As candidates prepare for elections at every level, from governors’ races to the next presidential campaign, we have a simple challenge: Tell parents how you’ll deliver the schools kids deserve. Not slogans. Not culture-war distractions. Not more finger-pointing. A real plan to help every child succeed.

We believe that plan should start with : safe schools, great teachers, strong reading and math outcomes, honest accountability, fair funding, pathways to economic mobility, responsible use of technology and artificial intelligence, meaningful public school options for families and a guarantee that every child has access to a high-quality education. The details matter, but the goal is simple; Every student, in every community, deserves the opportunity to thrive.

We represent parent advocates and teacher leaders. And we are united and prepared to fight for the opportunities, support and outcomes every kid deserves.

That’s why more than 60 national, state and local organizations came together through EdPwr. We represent different constituencies and perspectives, and we certainly don’t agree on every policy question. But we do agree on the destination.

Together, alongside a broad and diverse coalition, we developed these 10 commitments to help fulfill the promise of public education. That means making literacy a national priority. It means ensuring students graduate ready for college, careers, military service and civic life. It means giving families clear information about school performance and meaningful public school options. It means giving every teacher the preparation, support, resources and professional opportunities they need to give their students everything they need. It means investing fairly in students regardless of their ZIP code and embracing technology and AI in ways that expand opportunity while protecting children.

Just as importantly, these priorities are not confined to education advocates. They reflect what the public is asking for. A from the Hunt Institute found that nine out of 10 voters want more leadership and public debate on education. The priorities that emerged from EdPwr are not only backed by evidence, but also have broad public approval, with most receiving support from at least two-thirds of parents and some from nearly 85 percent.

Families and educators work too hard and there is too much at stake for education to remain an afterthought. Parents wake up every morning, pack lunches, get kids on the bus, head to work, prepare dinner, manage homework and bedtime routines 鈥� and then do it all again the next day. They shouldn’t have to wonder whether their children are safe, receiving a high-quality education or being prepared for the future. They want great teachers in classrooms, honest accountability for results and graduates who are ready for the workforce and the world. And they want leaders who are focused on outcomes rather than ideology.

The challenge isn’t that we don’t know what needs to be done. It’s that too few leaders have shown the urgency and courage required to do it.

For too long, education has been treated as a political talking point rather than a governing priority. Student outcomes have stagnated. Confidence in public education has eroded. Meanwhile, AI, technological innovation and economic change are transforming the skills today’s students will need tomorrow.

This moment calls for more than incremental change. It calls for bold leadership.

Leadership willing to be honest about where students are struggling and ambitious about where they can succeed. Leadership willing to invest in what works, challenge what doesn’t, and put outcomes ahead of ideology. Leadership that will listen to educators about what they need in their classrooms and listen to parents about what they want for their children.

Our next generation is filled with some of the brightest, most creative, and innovative young people our country has ever produced. Let’s give them an education system worthy of their potential.

These 10 commitments are more than a policy agenda. They are a roadmap for delivering the schools our kids deserve and that our teachers want to work in. The American people have made their priorities clear. It’s time for leaders to step up. 

It’s time to get to work.

Over the past few weeks, the nation saw something that doesn鈥檛 happen very often: Rival tech leaders agreed that artificial intelligence development needs to slow down. They are talking about AI鈥檚 potential to harm humankind, but education technology developers need to think this way about AI-based ed tech, too.

AI wields enormous influence over K-12 education, and it鈥檚 growing faster than educators, policymakers and the ed tech industry can check it. About use AI tools to help prepare for class, create worksheets or tailor materials for disparate students’ needs, saving precious time. With the right guardrails in place, educators can be sure these lessons are accurate and grounded in research-based best practices for K-12 teaching. But without them, students are vulnerable.听

Consider a teaching practice as fundamental as choosing a paragraph or a book for a student. Over 40 years ago, MetaMetrics took this seemingly simple (but actually quite complex) task head-on and developed the Lexile Framework for Reading, which places reading ability and text complexity on the same scale. Over 35 million students in all 50 states receive a number followed by an L on their standardized test score report, representing their Lexile measure, or ability to read and comprehend text. In addition, over 100 million books, articles and pieces of text have been officially measured for complexity.

Connecting students and reading materials with a common measure lets educators understand where students are, choose appropriately challenging materials and track growth.

Today, teachers are increasingly using large language models like ChatGPT, to adapt text for different reading levels in their class. They paste a passage into a mainstream AI model, ask for its Lexile measure and receive a remarkably confident answer. There’s just one problem: It’s usually wrong. And “in the ballpark” isn’t good enough either.

