🧭 One of our AI alignments: where our guidelines meet an outside framework, where we share ground, and where we go further.
Watters, A. (2026, June 5). At what cost? Second Breakfast. https://2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com/at-what-cost/
This is the education-specific companion to “Of Course They Booed.” Watters takes apart the AFT’s ten-point plan for the “AI era” and the framework underneath it: the idea that ed-tech can be cleanly sorted into tools for teaching and tools for learning, judged by different standards, with “AI” treated as too costly for children but labor-saving for the adults who teach them. She argues the divide is false. We agree, and the disability frame sharpens why.
The false teaching/learning divide. Watters refuses the carve-up that says student-facing tools should be judged on “developmental cost” while teacher-facing tools are judged on “professional utility.” You cannot separate them, she argues, because “teachers’ working conditions are students’ learning conditions.” The harms documented for students — damaged cognition, eroded critical and emotional capacity, engineered dependency — do not politely decline to befall the teacher. Our pages analyze the disabled user and the student as maker. Watters adds the figure our framework has left implicit: the teacher as a user whose cognitive cost is being waved away. The toolbelt question — is the human the maker or the subject? — applies to the adult in the room too.
The factory model is transactive dualism in the classroom. Watters names the hidden curriculum directly: data, output, efficiency, speed, and personalization — the core values of Silicon Valley — become the goals of school itself. She has argued before that the productivity suite trained all of us to treat our “cognitive processes as products.” That is the pathology this page calls transactive dualism in the Magnifica Vita Mesocosmica alignment — optimization installed as the supreme criterion, care reduced to service delivery, the person measured by countable output. The learning management system is her cleanest example: a tool sold as efficiency for everyone that bends everyone’s expectations, communications, assessments, and thinking-about-thinking to fit the software. That is a second-order harm, not a first-order one. Not one bad output, but the reorganization of the conditions under which teaching and learning happen at all.
Constitutive work, not menial tasks. The essay’s center holds that the tasks teachers are told to offload — grading, lesson planning, communication with students and families, designing materials, IEPs — are not menial. They are how a teacher comes to know “the content, the community, the classroom, yourself and others.” Nothing about teaching and learning should be thoughtless the way AI offers thoughtlessness-as-a-service. This is the constructionist argument extended from the student to the teacher. It is the same finding the Organization Science task force reached about writing — “the aha moments that come from the writing process are now gone” — because the maker was absent from the making. Watters’ line is the one to keep: if we worry about what the push-button classroom does to students, we should stop demanding teachers become button-pushers as well.
The capture of “AI literacy.” Watters reads the teacher academy’s “think critically” curriculum as the industry’s version of literacy: think critically about how you use it, but in the end you simply must use it somehow. Verifying that a model didn’t hand you something false, she notes, isn’t critical thinking — it’s fact-checking. This is the inevitability decoy operating inside professional development. It does not contradict our harm-reduction claim that literacy lowers receptivity; it sharpens it. There are two things wearing the same name. The co-opted literacy Watters describes routes you toward compliance. The substantive literacy this page defends — how LLMs actually work, hallucination, sycophancy, the scale of back-end harm — is protection. We name the hollow version with her and keep defending the real one.
Software is not structural change. Watters’ closing insistence is that software is not a substitute for the structural change necessary to improve everyone’s lives in and around the classroom. That is this page’s distinction between product-level remediation and pipeline-level redesign, stated in labor terms. Teachers are overworked. The answer is not a faster way to perform the relationship out of the work. The environment is what needs to change.
The encyclical underneath. Watters wrote this the same week she read Pope Leo XIV’s Magnifica Humanitas, and the title carries the encyclical’s question into the classroom. Read alongside the Magnifica Vita Mesocosmica alignment, the two arrive at the same diagnosis from opposite traditions — Catholic ontology and ed-tech labor criticism both landing on optimization as the supreme criterion. The factory model of education is transactive dualism with a bell schedule.
Where we go further. Watters writes from labor and ed-tech criticism, and her stance trends toward refusal. Ours is harm reduction, not refusal — because for many Autistic, neurodivergent, and disabled people, these tools are assistance without judgment, regained cognition, the closed ADHD loop, a space where masking is optional. Toolbelt theory resists two failures, not one: coercive adoption and coercive prohibition. Watters is excellent on the first danger and, like the broader refusal movement, largely silent on the second — the tech-lash failure this page names directly, where entire categories of tool are stripped off the belt and the learners who relied on them are the ones who pay. She preserves the AFT’s “support a student with special needs” carve-out, but only in passing. She does not center disability. Her labor critique and our disability justice critique are convergent readings of the same extractive machine. Neither contains the other.
Two specifics carry the correction. The “developmental cost” frame she builds on has to be handled with care from the neurodiversity paradigm: a fixed normative developmental trajectory used as the measuring stick is the deficit model wearing a developmental face. The counter-deficit question is not whether a child deviates from a normative path but whether the tool extends the learner’s own capacity or replaces it, and whether it was chosen or imposed. And IEPs — which Watters lists as constitutive work that should not be automated — are the sharpest disability hook in the essay. We agree twice over: an AI-drafted IEP draws on a century of deficit assumptions dressed as science, and IEP compliance is exactly the bureaucratic hypervisibility Nelson describes. We also complicate it, the way we complicate everything here. For some students and families, offloading the paperwork drudgery of the IEP can be harm-reducing. The standard is the one that runs through this whole page: facilitate, not replace. Automate the drudgery if it helps; never automate the relationship. Both are true. Neither cancels the other.
🧭 Back to all AI alignments · Part of our work on AI.