Joining the Center for Digital Education in a consulting roll this fall as a Senior Fellow, Goldson sat for a Q&A recently to reflect on the incident as well as lessons learned about classroom innovation post-COVID, artificial intelligence, securing student data and utilizing a growing amount of resources available to do so. Suffice to say, over more than 32 years of administrative experience in roles such as principal, associate superintendent, deputy superintendent and chief operating officer, Goldson has come to understand emerging technology as an inevitability and a necessity for students and staff alike.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Sustainability, just because ESSER (Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief) funding is getting ready to end and dry up, or it has to be extended (or spent) by a certain date.
Protecting against cyber attacks, what that looks like, and how do you shore up your own infrastructure to prevent it, and then if it happens, who do you reach out to, what are your next steps.
AI. AI is a big topic, and it can go from extremes of thinking it’s the boogeyman so you cut it off, you don’t want anyone to use it, to going “Yeah it’s on, and we don’t really know what to do with it,” and then the creation of policies around the use of AI. People don’t really know how to begin to deal with that.
Instructionally, with the use of technology … the previous district I was in would be a good example. We were virtual, and we used technology because that was the only way to access kids, and (we became a 1:1 school district). When we came back (to in-person learning), we had a really bad pendulum shift that we had to (address). Teachers were in the classroom with kids sitting on the computer, and we were like, “Hey, you’re back in now, so you have to teach, and you have to figure out now how to use technology as a tool to enhance your teaching.”
So the pendulum shift was about student behavior, what they’re used to?
That was really teacher behavior. After they finally got comfortable using technology in a virtual world, when kids came back, they still had everybody (on their laptops) doing their lesson, instead of doing directed instruction and having conversations with kids. We had to come up with strategies to move from the far end of the pendulum back to the middle.
That’s interesting. Was it about telling teachers to maximize their time—
Oh no, we ended up having to create a document (to monitor instruction). … We had people going in to do observations, talking to teachers about how they were using technology. If they were using it to take over as the teacher, and the teacher’s doing nothing, then we had a checklist. We gave them what “ideal” looked like. So it’s one thing to do part of a lesson and then have kids research some information, use tools to write something, then share it with a partner, have somebody use Google Docs to respond to it — that’s one thing. But to say, “Get on DreamBox (mathematics software) and do that all day, then class over,” was not what we were (looking for), so we ended up creating a document to let teachers know what we’d be monitoring, and for administrators and central office staff to go in and monitor.
Prince George’s County Public Schools just experienced a cyber attack in August. You weren’t there for that, but what can you tell me about cybersecurity practices or procedures that you and your staff worked on to prepare for those kinds of attacks, since they’re almost an eventuality now? A lot of districts think it’s just a matter of when.
Yep, it is just a matter of when. We had an audit done, so we knew we needed to do some things. Obviously we didn’t do enough. For example, every July 1, we had to reconcile the list of all the employees that left with all existing employees, and take out all their email addresses, et cetera, to make sure they no longer had access to the network. That was one thing we had not been doing in the past. We had just piloted additional authentication, a module on your phone, and I was one of the people who was part of trying it out. That was going to be unveiled in July …
The people who hacked us went directly to the engineers. They tried to disable (staff’s use of the network) first … and because they were moving so fast, our system shut down. … It was too much activity at once, so that’s what stopped it … I don’t know how many (victims) it ended up being … but the safest thing to do is pay for credit monitoring for every employee.
You mentioned several other topics. Generative AI is threatening to turn education on its head right now.
So did the graphing calculator.
Yeah. What are your views on AI with respect to education, and how did you begin to approach it with Prince George’s County Public Schools? I know it was so new.
Correct. I look at AI a little differently, because I was leader of a school district that was predominantly children of color. What I didn’t want to do was cut it off, because my fear was, if we don’t embrace AI, we’ll be behind the eight ball, and there will be other students who have access and opportunity. I don’t feel like we had enough time or luxury to sit back and wait for people to figure it out, so I convinced the team, “Hey, let’s figure it out along with everyone else.”
Initially, it was like, what is AI? The executive leadership team, I had (many) of them use ChatGPT just to create a memo to send to their staff, just so they could get used to using it, and then to highlight what they added in the memo that was from themselves. Then we brought it back to an executive leadership meeting a couple weeks later, just so that I could prove that you’re not going to use it exactly as is, you’re still going to need to insert your own (work). And there was a certain amount of information you had to give ChatGPT, so it’s not really doing your complete job. ... I think that helped start debunk the myth around what it could do.
I don’t know how often you interacted with other CEOs or superintendents of school districts, but did you get a sense that there was an emerging consensus about AI in schools? Can you speak to how you think administrators are viewing, or should view, this technology?
I’m in several superintendents groups. I’m in Chiefs for Change … and I’m very active in AASA (American Association of School Administrators). I lead a cohort of leaders right now and do some other writing to help them, and I’m in another female superintendent’s group. And we’re all over the place (on AI). We have some who are like, “We’ve cut it off, because we don’t know what it is, so we don’t know if there’s plagiarism happening,” but guess what? People plagiarize with Google Scholar. … Then we have others who have it on, and they’re like, “Yeah it’s on, and we know kids are using it, and we’re trying to create a team to create a policy around it.” Then we have others who are like, “Look, I need to do all of that, but my team doesn’t know much about it, my teachers don’t know much about it,” so it varies. It’s all over the place. It really depends.
Looking around the corner, it’s almost 2024 already, so what do you think K-12 administrators and IT leaders need to be looking at, and thinking and talking about?
Probably right now — not because a cyber attack just happened in Prince George’s, but because there’s federal funding — there’s this federal conversation coming out around cybersecurity. I think for superintendents, they really do need to know that you have to pay attention. Don’t wait until it happens to you. Be on the front end, and now that the federal government is investing resources into making sure that data privacy is really important, pay attention to it. Because that funding is there, that’s a big to-do.
Is there any particular piece of funding you’re talking about, or just in general the government is investing more?
In general, but we just met with CISA yesterday. … They’re rolling out lots of resources around cybersecurity, just because they know some resources and funding will be coming out soon.
There was a big White House summit about K-12 cybersecurity recently.
Yeah. Everybody’s like, “We have so much going on,” and you can’t have too much going on, because you have to pay attention to that.