Large language models are skilled at generating language because they predict what sounds right based on patterns learned from enormous amounts of text. But they weren鈥檛 built to estimate complexity or reading difficulty. When a tool generates a Lexile-like number, it isn鈥檛 basing it on the research and billions of officially measured words behind an actual Lexile score. It’s guessing the next most likely word or number based on patterns it was trained on. Sometimes that guess is close, and sometimes it鈥檚 way out in left field, with no obvious way for an educator to tell the difference.

MetaMetrics describing the results of over 20,000 text analyses, testing ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Copilot on their ability to accurately measure the difficulty of 1,807 passages. The results were haphazard and inconsistent. For example, the four AI tools ranked one passage as having a level of difficulty spanning three to four grade levels. When tested again, the same tools produced an entirely different Lexile measure for the same passage. Asking any of them to then make that text more or less complex for readers of different abilities only risks multiplying the problem.

Overall, the research found that only 3% of the Lexile measures estimated by the four AI tools matched the official Lexile measures; in more than 60% of cases, the AI-estimated Lexile measures fell outside ranges optimal for student learning; and the four tools differed substantially from one another.

Comparing a student’s Lexile measure against that of a text, validated through decades of empirical research, gives educators a meaningful starting point for choosing reading material, introducing productive challenge and measuring progress. A confident guess, even one that sounds completely plausible, can鈥檛 do that.

To help address this, experts behind the Lexile framework are exploring how to integrate validated text measurement with the AI-powered tools educators increasingly use, including piloting a ChatGPT app that conducts valid Lexile text analysis rather than guessing. The goal is to help educators adapt materials efficiently while ensuring that what they put in front of students is appropriately challenging.

That matters because, one way educators and ed tech developers help students become better readers is by challenging them with increasingly complex text. Recent make that particularly urgent for middle schoolers. Students need to progress toward whole books with longer and more complex sentences, new vocabulary and more complicated comprehension demands. As students encounter increasingly challenging texts on one side of the scale, their reading ability should grow on the other. That鈥檚 the power of measuring students and content together.

AI leaders are right to want to slow down enough to add guardrails. Ed tech developers of AI-based learning materials need to do the same, and educators using these tools should demand it. Ed tech providers and learning platform developers should keep pushing AI forward while being clear about where it needs an underlying research foundation. This includes training their models with official scales to ensure accuracy.  

When ed tech developers combine the power of AI with learning science grounded in research, schools and districts can quickly deploy tools and teaching practices proven to improve learning outcomes. And that鈥檚 a home run for students.

It’s just the way of things. 

Blithely noisy families are chattering their way 鈥� with wrinkled noses 鈥� from class to class, grabbing syllabi and weathering the shrieks of friends spotting each other for the first time since 鈥� debate practice wrapped up half an hour ago. 

The volleyball team’s selling snacks in one corner of the lobby; a nearby station has information about free public transit cards for students, though the bored senior behind the table keeps squirming her eyes out of the rays of sunset streaming through the windows. 

But if back-to-school night offers an overload of sights, sounds, and smells, this year it’s also saturated with questions about children sinking into the uncanny quietude of screens. In every class, most parents wonder it under their breath until some brave soul asks: “What’s your AI policy?”

Over and over, the teacher’s eyes flicker just a little as they absorb the question. It’s clear they expect it, because that hesitation marks the beginning of a rehearsed answer that’s a little too polished and careful to be extemporaneous. “Well, on a personal level, I have deep concerns about AI in schools,” they’ll say. “But the school’s policy is that students may only use AI in these specific, narrowly circumscribed ways.” 

The room mostly nods along. A few parents murmur appreciative agreement. One dad pumps his fist and sort of cackles. His kid blushes and stares desperately out the window. 

But at least one parent looks around nervously at this sea of peer pressure and social norming and pipes up, “So, uh, can they use it here in class, though? Where you could supervise?” Or perhaps, if that comes back negative, they say, “OK, got it, but they can use it to practice, right? Or to brainstorm? Or 鈥� I’m just curious, I swear 鈥� to research?”

And the room tenses back up as the teacher pulls their face tight into something that might be a grimace before diving back into the breach. 

We’re all circling this thing with ample nerves. Is AI an essential tool? A drug? Another in the long list of ed-tech overpromises? A distraction? Only for adults? Urgent for kids?

Yes?

