Introduce yourself in three words or phrases.

Innovative, empathetic, determined

What do you like most about your job?

Every day brings a new experience with a language or language community in the US or somewhere else in the world for the 150 languages we assess. It never gets old exploring creative ways to expand opportunities for learners, teachers, and test-takers through innovative assessment, learning technologies, and pedagogies.

Best work trip/Worst work trip?

Best: This June, I attended EdTech Week in London – a full week of thought-provoking sessions on how entrepreneurs are reshaping learning and teaching. Conversations with fellow innovators from all over the world, including The PIE’s own CEO Amy Baker, sparked countless ideas for growing our services. The weather was glorious, and staying on London’s vibrant East Side showed me a whole new incredibly rich and diverse face of the city.

Worst: I’ve had a few challenging trips, but I genuinely love travel. Even the tough ones offer valuable lessons.

If you could learn a language instantly, which would you pick and why?

Brazilian Portuguese – it feels like the voice is dancing with every word. It’s such a contrast to my second language, Japanese, which I deeply love. It would be wonderful to have the ability to speak two such different and beautiful languages. Brazil’s fast-growing economy and strong demand for both English and Spanish learning and assessment make Portuguese not only beautiful, but strategically valuable for business.

What makes you get up in the morning?

Our remarkable global team. They amaze and inspire me every day.

Champion/cheerleader which we should all follow and why?

In a world without many inspiring political leaders, I admire the courage, determination, and leadership of Volodymyr Zelensky. As far as a leader in reporting on technology and how it impacts global society, business, and education: Azeem Azhar consistently provides the most insightful analysis I have found.

Worst conference food/beverage experience

I won’t comment on the worst, but if I could humbly say, the best was the spread of Polish food our company put on for our party at the Polish Museum of America in Chicago during the US national language conference in 2023.

Book or podcast recommendation for others in the sector?

AI is the biggest topic out there everywhere, including EdTech. Although it was written before ChatGPT exploded on the scene, I found this book incredibly helpful in understanding both the fundamental principles of AI, and the history of how it has evolved since it was first discussed in 1954 at Dartmouth College. ‘Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans’ by Melanie Mitchell. As a history major in college learning the context of where it started to where it is today gave me a good feel for the trajectory of this powerful technology.

A classic book on EdTech I would recommend is Clayton Christensen’s 2008 book ‘Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns’. A personal lesson for me from the book: even proven technologies take years to gain traction in education, and that the change will only come from around the margins. As the developer of ELPA in 2004, the first online test of English for English Language Learners for the Oregon Department of Education, we assumed that departments across the US would quickly adopt online testing given the many advantages that it provided. Instead, it took the Covid crisis to finally push online testing to be used throughout the US education system.

Describe a project or initiative you’re currently working on that excites you.

In 2022 we created Mira, our AI-powered language learning and assessment platform. This summer we launched Mira Stride, a formative assessment that uses AI to instantly analyae English Language learners’ use of language, provide individualised reports on the strengths and challenges for the learners, and identify concrete measures that teachers can use to address each learner’s challenges. I am constantly amazed by the power of properly harnessed AI technologies to personalise and accelerate language learning.

From parents’ fraught decisions over whether they can safely send their children to class to reports of districts losing families to self-deportation, schools around the country are responding to the ripple effects touched off by the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration raids.

More specifically, they are trying to counteract the resulting fear that’s keeping students away from campuses — a continuation of what they saw in the spring as the immigration authorities ramped up apprehensions and deportations. Estimates put the number of K-12 students who did not have legal status in the U.S. at roughly 620,000 in 2021, about 1 percent of public school students.

Since the start of this new school year, education leaders and immigration advocacy groups have highlighted the challenges that schools and families are facing in light of ICE sweeps in their communities. Anxiety is higher following a recent Supreme Court decision allowing federal agents in Los Angeles to question people about their immigration status based solely on factors like their race, ethnicity or language spoken.

Speakers during recent panels hosted by America’s Voice and Advancement Project, an immigrants’ and civil rights organization, respectively, discussed what they believe should be schools’ role in ensuring parents and students feel safe.

The Effects of Fear

Fear caused by the visibility of immigration apprehensions can impact any child, clinical child psychologist Allison Bassett Ratto said during an America’s Voice panel, but immigrant children in particular are facing psychological harm. The resulting stress and trauma could be short- or long-term, she adds, and they can develop conditions like post-traumatic stress disorder whether they witness violence directly in person, or online.

