By Loan-Anh Pham
San Jose Spotlight

A popular Bay Area charter school system is closing its two Sunnyvale campuses this June despite months of attempts to save them, but parents and teachers said the ordeal is far from over.

Board members from Summit Public Schools voted to shut down the middle and high schools in Sunnyvale, called Summit Denali, at a special board meeting Thursday. Families and educators said they’re reeling from the decision and now face an uncertain future.

More than 600 students are currently enrolled at Summit Denali’s Sunnyvale schools, according to state data. Officials have encouraged students to apply to other Summit locations, but many parents say those schools are far away and would require hours of commuting.

More than 100 parents, students and teachers tuned in virtually for the board meeting. About a dozen attendees spoke during a half-hour public comment window.

“The fact that we are here less than two months after the initial announcement of Summit’s plan to close Denali gives families and students very little time to plan for the future,” Unite Summit President Justin Kim, who represents the teacher’s union, said. Officials said teachers can apply to transfer to other Summit locations but employment is not guaranteed.

After shuffling into a closed-door meeting, the board members emerged a half hour later and voted unanimously to close the two schools.

“The board is being asked to make a decision today from which nothing positive is going to come,” Summit Public Schools CEO Diane Tavenner said. “To all of the members of the Denali community, I’m very sorry.

Parents, teachers and the Santa Clara County Board of Education called on Summit Public Schools to make a final decision after the abrupt announcement of Denali’s probable closure in January. Officials blamed a loss of pandemic-era stimulus funds, declining student enrollment and a yearslong budget deficit for the closure. But families have called for accountability, questioning claims of financial problems amid a $31 million investment to construct Denali’s high school, which opened in 2021.

After the controversial vote, Summit Denali parent organizer Shan Sankaran said he’s worried the upheaval is impacting quality of education. The Sunnyvale resident said he’s concerned about the mental health of his young children, who are in sixth and eighth grade, and their peers with a transition to a new school looming.

“We need to figure out our next options,” Sankaran told San Jose Spotlight. “The kids are still in denial. They couldn’t comprehend that the school is going to get closed because they love the school.”

Kim Nicholson, a teacher at Summit Denali, said she’s afraid that the school’s fate will extend to other Summit locations. The system has six other California locations, including one in San Jose and others in Richmond, Daly City and Redwood City. Nicholson said community input is critical and the board meetings happen when most teachers and parents are working.

“There’s a lot of unanswered questions,” she added, “and just a question about the future of Summit (Public) Schools in general.”

Copyright © 2023 Bay City News, Inc.  All rights reserved.  Republication, rebroadcast or redistribution without the express written consent of Bay City News, Inc. is prohibited. Bay City News is a 24/7 news service covering the greater Bay Area.

By Ivan Natividad

Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers, UC Berkeley’s chancellor’s professor of history, recently won the prestigious Dan David Prize for her research that focuses on women and slavery.

This global recognition for outstanding work in the study of the human past is given annually to up to nine recipients and recognizes emerging scholars whose work “illuminates the past in bold and creative ways.”

“Our winners represent a new generation of historians,” said Ariel David, a Dan David Prize board member. “They are changing our understanding of the past by asking new questions, targeting under-researched topics and using innovative methods … they have already challenged how we think about history.”

Recognized for her 2019 book, “They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South,” Jones-Rogers has researched the issues of gender and economics in American slavery for more than 15 years and also won the 2020 Los Angeles Times Book Prize.

Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers’ book, “They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South” was published in 2019.

Each winner of the Dan David Prize receives $300,000 to support the scholar’s future endeavors. For Jones-Rogers, that funding will allow her to delve deeper into her new project, “Women of the Trade,” a book focused on European, West African and North American archives that depicts the British transatlantic slave trade through the eyes of women.

“This prize also means a great deal to me, personally,” Jones-Rogers said in an interview with Rutgers University, her alma mater. “I’m the descendant of enslaved people, the granddaughter of North Carolina sharecroppers, and the daughter of a single New Jersey mother. I’ve been very poor for most of my life. So, I never dreamed of being honored in this way. This prize is something my ancestors could never dream of. It feels wonderful.”