Here’s a hint at a workable answer for this school year (at least). The coaches are also around on back-to-school night, but down in the gym, no one is asking if student-athletes are allowed to use AI during cross-country races. No one is nervously checking the crowd and trepidatiously following up to see if kids can, at the very least, have AI do the hill sprints. No one asks if coaches 鈥� or kids 鈥� should at least consult AI about their training plans.听

Why not? Partly it’s because ChatGPT runs a lousy mile and Gemini’s hill sprints are pathetic. But it’s also because of a secret about education and child development: the indirect elements of most of the tasks we present to kids matter at least as much as the direct elements. We mostly don’t have kids run 5Ks in middle school cross-country so that they can win Olympic medals, college scholarships, the local meet at the end of the season, or even a varsity spot in high school.

No. We have kids run those races because those help them learn how to set goals and then grind out the (often boring) work it takes to pursue them. We want them to know how to care for their bodies to avoid injury while also persisting through the healthy pain of building stronger lungs and muscles. 

It’s the same with everything else on (and off) campus. It’s not, believe it or not, urgent for kids to retain the particulars of or the full breadth of heroism at Gettysburg in American history. Kids don’t need to hold close The Grapes of Wrath or Invisible Man for their entire lifetimes.

We don’t make every student study these things so that they’ll all become chemists or Civil War reenactors or great American writers. We make them learn and explore a wide range of academic subjects 鈥� and undertake a variety of assignments within those topics 鈥� for indirect reasons. We hope they will build some facility with each subject, but also that they’ll develop the attention span, focus, memory, and confidence that come through difficult, sometimes tedious study. 

Parenting and teaching are both versions of preparing kids for thriving adulthood. At a granular, fundamental level, that means teaching them a bunch of adult skills, everything from potty training and holding a conversation to reading, cooperating and financial planning.

The indirect element in child-raising is even more important as kids age and take more full control of their independence and selves. By adolescence, the adults in their lives aren’t reminding (most) of them to do basic hygiene stuff just because basic hygiene matters. Instead, the adults in their lives are helping them learn to persevere through complex projects, particularly the boring ones. 

These are years where they learn that, with some training and practice, they can nail that 4×100 relay handoff, write a compelling argument about an idea that’s genuinely their own and figure out what’s wrong with the science experiment on the table in front of them. 

“Can’t AI help them find the problem?” the parents ask. “Or, well, can’t AI at least talk them through the challenges?” 

It can. It absolutely can. And they probably don’t strictly need to know whatever the specific knowledge that they’re missing is when they take that shortcut. But as the years go on and the back-to-school nights pile up, all the shortcuts add up, until 鈥� research 鈥� the costs of skipping all those (academic) hill sprints become evident.

The rise of robotics and artificial intelligence isn鈥檛 lessening the need for skilled workers, industry leaders said as they called for better training; it鈥檚 just requiring workers to use technology as a tool. 

The Alliance for America鈥檚 Skilled Trades, which also includes Google, Carhartt and Black & Decker, estimated last week the nation needs about 1.7 million additional workers each year in skilled trades; ranging from plumbing to manufacturing to construction.

But officials said there aren鈥檛 enough training programs or enough candidates  finishing the programs  to keep up.

The report, found a 鈥渟ubstantial mismatch,鈥� with formal training through schools or registered apprenticeships filling only 55% of the need. 

The greatest shortfalls are for mechanics for industrial machinery and electricians, with carpenters, plumbers and HVAC repair and installation not far behind, according to the report. 

Ford President and CEO Jim Farley said young people have been told for too long that going to college, not learning a trade, was the only way to succeed.

鈥淭oday we are paying that price,鈥� Farley told business leaders gathered by Ford in Detroit last week for a summit on what he called the 鈥渆ssential economy.鈥�

鈥淥ur mission is straightforward,鈥� Farley added at the forum at the restored Michigan Central Station, a former railway hub turned into a training and innovation center. 鈥淕et the data to deeply understand the problem. Get busy training more people with the skills our country needs.鈥�

Ruth Porat, president and chief investment officer of Google and Alphabet, said students need to hear about career opportunities the trades offer, not just about college, from their parents and high school guidance counselors.

Though 95% of school counselors agree trade school is valuable, just 56% recommend vocational or trade school to students, according to a survey the Ad Council Research Institute conducted for Ford earlier this year. Only 28% said they recommend apprenticeships to students often.

鈥淭his is rewarding and something that the country respects and desperately needs and wants to invest in,鈥� Porat said.

The report researched by the Burning Glass Institute and the Jobs For the Future career training nonprofit.and experts at the forum said that the need for skills and training gaps varies so much by state and city that it鈥檚 hard to have clear national recommendations for solving the shortage.

