The guidance counslor assures me the people who run the alternative education program "are well aware of the shortcuts" which students take to get through those program. In actual reality most adults would probably say the "shortcuts" are "cheating". So would a lot of students.
"It's everywhere," George Mooren, a sophomore at Kimberly High School in Kimberly, Wisconsin, told me when I asked about the prevalence of cheating at his school. Where a handful of students in every class used to take a sideways glance during a test or complete homework together, he and his older brother JR, a senior, said it's now the majority of students the majority of the time. (1)
1. Buck, D. (2025). "From Crib Sheets to AI Cheats, Everyone's Doing It: In the age of artificial intelligence and cell phones, cheating in high schools is rampant". Education Next, 25(1), 8-15.
The implication is that times have changed and in some ways times have changed.
I am so old that when schools say No Cellphones In Class I still hear the word "phone". In terms I can recognize the intent might be No Teacher's Edition Textbook In Class. Today is the age of cell phones. Farther down that article is an overview of how students "type questions verbatim into Google's search bar" and "send around photos of homework or problem sets on Snapchat". But that is so last year.
Apparently getting correct answers today only involves taking a cellphone picture of the Chromebook page and waiting 2 seconds for the solution to come back.
We are the ones who asked for the grunt work of life to be automated. So it is.
The grunt work for these alternative students is identifying and entering the correct answer. Along the way they may become a little familiar with mathematical words like circumference, area, and volume. Mostly they are learning how to ask for help finding an answer to a problem they have been assigned.
Is that not what we are expecting of them? If you are an adult employee and you come across a problem you do not already have the skill to solve what should you do? Take a picture and ask your coworkers or the internet for solutions. In actual reality that is what a real worker is expected to do.
Piously I aver that just getting the correct answer is not all that education is about. Piously I insist they ought to learn how to solve problems they may encounter as adults. I have to wonder whether in actual reality they may be learning exactly what we are asking them to learn.