. “There’s decades of research that speaks to the power of that, so if they can save time on mundane tasks so that they can spend more time with their students, that’s a win.”

English teacher Jen Roberts checks her student’s work at Point Loma High School in San Diego on May 3, 2024. Roberts uses AI platforms for classroom exercises and grading. Photo by Adriana Heldiz, CalMatters

(

Adriana Heldiz

/

CalMatters

)

Alex Kotran, chief executive of an education nonprofit that’s supported by Google and OpenAI, said they found that it’s hard to design a language model to predictably match how a teacher grades papers.

He spoke with teachers willing to accept a model that’s accurate 80% of the time in order to reap the reward of time saved, but he thinks it’s probably safe to say that a student or parent would want to make sure an AI model used for grading is even more accurate.

Kotran of the AI Education Project thinks it makes sense for school districts to adopt a policy that says teachers should be wary any time they use AI tools that can have disparate effects on student’s lives.

Even with such a policy, teachers can still fall victim to trusting AI without question. And even if the state kept track of AI used by school districts, there’s still the possibility that teachers will purchase technology for use on their personal computers.

When teachers can’t tell if they’re cheating

Kotran said he routinely speaks with educators across the U.S. and is not aware of any systematic studies to verify the effectiveness and consistency of AI for grading English papers.

Roberts, the Point Loma High School teacher, describes herself as pro technology.

She regularly writes and speaks about AI. Her experiences have led her to the opinion that grading with AI is what’s best for her students, but she didn’t arrive at that conclusion easily.

At first she questioned whether using AI for grading and feedback could hurt her understanding of her students. Today she views using AI like the cross-country coach who rides alongside student athletes in a golf cart, like an aid that helps her assist her students better.

A student scrolls through their laptop during class at Point Loma High School in San Diego on May 3, 2024.

(

Adriana Heldiz

/

CalMatters

)

Roberts says the average high school English teacher in her district has roughly 180 students. Grading and feedback can take between five to 10 minutes per assignment she says, so between teaching, meetings, and other duties, it can take two to three weeks to get feedback back into the hands of students unless a teacher decides to give up large chunks of their weekends. With AI, it takes Roberts a day or two.

Ultimately she concluded that “if my students are growing as writers, then I don’t think I’m cheating.” She says AI reduces her fatigue, giving her more time to focus on struggling students and giving them more detailed feedback.

“My job is to make sure you grow, and that you’re a healthy, happy, literate adult by the time you graduate from high school, and I will use any tool that helps me do that, and I’m not going to get hung up on the moral aspects of that,” she said. “My job is not to spend every Saturday reading essays. Way too many English teachers work way too many hours a week because they are grading students the old-fashioned way.”

Roberts also thinks AI might be a less biased grader in some instances than human teachers who can adjust their grading for students sometimes to give them the benefit of the doubt or be punitive if they were particularly annoying in class recently.

She isn’t worried about students cheating with AI, a concern she characterizes as a moral panic. She points to a Stanford University study released last fall which found that students cheated just as much before the advent of ChatGPT as they did a year after the release of the AI.

Goyette said she understands why students question whether some AI use by teachers is like cheating. Education department AI guidelines encourage teachers and students to use the technology more. What’s essential, Goyette said, is that teachers discuss what ethical use of AI looks like in their classroom, and convey that — like using a calculator in math class — using AI is accepted or encouraged for some assignments and not others.

For the last assignment of the year, Robers has one final experiment to run: Edit an essay written entirely by AI. But they must change at least 50% of the text, make it 25% longer, write their own thesis, and add quotes from classroom reading material. The idea, she said, is to prepare them for a future where AI writes the first draft and humans edit the results to fit their needs.

“It used to be you weren’t allowed to bring a calculator into the SATs and now you’re supposed to bring your calculator so things change,” she said. “It’s just moral panic. Things change and people freak out and that’s what’s happening.”

NEW YORK — In Brian Sanchez's slice of Astoria, the FIFA World Cup doesn't begin with the first match. It starts weeks earlier, with the arrival of a sticker album — and a mission.

It's a deceptively simple one: Fill the book with all the stickers representing World Cup teams, players, venues and other tournament details. But these stickers are sold in blind packs, similar to baseball or Pokémon cards, which adds to the fun and the headaches.

Sanchez, 20, has tried to complete the task before but never succeeded. This year, he planned to skip it altogether, but it was hard to ignore the chatter and excitement among his friends and family — both at home and abroad — who were all participating.

"Honestly it comes down to a little bit of FOMO," he said.

The hunt for stickers, produced by the Italian company Panini, is a decades-old World Cup tradition that's especially popular in Latin America and Europe. In the U.S., interest has been building steadily over the years, but this summer, the buzz is bigger than ever.