Ohio and Rhode Island need industrial machinery mechanics more than any other trade workers, the report found, while that skill is just a middle-of-the pack need in Kentucky. Rhode Island also has a great need for many more plumbers, pipefitters, and steamfitters. 

The overall need is growing in some states, while declining in others. Arizona employers, for example, added 73,000 trades jobs since 2019, while New York lost 40,000.

Some states are training people so well that many are leaving for states that need workers but fall well short in training them. Texas and North Carolina, for example, import 5,000 more skilled trades workers from other states than they send, while New York sends out roughly 9,000 more than it takes in.

While Wisconsin, Oklahoma and Kentucky are training workers well, Arizona, Colorado and Florida are lagging far behind demand, Burning Glass Institute President Matt Sigelman told reporters. 

鈥淎 lot of the places that are growing the most, that need the most new workers, that are鈥� having to do the most to pull workers in, aren’t necessarily pulling people up from within,鈥� Sigelman said. 鈥淭hese fast-growing states are essentially importing the workers that they’re failing to train.鈥�

The challenge is deeper than just convincing people to try trades, the alliance found in the report Trades have a 鈥渓eaky pipeline鈥� of new workers, with only 55 percent of people who start training finishing it, sometimes because they aren鈥檛 paid at all during training or they need other help.

鈥淢aybe they don’t have the wraparound services they need,鈥� Farley told the gathering. 鈥淚t may be childcare. It may be transportation. And if they don’t have that stuff, they can’t get the training.鈥�

鈥淲e have clear obstacles we have to face beyond just the program itself,鈥� he added.

Apprenticeships, in which students take classes for a trade while being paid to work, might be the best way to solve those issues, he said, though the alliance does not have clear recommendations for how to make them more available. Those are rare for high school students, and while they are more common for graduates, they are nowhere near as available as in other countries.

The call for more training mirrors findings of other surveys, including one earlier this year by the University of Chicago and commissioned by Harbor Freight Tools for Schools. That survey found 95% of voters and 81% of parents of high school students believe more opportunities to study skilled trades in high school would better prepare students for careers.

About 84% of voters and 73% of parents support increased government funding for trades, that survey found.

Though not a focus of the report, the rise of artificial intelligence and robots was a backdrop to the summit in Detroit. Farley told reporters that Ford is doing more to automate its production lines, so it may not need as many people doing repetitive tasks, but still needs people with the skill to run the lines, program the robots and fix and maintain machines.

鈥淭here used to be a pretty visible line between our engineers and then the manufacturing engineers and then the actual hourly workforce, the skilled trades,鈥� Farley told reporters. 鈥淭hat line is completely blurred now.鈥�

He predicted that tradespeople will learn to use AI as part of their jobs, but won鈥檛 be eliminated by it.

鈥淢ost of these jobs will be both using AI and also protected from it,鈥� Farley said. 鈥淚 don’t think these are the kind of jobs, like, if you work in finance doing spreadsheets, or you’re in a call center, or you’re an entry level programmer. You know those jobs are definitely going to be changed and eliminated by鈥I.  I think these (skilled trades) jobs are pretty dependent on it and also pretty isolated from the risks.鈥�

Chris Nelson, president and CEO of Stanley Black & Decker agreed AI will be part of the solution to workforce needs, but won鈥檛 wipe out the need for skilled people. He said a recent survey by his company found almost 90% of construction trades workers expect to use AI in several ways, including planning how to lay out job sites and deciding which materials they need for a job, 

鈥淭hey think it’s absolutely necessary for them to learn AI as a part of their trade training,鈥� Nelson said.

He said AI can be used as a companion to workers, not a replacement.

鈥淭he task is not going to change,鈥� Nelson said. 鈥淗ow swiftly, safely, and productively you can accomplish it in concert with AI is going to be, I think, a big part of the formula.鈥�

That skilled trades have a lack of available workers is no surprise. Researchers and economists have predicted a shortage of workers for years as Baby Boomers, who have dominated industries for years, retire. The college-for-all mindset of the last few decades has also turned parents and students away from trades.

The alliance鈥檚 report released last week found that 24% of skilled trades workers are 55 or older but younger workers are not entering trades to eventually replace them. Only 11% are under 25.

U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon joined the call for better training by telling the gathering that the nation will have a shortage of 2.1 million workers overall by 2030 if career preparation doesn鈥檛 improve.

She was joined by a representative of the U.S. Department of War, who also stressed the need for a strong industrial base to supply the military.

