Naming the Reader
Where the Infrastructure Begins
At six years old, my ego flew a tight circle around my literacy skills. I didn’t just want to read perfectly, I wanted to comprehend (pay attention to this word, we’re going to double back). I was especially invested in knowing how to spell words correctly. Not just any words, either. The big, fancy words.
Technically
Maintenance
Biblical (not a necessarily long word, but it felt heavy)
Pneumonia
Mothaf*cka (my father’s dialect)
Imagine how my world shifted when I learned about phonemes and graphemes.
A quick way to understand them:
A phoneme is the sound your ears hear, and your mouth makes.
A grapheme is what your eyes see, and your hands write.
Which is to say, if a word was difficult, I could say it out loud. I could sound it out. Like a detective, I could investigate the alphabet until I found the letters that held the sounds responsible for the word I was trying to spell (pay attention to this bit, too)!
Mind? Blown. I was six years old, and my mind was blown. Years later, I would learn about the phonetic alphabet and need a moment to recover. It felt like I was looking at building blocks without a microscope, as if I were observing sound at a deeper biological level. I’m not sure. But every language’s topical layer got peeled back the day I learned about that alphabet. Because if I had the ability to hear and sound out what I heard, then surely I could learn to make those wonderful and peculiar sounds too.
This was all coming down to one thing. It was really all about one major skill that I was secretly trying to unlock: becoming a trusted writer. I had no idea what I was going to write with my life. Music? Theater? Policy (please God no)? Poetry? Maybe I would write about history, science, or money. Maybe I’d write about God and the merit of a later Sunday school start time (those mornings were boxing me up and wearing me down. I was six, and I was tired). The more I figured, the less sure I was. The only thing I knew was this: I’d be allowed to write with my life if the writing was well-done. Sharp. Correct. If I could write the right words at the right time on the page, the work was elevated. Dare I say, trusted. My six-year-old mind decided that proper spelling was the starting point for sharp, trusted writing. But I wasn’t getting a pat on the back for going from a phoneme to a grapheme to groups of correctly spelled words. That was Point A to Point C for a kid like me; a straight line that led to an open-and-close investigation.
“Any Joe Shmoe can spell. That ain’t nothing. Do you know what that word means? You seem to really like the word “technically,” but I don’t think you know what it means. Look it up and see if you should still use it. You might not even need it.”
My father: the rain on my fancy word parade (fun fact: parade is the first word I misspelled in my first spelling bee). Lucky for me, rain nourishes the flower.
He made me grab a dictionary, where we proceeded to look up and write down the definitions of “technicality”, “technical,” and somehow landed in the realm of the technical foul.
He had made his point by the end of that nuanced discussion on the Bulls’ second three-year championship run between ‘96 and ‘98: you shouldn’t use words you can’t define. You shouldn’t use words you don’t understand. People who read your work and do understand those words will doubt your comprehension (there it is!) of the topic you chose to write about…he always made basketball so deep.
But the message hit: I felt so fancy writing those big words correctly. I investigated (there’s the other one) the phonemes and followed the trail to the grapheme. I made the adjustments to the grapheme until it was a proper word in the English language. What was happening? What was wrong?
I halted the investigation too early, and I hadn’t yet learned that reading a word and comprehending its meaning were not synonymous. After that kitchen table talk with my daddy, the strategy of my investigation changed forever. I went from wanting to spell to wanting to comprehend. I began to go through books to find words I didn’t know so that I could define them. The new line of inquiry became:
Phoneme to grapheme
Grapheme to correctly spelled word
Correctly spelled word to dictionary
Following this line shaped me into someone who looked at language differently, forensically. To look at language means it was written down. Written language has an author: a person who examined the letters and brought them together to form words, terms, and phrases that create a message of some sort. And whether that author likes it or not, they are accountable for the words they wrangled together after their investigation. I became one of those people my daddy warned me about: I actually understood quite a few words because I had investigated them from the phoneme to the dictionary. It became instinctual for me to read something, and need to know who wrote it. Who is accountable for wrangling these words together? Who is responsible for this message? Who wrote this? I have more gray hairs than I thought I would at my current age, in case you were wondering.
