PA Charter School Proposes Replacing Teachers With AI

HARRISBURG, PA — A Pennsylvania charter school broke into new, some would say inevitable territory this week when it proposed to replace human teachers in a classroom run entirely by artificial intelligence.

The cyber charter, Unbound Academic Institute, also said there would be only two hours of instruction for students a day.

The Pennsylvania Department of Education summarily rejected the school's application, which was met with alarm by teachers and activists.

“Pennsylvania’s nearly three-decade-old charter school law never envisioned a cyber school where human teachers were replaced with an AI program,” Aaron Chapin, a middle school teacher and president of the Pennsylvania State Education Association, said in a statement. “There is no way that two hours of AI-guided learning in core subjects could replace direct instruction from a certified teacher or meet state academic standards."

While considered outlandish by Pennsylvania officials and school leaders, a similar program from Unbound has already been approved in a public school in Arizona, and they are connected to private schools in Texas and Florida, according to Education Week.

The school, with administrative offices based in Lancaster, would have been entirely online. It would provide two hours a day of learning would focus on "core subjects" of math and reading, the application stated.

It also called for a small number of human employees, called "guides" instead of teachers, to provide ancillary support, but not actual instruction.

In their decision, the state Department of Education said that Unbound's application included no statements of support from teachers, parents, students, or the community at large. It also pointed to flaws in their planned budget, which officials said overestimated their projected growth and did not properly account for special education needs.

The state also expressed concern about the planned curriculum itself, as the "application provided only standards to be taught and lesson titles for three content areas – science, math, and language arts...there were no mentions in the application of a physical education curriculum, world languages, health, or any other subject areas."