鈥淏y 2030鈥he five men that are retiring or leaving the workforce today are only being replaced by two,鈥� McMahon said. 鈥淭he economic impact has been estimated鈥s high as a trillion dollars, so it is vital and critical that we continue this work.鈥�

The scale of youth adoption is vastly outpacing district capacity. A June 2026 report found , with over two-thirds reporting regular use. Yet, as policy experts emphasized at a recent Capitol Hill hosted by the , school districts still bear the sole burden of vetting and deploying these tools 鈥� linking them to improved educational outcomes or to the development of essential skills like critical thinking, media literacy and problem-solving.

For already under-resourced schools, basic implementation has become a minefield. Supporting teachers, reassuring parents and vetting vendors now require evaluating complex AI safety, privacy and security risks. These technical demands go far beyond standard software procurement, leaving districts to navigate the risk alone.

Ongoing regarding AI governance, particularly with the 2026 midterm and 2028 general elections approaching, highlight a unique window of opportunity for policymakers to champion meaningful, local-first policy. Rather than top-down mandates, lawmakers must invest in community-level readiness. A forthcoming 鈥淏ig Bets鈥� white paper from the A-I Policy Forum provides a roadmap, offering five concrete recommendations that outline how targeted federal resources can help schools manage implementation risks and harness AI to drive deeper learning, critical thinking and workforce readiness.

First, establish national technical assistance hubs. Districts need a clear map of an increasingly complex technical environment. A national network of dedicated technical assistance centers could provide practical guidance on procurement, implementation and student privacy, ensuring that schools are not left to navigate commercial market pressures in isolation.

Second, create regional pilot programs. Communities need designated spaces to explore new tools without turning classrooms into unvetted testing grounds. Regional piloting centers with strong safety and ethical safeguards would allow schools and researchers to evaluate AI tools, measure real learning outcomes and establish best practices before software is adopted at scale.

Third, help integrate foundational AI literacy across core curricula. A basic understanding of AI cannot remain an optional elective restricted to advanced computer science tracks. Federal support should help states embed digital literacy and algorithmic critical thinking across standard subjects, equipping all students to evaluate emerging tools responsibly and recognize their limitations.

Fourth, modernize federal funding streams. To sustain these efforts over time, Congress must update federal programs designed to support district-wide technology adoption. Reauthorizing and modernizing the program would provide predictable funding for state and local agencies to manage ongoing professional development, privacy safeguards and evidence generation.

Finally, launch targeted innovation grants to reimagine classroom instruction. Ambitious competitive grants can enable pioneering districts to reimagine instruction entirely. By funding schools eager to explore novel, AI-enabled learning models, federal leadership can spur true innovation in classrooms rather than simply layering new technology onto outdated routines.

The economic case for acting now is as urgent as the educational imperative. By 2030, are predicted to shift, moving the job market from basic digital literacy toward advanced human-AI collaboration, critical analysis and data-driven decision-making. While competitors like and the are already pursuing deliberate approaches to preparing the next generation, the United States cannot afford to treat K-12 AI readiness as a collection of disconnected, under-resourced experiments.

The coming school years do not have to be marked by uncertainty and confusion. By providing targeted federal funding and technical infrastructure, Congress can empower states, districts, educators and parents to shape AI instruction on their own terms and ensure American K-12 education serves as the cornerstone of America’s long-term technological leadership.

This fall, as students at the private, AI-focused Alpha School begin their academic year, many are being tested in an unusual way: they鈥檙e watching a video of their parents 鈥渢alking about our worst qualities,鈥� according to one student, while hooked up to a heart monitor.

To pass the test, they must not let their heart rate rise by more than 10%.

Students also must find a 鈥渄irty job鈥� 鈥� cleaning public restrooms, mucking horse stalls or clearing restaurant grease traps 鈥� and do it for several days without pay. Students say they鈥檙e required to record themselves doing the work without complaining. Complain and they鈥檒l fail.

The tasks are part of a 鈥淏ootcamp鈥� running through the first eight weeks of high school at the private K-12 network. And the revelations, as well as others, come not from an investigation into the school but from students鈥� own tweets. 

First reported earlier this month in the newsletter by AI skeptic Benjamin Riley, founder of an education think tank of the same name, the tweets shed new light on a school that has long been a , especially among the Silicon Valley elite. 

The private school 鈥� its tagline is 鈥淪chool is broken鈥� 鈥� is encouraging students to tweet about their experiences. Alpha curates the tweets . And for bootcamp students, tweeting isn鈥檛 optional: they must gain 100 鈥渁uthentic鈥� Twitter followers 鈥� 鈥渘ot purchased, not bots, not friends鈥� 鈥� by Oct. 9 鈥渙r we fail,鈥� according to one student.