“What they see are their classmates, their family members, their neighbors often being apprehended in violent and confusing ways while going about their daily lives, and this for children creates a sense that nowhere and no one is safe,” Bassett Ratto said. “Young children don’t understand who is at risk of being detained in this way, so this creates a sense of fear and worry that they or their families could be next.”

Noel Candelaria, the National Education Association’s secretary-treasurer and a special education teacher, said that children of immigrant parents feel unsafe in their own communities and “unsure of who they will find or not find when they get home from school.”

“Every student, cada estudiante, deserves to feel safe at school,” Candelaria said.

Alberto Carvalho, superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District, feels a personal connection to the issue. He’s spoken publicly about his experience living without legal status in the U.S. after graduating high school in his native Portugal. He was homeless in Miami for a time, eventually becoming a teacher and later superintendent of the Miami-Dade school district.

“As a once-undocumented immigrant, as someone who grew up in poverty and slept under a bridge, I cannot speak or address anyone without recognizing the impact that education has had on my life and that thousands of students are facing the same challenges and the same traumatic abuse I felt as a teenager alone in this country,” Carvalho said. “We are asserting the fundamental rights that belong to our children as prescribed and interpreted in the Constitution.”

Researchers have found that stress can impede normal childhood development, and instability like that caused by the Trump administration’s current immigration policies can interfere with children’s ability to focus and learn while in school.

“What we see in terms of school impacts is that when a child is managing trauma, anxiety or intense stress, it significantly impacts their ability to pay attention because that is like a vice on their brain,” Bassett Ratto said. “Fundamentally, it puts them in this fight or flight, the survival mode where math class or their band instructor is unfortunately moving to the back burner as they try and just get through their day over the long term.”

Fedrick Ingram, the American Federation of Teachers’ secretary-treasurer and a high school band director in Miami, described feeling a dissonance between the fear caused by immigration arrests and the normalcy of the school day.

“Unfortunately, we’re up against what we’ve not seen in the country in a long time, where we are traumatizing students and then asking them to go home and do school work in a traumatized situation,” Ingram said. “What many of our lawmakers have done is point fingers at our educators, point fingers at our students and say, ‘You didn’t pass this test,’ or ‘You didn’t do enough.’ They fail to understand these kids will bring those traumas to school and try to do the best they can, and we’re forcing them to try to process these things faster than they should, so shame on this administration.”

Attendance Struggles

Schools have a responsibility to protect students that goes beyond ensuring they can safely get into the building, Kristal Moore Clemons said. She is national director of the Children Defense Fund’s Freedom Schools program.

“This means superintendents, principals, school board members must establish clear procedures for how their staff should respond if ICE agents appear on school grounds,” she said during the Advancement Project panel. “This means taking the time to teach all students in all districts what their rights are if they are ever approached or questioned by immigration officials.”

Carvalho said that Los Angeles public schools have seen a slight enrollment dip, but concrete numbers on attendance won’t be available until mid-month. Prior to the school year’s start, he added, the district went on a communication blitz to reassure parents their children would be safe while en route to and inside their schools. The effort included adding more bus routes, increasing the number of mental health and legal aid professionals available to families, and helping parents understand their rights in case of an encounter with immigration agents.

“We prevented DHS agents from coming into our schools to talk to a first grader and second grader. What danger do elementary kids pose to national security?” he said. “I hope the community feels from us that we are that protective space, that our schools are those safe zones.”

Ingram noted that Miami-Dade County Public Schools saw enrollment drop by more than 13,000 students this fall, the result of not only immigration policy but also declining birth rates and families leaving for more affordable locales. The superintendent has promised not to lay off teachers as a result of any funding shortfalls.

“While we can’t attribute all of that to the immigration fight, we know that there’s a significant portion of people who are just not sending their students to school because of fear of deportation, because of fear of what will happen at home or because of tracing or what have you,” he said. “Where those dollar figures add up is there are fewer teachers, there are fewer programs and there’s less funding for students overall. And so anytime you get this particular kind of issue or this particular kind of trauma and stress to a school system, it hurts everybody from top to bottom.”

Adaku Onyeka-Crawford, director of the Opportunity to Learn Program at Advancement Project, said during a panel hosted by her organization that she’s seen families in the Washington, D.C., area show support by walking students to school in groups.

“They walk together to school to make sure that they get to school safely and aren’t afraid of being stopped or detained while just going to school,” Onyeka-Crawford said. “However, we don’t see that commitment coming from district leadership. We want them to make sure that these resources are available to all students, because we are just seeing that parents and school leadership need that support from the district and aren’t receiving it.”