By John Fensterwald
EdSource

ChatGPT both awed and alarmed the computer savvy and the computer-phobic public when the encyclopedic chatbot debuted in November. Teachers worried about cheating, and parents feared the unknown.

The artificial intelligence software, which analyzes mammoth amounts of information from the internet, spits out impressive essays and logical answers to seemingly any question — even, on occasion, with undue confidence, as it miscalculated a math problem or made up an answer.

Sal Khan, founder and chief executive of the Mountain View-based nonprofit global classroom Khan Academy, envisions artificial intelligence as a powerful tool for learning and teaching. On the same day last week that the research lab OpenAI released GPT-4, which is an even more advanced version of ChatGPT, Khan introduced Khanmigo. It’s an application of GPT-4 that will be integrated into Khan Academy’s lessons and videos.

The timing wasn’t coincidental. Khan had been working for six months with OpenAI on the application, getting a sense of GPT-4’s possibilities, he said.

“We view it as our responsibility to start deeply working with artificial intelligence, but threading the needle so that we can maximize the benefits and mitigate the risks,” he said. “We think artificial intelligence needs to be a tool for real learning and not for cheating.”

Khan Academy offers free personalized learning where students can work at their own pace, a comprehensive set of pre-K through early college courses and programs on life skills. Its videos and prompts guide students through content that’s available in 50 languages. Tens of millions of students have used Khan Academy.

Khan said Khanmigo will act like a “virtual Socrates,” asking questions and coaxing answers, not giving them, suggesting how to create students’ essays, not writing them — just as a good tutor would, he said.

Studies point to “high-dosage tutoring” — face-to-face, in school, several times each week with the same tutor — as the most effective form of tutoring. But those tutors are hard to find and often expensive. Instead, many districts are relying on tutoring in after-school programs and through companies that offer tutoring by text or phone, more like homework help.

Khanmigo will work in real time in the classroom with students who are struggling, Khan said. Teachers who integrate Khan Academy will have a record of Khanmigo’s “conversations” with individual students and monitor their progress, Khan said. Parents will have full access to what students are working on at home, too.

Khanmigo will engage and captivate students in ways that haven’t been possible until developments in artificial intelligence in the last few years, Khan said. What’s available already hints at the potential, he said. Students can have conversations with presidents they’re studying in history class. Khanmigo will take the other side in debate exercises.

Over time, there will be a lot to offer teachers, from correcting papers to creating handouts and prompts for discussions. Khan Academy has been consulting with experienced teachers and content experts on an activity to develop lesson plans, “and it’s quite good,” Khan said.

The assistance will save teachers time so that they can spend more of the day focusing on their students.

To be clear, he said in announcing Khanmigo, this will be a “learning journey,” and “there is a long way to go. AI makes mistakes. Even the newest generation of AI can still make errors in math.”

That is why Khanmigo is rolling out slowly, as Khan and his team troubleshoot and build safeguards into the system, defining areas that are inappropriate and off-limits.

The first users have been a select group of students, teachers and funders. Soon Khanmigo will be open to the 500 school districts nationwide that have partnered with Khan Academy. In California, they include Atwater Elementary School District, Long Beach Unified and Compton Unified.

Khan is inviting individuals to join a waiting list and will let in several thousand in the coming weeks. Khan is charging them $20 per month to cover development expenses and OpenAI’s fees. The cost should come down substantially in coming months, and there’ll be no charge for low-income schools, he said.

Compton Superintendent Darin Brawley said Friday that high school grades hadn’t used Khan Academy since the start of the pandemic but the district is interested in learning more about its use of artificial intelligence in the classroom.

Copyright © 2023 Bay City News, Inc.  All rights reserved.  Republication, rebroadcast or redistribution without the express written consent of Bay City News, Inc. is prohibited. Bay City News is a 24/7 news service covering the greater Bay Area.