An Alpha spokesperson did not respond to requests for details about the challenges or other issues. But in a posted Sept. 23, Riley quoted a student who said those who don鈥檛 complete Bootcamp within the allocated time 鈥渨ould get put into the 鈥楶irate Ship,鈥欌�� a segregated space reserved for students whose academics lag behind. Being relegated there, the student said, brought fewer privileges, including missing out on workshops. 鈥淚t鈥檚 a morbid term but 鈥� [it was] pretty much a concentration camp of students. Until they were up to the standards of what Alpha wanted us to be.鈥�

In a , Alpha said Bootcamp tasks are 鈥渘ot one-time, pass-or-fail tests. Though failure is an intentional and expected part of Bootcamp, students have unlimited opportunities to try again, apply what they learned, and keep working until they demonstrate mastery.鈥�

The website listed 18 鈥渢ests鈥� 鈥� a few students have said they鈥檝e been given 21 鈥� and notes that Bootcamp also includes more conventional activities such as delivering a filmed keynote of 鈥渨ho you intend to become by graduation鈥� and finding a local non-profit with a 鈥渞eal problem鈥� and using AI to build them a working solution.

U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon last year toured the flagship Austin campus and called the model the 鈥溾�� thing she鈥檇 seen in education in a long time. McMahon said she wanted to look at ways to Alpha鈥檚 methods into public schools.

Founded in 2014 in Austin, Texas, by MacKenzie Price and Brian Holtz, Alpha is now led by tech entrepreneur . Its signature strategy is known as , in which students work through adaptive software each morning to learn basic academics 鈥� its creators say that enables students to 鈥渃rush academics in just 2 hours a day and motivates them with the gift of time.鈥� Students spend the rest of the day in life skills workshops, tackling entrepreneurship, public speaking, coding and the like. Teachers are called 鈥済uides,鈥� and roughly two-thirds come to the job without formal teaching credentials, according to one .听

Alpha students, Price has said, learn 鈥渢wice as fast鈥� as typical students, with the top 20% learning 6.5 times faster. 鈥淢y mission is that I want parents to understand that their kids do not need six hours of sitting in a class all day to get their academics done,鈥� Price told magazine in 2024.

Tuition runs from about $10,000 to $75,000. The network has expanded rapidly from a handful of campuses to roughly 50 locations nationwide this fall.

With the arrival of the new Texas private-school voucher system, Alpha has nearly quadrupled the number of schools in the state to more than 30 virtual and in-person campuses, most of which can now accept the taxpayer-supported vouchers.

None of Alpha鈥檚 schools were required to meet state curriculum standards or show how the company鈥檚 model would lead to student success to gain approval, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune earlier this month.

Meanwhile, Alpha鈥檚 founders have repeatedly failed to expand the network鈥檚 reach into publicly funded charter schools: Of 10 states where it has sought charters, only one state, Arizona, has approved their plans. The Texas State Board of Education rejected Alpha鈥檚 application in 2025, with one member saying he was 鈥渏ust a little skeptical鈥� of its claims to large gains in the two-hour timeframe.

In Pennsylvania, state officials also a proposal to establish a so-called Unbound Academy cyber charter school, saying they found 鈥渕ultiple, significant deficiencies鈥� in the plan. 

In North Carolina, one charter school board member in 2024 feared the two-hour learning window was 鈥渘ot nearly enough鈥� to teach required subjects, while a Utah official said Alpha鈥檚 instructors seemed more 鈥渓ife coach鈥� than teacher.

The charter effort, meanwhile, has come under . In a widely circulated posted in January 2025, educator and instructional designer Dan Meyer noted that in its Arizona application, Alpha had budgeted $1,000 per student annually for marketing costs, fully half of the estimated $2,000 per student for academics. He also noted that while it claimed that its 2 Hour Learning program showed strong results at an Alpha campus in Brownsville, TX, which it said serves 鈥渟tudents from underprivileged backgrounds,鈥� tuition there is $15,000, 鈥渨hich is not a definition of 鈥榰nderprivileged鈥� I am familiar with.鈥�

鈥楥ramming isn鈥檛 learning鈥�

While Alpha has said it鈥檚 bringing advances in cognitive science to the schools鈥� curriculum, it鈥檚 not clear to what extent those advances show up in Bootcamp. The school has retained several high-profile in the , but students this fall say the bootcamp often requires them to make progress entirely on their own, with no adult guidance or supervision.

