In 1932, Sidney Pressey gave up. He had spent a decade building machines that quizzed students and scored them on the spot, and he had predicted an "industrial revolution in education." It didn't come. "The writer has found from bitter experience that one person alone can accomplish relatively little," he wrote, "and he is regretfully dropping further work on these problems."

Twenty-six years later, B.F. Skinner picked the idea back up in the pages of Science. He blamed Pressey's failure on "cultural inertia" and a learning theory that wasn't ready, and he conceded that "no large-scale 'evaluation' of machine teaching has yet been attempted." Then he answered the question everyone was asking: "Will machines replace teachers? On the contrary, they are capital equipment to be used by teachers to save time and labor." The teacher would teach more students "in fewer hours and with fewer burdensome chores," and in return for that productivity "can ask society to improve his economic condition."

Nearly seven decades later, Gallup has new data on the first half of that bargain. In a survey of 1,952 K-12 educators conducted with the Walton Family Foundation and The Mattering Institute, 59 percent said they used AI tools last school year. Of those, 64 percent said it freed up time for the parts of the job that matter most to them. Seven percent said it cost them time.

The same survey asked what makes educators feel they matter. Helping a student through something difficult topped the list at 85 percent. Administrative tasks came in last. Only 35 percent said they matter a great deal at their school. Among those who said they matter little or not at all, Walton reports, 68 percent describe frequent burnout and fewer than half expect to stay in education long term. Among first- and second-year educators who feel they matter a great deal, nearly two-thirds plan to stay for their whole careers. "It's very hard when you feel like you don't matter, or your work is not recognized, to have the capacity and bandwidth to act as a first responder to so many students' struggles day in and day out," Jennifer Wallace, founder of the Mattering Institute, told The Washington Post. "These are wake-up calls."

James Lane, Virginia's former superintendent of public instruction and a former assistant secretary for elementary and secondary education at the U.S. Department of Education, now CEO of Unlimited Instruction, told the Trending in Education podcast this week that the teacher shortage is a workforce design problem: pay, a thin pipeline, poor retention and a confusing path to certification. AI should make the job easier, he said, and his company's tutoring stays in person on purpose.

California and Michigan are working on the second half of Skinner's bargain the old way, with money. Chico State will use an $8 million federal grant to pay 60 teaching residents $42,000 each to train in California's far north, where the university estimates 170 new elementary teachers are needed this year. "Teacher residents don't have time to get a job and do something else," project lead Jennifer Oloff-Lewis told EdSource. "We're paying them to be in this experience." In Detroit, the district and Michigan State are covering tuition for current teachers to earn autism endorsements in exchange for a six-year commitment, building on the $15,000 bonuses DPSCD already pays special education teachers. Superintendent Nikolai Vitti said the endorsement is so rare in Michigan it can't be obtained through alternative certification at all.

Skinner thought the machine would do the saving and society would do the paying. Sixty-eight years later, teachers say the machines are finally giving them some time back.

— Thomas

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