Jason Howarth, senior vice president of marketing and athlete relations at Panini America, said retailers reported being sold out of sticker packets within a week of the release in late April — unseen in previous World Cup cycles.

"There's a different energy coming out of it," he said. "Right now, it's outpacing where we were in 2022 by three to five times."

The surging demand comes as collectors face their toughest challenge yet. This year, they need to track down 980 distinct stickers to put the album to bed — 310 more than at the 2022 World Cup and a record number for the company. It's a reflection of the upcoming tournament's historic scale, which is expanding from 32 teams to 48 across three countries.

This edition will also be the second to last men's World Cup sticker album produced by Panini — ending a partnership that stretches back over five decades. Last month, FIFA announced that starting in 2031, U.S.-based Fanatics will be the official supplier of FIFA soccer cards, trading cards and stickers.

On a recent afternoon in Central Park, Sanchez met up with other collectors. Hunched over stacks of stickers, some two dozen people inspected the offerings with laser focus.

With only four stickers missing, Sanchez was already looking forward to earning bragging rights as the first person in his family across the finish line this year.

" I'm feeling pretty accomplished," he said. "I've been trying to get a win, and this is gonna be a huge win for me."

An expensive, labor-intensive but rewarding hobby

A single pack of seven stickers — available online, at corner stores or drugstore chains like Walgreens and CVS — now cost $2, compared to four years ago when five stickers retailed for around $1. That means simply buying enough packs to accumulate 980 stickers would total $280.

Given the costs, finishing the book is rarely a solitary pursuit, and aficionados often meet up to spread the wealth, according to Crista Latvis, 26, who organized the recent sticker swap in Central Park.

"You can't just buy your way into it," she said. "Otherwise,  it's super expensive and you've got to be very lucky."

For many, these gatherings are part of the pastime's draw.

"It's great to meet other people who are also doing it and also excited for the World Cup, especially since it's here," Latvis said.

Sebastian Clavijo, who attended Latvis' swap, said he spent tens of thousands of dollars on his quest this year. Clavijo, 32, has been collecting Panini stickers since he was 4. This year, his goal is to complete the book only with pieces featuring red and purple borders — an even rarer get.

" I just like soccer and I love collecting," he said. "That's my hobby, you know?"

In 2022, Panini introduced stickers with different colored borders that vary in rarity. That element has been an especially big hit with the trading card community and contributed to the hobby's appeal in the U.S., according to Howarth from Panini America.

Panini popularity has grown along with soccer

Demand has always existed in New York, Texas, Florida, among other big states, but it's also emerging nationwide, in places like Phoenix and the Northwest, according to Howarth.

" As soccer has grown, so has Panini," he said.

Howarth believes part of this year's popularity stems from the expanded World Cup format. Teams that have never qualified for the tournament — and therefore never been sticker-fied by Panini — are finally getting their moment.

For some, completing the sticker album is driven by nostalgia for their childhood, family or home country.

Linda Lino never heard of the hobby until she was 18, and her grandmother gave her a Panini sticker book. That was in 2014. Lino has completed every World Cup edition since, in part in memory of her late grandmother.

"It started with my grandma and then it became like a whole family thing," Lino said. "I love the community that it brings together."

That's especially true with her father, who never had the chance to collect stickers when he was a kid in Peru, Lino said. Now, the two are making up for lost time.

"My dad is so excited," she said. "He's like 'I want to help you. I want to put the stickers together.'"

Clemente Lisi, a sports journalist who has written about the Panini sticker phenomenon, said the sticker album serves as a time capsule for the World Cup. With the tournament's return to the U.S. after 32 years, he expects it will produce more first-time collectors looking for a way to remember this summer.

"This may be the only tangible thing from a World Cup unless you go to a game," he said.

Lisi, who also runs Planet Soccer on Substack, anticipates that the U.S. company Fanatics will further cater to the market at home.

" It'll even become more American and more baked into our culture," he said.

Sanchez, the college student from Astoria, dabbles in collecting other items, like vinyls and trading cards. But what he appreciates most about the Panini sticker scene is its supportive and rarely competitive nature.

" The community around the World Cup stickers is something like I've never seen before," he said. "The community is just so nice."

After countless hours of trading and visiting multiple convenience stores, Sanchez found his 980th and final sticker at the swap in Central Park. It was of the Iraqi team. He let out a gasp, followed by a smile that spanned ear to ear. "Let's goooo!"

With a mountain of duplicates left, Sanchez wasn't ready to move on just yet. His next step was to help his mother finish her album.

" I'm going to take a break," he said. "I'm going to celebrate today and then get back to it."

Topline:

The backstory: Once a year, dozens of sound artists converge on the hill with views of the harbor below to perform their audio art, which can range from serene to “beautifully weird.”

What to expect: This year includes a performer bending a bar of tin with his bare hands to get it to emit what’s called a "tin cry" and synthesizer-based soundscapes that take inspiration from both the ocean and the industrial space below.