In late August, one 15-year-old tweeted that Alpha 鈥済ave us 5 days to teach ourselves an entire AP unit with zero lectures and no study guide. 鈥� Instead of waiting for a teacher to hand out chapter questions, we had to pull the official AP syllabus, use AI to break down the hardest concepts, and build our own master study system from scratch.鈥�

By the end of the week, the student said, 鈥渨e had to sit down and take the official AP exam to prove we could score a 5 on our own.鈥�

The student added, 鈥淢ost schools test how well you remember what someone told you on Tuesday. When you know how to build your own syllabus and teach yourself college material, you realize traditional classes just move too slow.鈥�

A few days earlier, another student tweeted, 鈥淚 have to raise my SAT score 150 points by October 9th, completely on my own. No tutor holding my hand, no one checking in, just me and my computer.鈥� 

While many commenters on Twitter have encouraged these students over the past few weeks, urging them to strike out on their own and learn all they can independently, a few aren鈥檛 so sure. One retired AP macroeconomics teacher wrote: 鈥淵ou are missing the richness of a voice leading you to lifelong mastery.鈥�

Another suggested that the school should ask Bootcamp students to take the AP test 鈥渨ithout notice鈥� near the end of the school year to see what they retained, adding, 鈥渃ramming isn鈥檛 learning.鈥�

The Bootcamp鈥檚 emphasis on hitting arbitrary goals could be problematic, educators say, playing on students鈥� desire to please adults but ignoring their inward desire to learn about a given topic. That could result in students who hit their marks but learn less than they could.

Teacher, writer and blogger said the two strategies 鈥� extrinsic and intrinsic motivation 鈥� are not easy to tease apart.

鈥淚s a student studying for a test because they want the grade, or because they want to understand things deeply?鈥� he wrote in an email. 鈥淚t’s not easy in practice to tell. Most people are motivated by a mix of both intrinsic and extrinsic reasons. I’m sure that’s the same for Alpha’s students.鈥� 

To make things more complex, he said, students 鈥渙ften internalize external motivators,鈥� with high test scores, for instance, integrated into our own value systems as good things. 

鈥淲hat seems distinctive about Alpha’s bootcamp to me isn’t the reliance on extrinsic motivators. It’s the value system these motivators represent, along with the use of clear quantitative benchmarks to measure them. Most schools don’t care if you know how to use social media, and even if they did, they’d be unlikely to require you to get one hundred followers.鈥�

鈥楳y hands were shaking the entire rest of the afternoon鈥�

On its website, Alpha said the heart rate test challenges students to take in 鈥渁t least three pieces of honest, critical feedback鈥� calmly and 鈥渂ring your heart rate back within 10% of your resting baseline. It is a lesson in hearing hard truths without shutting down.鈥�

Writing about the heart-rate test, one student called it 鈥渁nother horror story I get to experience鈥� on Aug. 31, noting, 鈥渁 video of my parents criticizing me will be played in front of the entire school. yay.鈥�

Another student provided perhaps the best description of the challenge, noting on Sept. 1 that she鈥檇 been assigned to write 10 questions to ask her parents. Her list includes several extremely personal, difficult questions, such as: 鈥淚f I don’t change one thing about myself in the next five years, what will this cost me?鈥� 鈥淲hat’s a compliment people give me that you don’t fully agree with?鈥� and 鈥淲hat’s something I say I want that my actions don’t actually support?鈥� 

Posting on Twitter , one parent said the exercise worried him at first, but he noted that his son 鈥渃ame to me with deeply personal questions about who he was becoming as a young man and how he could grow … questions he hadn’t exactly asked me before.鈥�

He said the exercise led to a long conversation 鈥渨here I answered critically but did so also with kindness and a focus on growth.鈥� Very little of what he said, the father noted, was shared with the school or his son鈥檚 class.

鈥淭he heart monitor was probably meant to make the exercise feel like a game,鈥� he wrote. 鈥淲hile I can鈥檛 speak for every family, all I know is that this brought me closer to my son.鈥�

One student who went through the experience said on Twitter that students watched the videos in small groups of five to 15 people and concluded, 鈥淔unniest 30 minutes ever. Parents would say harsh feedback, and we鈥檇 simply laugh it off.鈥� 

The student said she suffers from 鈥渢errible anxiety鈥� but that the exercise 鈥渕ade me step out of my comfort zone allowing me to realize the harsh feedback I may receive in front of others will never be as bad as I make it to be.鈥�

By contrast, another student, featured in Riley鈥檚 newsletter, tweeted that they 鈥渂arely made the cutoff by one single beat, and my hands were shaking the entire rest of the afternoon.鈥� The tweet has since been deleted.