The [September 1, 2025] Labor Day was a question of what should become of education, if AI can operate intelligently, to do aspects of productive work? What is the missing piece to learn for the future, in the era of AI? How much potential do AI tutors hold, specifically, against what excellent human instructors already provide? 

The biggest problem in education is the unknown — how human intelligence works. The promise of revolutionizing learning is less about another trend than what is understood as human intelligence and how it should guide learning.

Learning has subsumed a ton of [guess] interventions over decades, with explorations for improved outcomes. Yet, the quality of knowledge as a transcendent property has eluded many. The barriers to the transformational capacity of education are closely aligned with human intelligence, much more than facilities or instructors’ questions.  

It is not even progress, at this point, to assume that artificial intelligence can augment learning without knowing how human intelligence works. The human intelligence that AI would train is the same human intelligence that would compete with AI for work? What should humans be learning for now [that the subtraction of whatever AI can do or answer, from what humans can do, in several important tasks, leaves the thing a lot less valuable — as an impact on labor]? 

Learning Questions 

How does learning adapt to significant problem-solving? What are the techniques to persist in learning complex stuff that may hold important solutions? How can learning be designed to match patterns to answer the unsolved? If an individual is learning what AI already knows, how should that learning be structured to out-compete AI? 

Will it ever be possible to personalize learning for everyone?  

AI Tutor  

For now, AI tutors, AI schools, AI education, or AI learning are not offering anything beyond what is still possible with human instructors. What education is seeking in this era, that AI tutors can optimize for, is pathway displays for memory and intelligence in the brain, to track, almost in parallel, the processes of understanding, recall, creativity, innovation, and expertise, to increase the chances for those.  

Simply, what an AI tutor should solve is what a human instructor cannot yet solve: which is the likelihood to target learning, for navigation in the brain, towards advancing humanity. Already, all AI chatbots can answer questions, with several examples — plus simplicity. Still, it is not like grasping, for all, is now straightforward. This is saying that the problem that exists continues to linger, even if mitigated by consumer AI. 

Human Intelligence 

Any AI tutor program that can develop or show a model of how human intelligence works, to prospect learning [for relays] in the brain would transform education — this century. Simply, show a concept of how human intelligence works, and use that to tailor lessons for higher-order results. Already, human instructors can provide regular training, but what would make a difference, for AI, is to shape human intelligence to withstand the uncertainties that AI holds for the future.

AI tutor in schools can explore theoretical neuroscience, developing models for many aspects of learning. Memory, conceptually, is obtained in destinations in the brain, but intelligence [which is the use of memory] are navigations [of information] summaries across memory areas. Rote memorization, for example, is the making of new paths between memory locations, so that the paths are available for direct relays subsequently, resulting in recall. Problem-solving could be the overlay of two memory locations, so that their differences, rather than contrast, are made similar, opening up possibilities for answers. 

The opportunity for AI tutor in education is not to do what human instructors can do or to assume it will simply make things easier when the [human intelligence] question remains unanswered, and AI would be able to do aspects of several jobs, if that is the learning objective. How does human intelligence work is how to restart the education project — now that AI is ascendant.  

ChatGPT Edu 

There is a recent [August 28, 2025] announcement by Indiana University, IU strengthens national leadership in AI innovation with ChatGPT Edu rollout, stating that, “Indiana University is expanding its robust artificial intelligence offerings with OpenAI by providing access to ChatGPT Edu, a version built specifically for higher education. ChatGPT Edu offers the world’s most advanced AI tools for learning, teaching, and research.”

“In providing access to all 120,000 students, faculty, and staff, IU will be the second-largest ChatGPT Edu rollout of all time for OpenAI, demonstrating IU’s national leadership in higher education innovation and underscoring its commitment to responsibly integrating AI across its campuses while preparing a future-ready workforce.”

“IU faculty and staff can request institutional access beginning Sept. 2, with student access launching Jan. 1 [2026]. The deployment of ChatGPT Edu is one of many ways IU is integrating AI across the academic experience.”

“In August, IU launched a new, free GenAI 101 course that serves as a foundational program introducing the IU community to generative AI concepts, applications, and responsible-use practices.”

“Together, GenAI 101, ChatGPT Edu, and IU’s expanding suite of AI services ensure that faculty, staff, and students are not only equipped with powerful AI tools but also prepared to use them effectively and ethically.”

This article was written for WHN by David Stephen, who currently does research in conceptual brain science with a focus on the electrical and chemical signals for how they mechanize the human mind, with implications for mental health, disorders, neurotechnology, consciousness, learning, artificial intelligence, and nurture. He was a visiting scholar in medical entomology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, IL. He did computer vision research at Rovira i Virgili University, Tarragona.

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