And here is where I have to put on my big, mature, professional hat (it is dramatic and has a feather). Buckle up.
If you are granted the privilege of aging, you’ll find policy and contract language lives in its own little world of authorship. And as time goes on, that world appears to matter less and less. In my youth, consideration for the writer of the contract was intriguing. In my older youth (born in ‘92), I am more concerned with the person who signed it. Adulthood demands my attention shift. Who wrote the user policy feels irrelevant. I’m concerned about the user who signs it: did they actually read it?
We are in a whole new world, and it’s chock-full of AI tools and edtech promises. This new area of business comes with new engagement risks for the user.
The user is a six-year-old. The user is a seventeen-year-old. The user is a fifth-grade ELA teacher. And not one of these users is the responsible party for vetting or signing off on the tools they end up using on an average school day. None of these users is responsible for investigating the words that were wrangled together to create user policy, restrictions, or default settings. They are users at risk unless the user policy covering the tools has been read by someone who does understand the words and the way they have been wrangled together. We assume that leadership conducts such readings; otherwise put the users they are responsible for at risk. What is the risk? Surely, we must actually read the agreements to find out.
The way those words are wrangled together? That structure holds meaning. That structure holds the message on what the business is allowed to do, take, set as default, and restrict if their user policy is agreed to by the client. So when the responsible party is signing off on tools, they are turning students and teachers alike into new users. We know how aggressively out of hand this can get and how quickly that can happen. There are AI and edtech tools being used in buildings, but parents have never heard of the tool. They know their child is using AI in school, but they aren’t exactly sure how many businesses have an account with their child’s name in it. Feels a bit…icky? Yes. I will go with icky.
One surefire way to at least significantly mitigate the likelihood of this gross mess (which can become aggressively out of hand in a short time) is to ensure leadership is equipped to read what they sign and to document that they signed something they genuinely understood the message behind and the weight of.
AI and edtech come with their own attack vectors. What are attack vectors? An attack vector is the method hackers and other nefarious individuals use to gain unauthorized access to a network or system. For so long, schools only had to worry about keeping credentials safe and training educators to notice telltale signs of phishing emails—no more. The game has changed. A new business model with a new recurring need for improvement has entered the school building. None of the business models is exactly alike, and what happens to the student data when any of these businesses goes under is unclear. The businesses and their models gain entry under the authority of leadership responsible for agreeing to and signing off on user policy, guidelines, and all that both aspects of engagement entail.
Who wrote the user policy doesn’t feel as important as district and building leadership signing off on the data processing agreements they didn’t investigate.
Why mention this now?
Because I broke down one publicly available DPA of a tool widely used in K-12.
Just one.
And I was left confused about how the tool ended up in schools without a media storm over school leaders demanding changes to contract language. It never happened. It leads me to believe that somewhere in the chain of command, my daddy’s fundamentals are being ignored.
The same way you don’t write words you don’t understand is the same way you shouldn’t sign off on agreements you have failed to read and don’t fully comprehend.
AI is in schools. One way to ensure AI is safely in the building is to start with understanding what is being signed off on and what it actually makes the signer accountable for: new users and their safety on the tool. There is now a question of what happens to more contextual and sensitive information after a tool has been let into the building, used, and then removed.
A signature is supposed to mean a thorough reading of the agreements and documentation took place, so risks could be weighed against the pros of granting the business and its model new users and their data. If the signer wants to maintain trust, they had better start thinking about how well they have investigated what they signed, what they allowed in the building. The signer is the named reader. The district that is ready to lay a foundation of safety for their students and teachers is the district that builds the infrastructure to efficiently investigate and document current and prospective tools, what they do, and if what they offer is worth what they want in exchange.
Now is the time to ask. As a parent. As an educator. As a building or district administrator:
Who cleared this tool to enter the school?
What does agreement to the tool’s user policy and DPA require in terms of student data?
Who read over these things?
Now is the time for districts to build the infrastructure. Situate the workflow.
Name the reader.