When to go: Soundpedro is free and lasts from 7-10 p.m. Saturday.

More info at the Soundpedro website.

When I first came to the states many years ago, if I’d mentioned Arsenal, people would have thought I was referring to the U.S. military or something. But all that has changed. You can now watch U.K. premier league games in sports bars, most kids play soccer, and Ted Lasso is must-watch TV.

To which I say — welcome. We English are proud of the fact that soccer began with us more than 150 years ago. And every World Cup, we think, surely this will be the year that the trophy returns home — the year that we’ll win!

Queen Elizabeth II awarding the Jules Rimet World Cup Trophy to Bobby Moore after England won the 1966 World Cup final at Wembley.

(

Marc Atkins/Getty Images

/

Getty Images Europe

)

I mean it did happen … once… back in 1966. It’s such a long time ago the game was televised in black and white and shillings were still being used. My mother was nine months pregnant with my brother, and got so excited jumping up and down she went into labor and had him the next day. World Cup Willie they called him. Actually his name is David, but never mind.

Since then, every four years everyone in the U.K. watches the games with bated breath. And then something stupid will happen, and we’ll lose, like that time in 1998 when David Beckham (who played for England before he came to L.A. Galaxy) lost his temper and was sent off, and we’ll sit there, gloomy and despondent. I know because I was there in my friend’s living room in London, gloomy and despondent, thinking just once, just once, maybe could we please have a win?

David Beckham's infamous 1998 red card in the England vs. Argentina game.

(

Richard Sellers/Allstar/Getty Images

/

Getty Images Europe

)

The last World Cup, I went to Ye Olde Kings Head in Santa Monica to watch England play. At 7 a.m. it was full of people already on their third pint of beer. And when the team got through to the next round, the gentle men of England ran outside the pub, whipped off their shirts and started weaving through traffic, singing football chants and acting like hooligans. I really couldn’t decide if I was embarrassed or if it felt like home.

Anyway, this time, since I’m now an American citizen, it’s in my contract that I need to support Team USA. I’m a dual citizen, though, so I’ll also be cheering for England. If by any chance Team USA and England play each other, my two selves will be watching, with a cup of tea in one hand, and a cold brewski in the other, and the polarities will explode, or something. But what will probably happen is that both teams will be eclipsed by Brazil or France playing the beautiful game… beautifully. Cheers.

You may know about Union Station as an L.A. landmark or as a transportation hub — but how much do you know about its rich architectural history?

To foster that interest and knowledge, Metro created a series of public tours of the station this spring.

“There's so much that you might just walk by without really having the opportunity to delve deeply into,” said Zipporah Lax Yamamoto, deputy executive officer of Metro’s art program. “[The tours are] a really wonderful opportunity to be able to spend time with the station, learn more about the historic landmark, which belongs to all of us.”

Union Station in Los Angeles

(

Myung J. Chun

/

Getty Images

)

Architectural style

It’s called Union Station because when it opened in 1939, it connected the Southern Pacific and Union Pacific railroads with the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe railway.

While it was designed by father-and-son team Donald and John Parkinson, the architects who gave us L.A. City Hall, its style is very different. Union Station’s interior and exterior mixes art deco, Spanish colonial and other styles into a hybrid dubbed Mission Moderne.

As you begin the tour, entering from Alameda Street, tour guides ask you to look up at the decorative elements in the high ceilings. The beams and geometric patterns may look like wood — but they’re actually just painted to look that way.

A community destroyed by development

Along the way, the tour gives background on pieces created more than 30 years ago. These include "City of Dreams/River of History" by artists May Sun and Richard Wyatt in 1995. Sun’s piece uses remnants of the Chinese American homes torn down to build the station, a reference to the high price that community paid for this building’s construction.

Detail from "City of Dreams/River of History," created by artists May Sun and Richard Wyatt at Union Station.

(

Adolfo Guzman-Lopez/LAist

)

“It was an enormous price. Chinatown ceased to exist in this area. … The families that lived here during that time are still around and maintain archives of that time period and the original Chinatown here, and we've worked with those families to have those objects on display,” Lax Yamamoto said.

Meanwhile, Wyatt’s large-scale mural includes the face of a Chinese man, along with nine other people of different races, ethnicities and ages; a nod to the diversity of the city since its founding in the late 1700s.

There are also stops to see new art installed for the World Cup.

A mural by Richard Wyatt at Union Station

(

Adolfo Guzman-Lopez/LAist

)

There are three tours left in the series but the RSVPs have reached their maximum; however, Lax Yamamoto said Metro will decide whether to continue them based on what people have thought about the tours.

Meanwhile, Union Station is set to swell with people in the next couple of months as L.A. hosts World Cup games. The station is the site of an official FIFA-sponsored Fan Zone from June 25-28.