Students are also asked to endure a three-day wilderness experience similar to an Outward Bound trip. Alpha calls it a 鈥渟urvival-style challenge.鈥� One student posted a photo of a tent in the woods with the caption: 鈥淚’m spending three days in the wilderness and still coming to terms with it. In a couple weeks, we will be dropped in the middle of nowhere with only 3 bags of rice and a tent. I would consider myself a strong leader in difficult situations, but @alphaschool is putting that to the test.鈥�

In addition, students must watch a full season of the reality TV show and analyze the players鈥� decision-making.

Other students have detailed the 鈥淕rit & Hard Work Challenge,鈥� with one calling it 鈥渁n unglamorous job with zero pay.鈥� The student said that could entail deep-cleaning public restrooms or restaurant kitchens. 鈥淵ou record yourself narrating out loud through the entire shift, and the full transcript gets run through an audit,鈥� the student tweeted. Alpha鈥檚 site notes that to pass, 鈥渢he transcript must contain zero instances of complaining or victim language.鈥�

The student seemed at least curious about the task, adding that while most high schools 鈥渢alk about character building during morning announcements,鈥� Alpha 鈥減uts you in the dirtiest job you can find to see how your mindset holds up under real discomfort.鈥�

Another was more blunt, saying that by the end of September they鈥檇 have to, among other tasks, 鈥淰olunteer cleaning horse shit and not complain 鈥� I鈥檒l be mic鈥檇.鈥�

In her , author and longtime ed-tech skeptic Audrey Watters said Alpha School鈥檚 appeal 鈥渋s to parents who believe their child is the next genius tech entrepreneur billionaire. But it is damaging in its own right. AlphaSchool, as we can see in the details of the bootcamp, actively demands students mold their behavior and their identity, in this case into some sort of John Galt figure,鈥� a reference to the 1957 Ayn Rand novel Atlas Shrugged.

Watters said Alpha鈥檚 curriculum 鈥渓eans into the kind of pseudoscience that litters the pages of bestselling 鈥榞et rich quick books鈥� 鈥� psychological pseudoscience, economic pseudoscience alike 鈥� and the ideology of Silicon Valley’s startup hustle. All of this is the kind of messaging you can regularly find on social media, no surprise, since this seems to be a school fixated on the anti-expertise of influencer-culture, the sociopathy of tech-culture: move fast and break things.鈥�

In a note published by Riley earlier this month, educator and author said most of what she might say in response is 鈥渦npublishable.鈥�

If the accounts are accurate, she said, 鈥渟omeone there needs to be reminded that teenagers are children. They are not soldiers in an army, they are not adults at a business school, they are not workers in a pressure cooker environment.鈥�

A former Wall Street trader, Fernandez said she and her colleagues 鈥渨ere not treated as these students appear to be. Especially dark is the biometric monitoring, which sounds like something a CIA trainee would be subjected to.鈥�

The surveillance and pressure to achieve that most other students experience are on a 鈥渘ew and unheard of level鈥� at Alpha, she said. If, as they鈥檝e indicated, they want to use the school as a model for others nationwide, Fernandez said, 鈥淚鈥檓 profoundly disturbed.鈥�

New York City Public Schools has placed a on student-facing generative AI through eighth grade, while limiting high school use to approved programs and career pathways. Los Angeles has put in place its own on student use of generative AI on district devices.

These decisions will inevitably be described as AI bans. The debate will settle into familiar camps: Are schools protecting children from a powerful and poorly understood technology, or keeping them away from tools they will need later?

That is an important argument. But it is too small. The districts are not wrong to draw a line. A line is not a plan.

My state of Alabama offers a useful example of what a plan might look like.

Its new standards begin in kindergarten and weave AI through a broader progression of digital literacy rather than treating it as a disconnected topic. The state has also established a for students beginning with the graduating class of 2032.

The important thing is the sequence.

In the early years, that can mean simple questions. What is a digital tool? What information should students keep private? Can something on a screen be wrong?

As students grow, the questions can grow with them. Why does one video appear in your feed instead of another? What do apps collect? How do recommendation systems influence what you watch, buy and believe?

Then AI takes its place. How does it produce an answer? Why can it sound confident and still be wrong? When does it help learning, and when does it substitute for thinking we all need to do ourselves?

The emphasis shifts in high school. Alabama’s computer-science requirement gives students an explicit place to encounter the technologies they are likely to meet after graduation. New York’s own high-school policy points in a similar direction, allowing AI in approved programs and career pathways, including computer science.

None of this prevents AI from appearing in English, science, history or mathematics. It creates a foundation on which those uses can develop. By high school, protection is no longer enough. Students should begin learning to use these systems deliberately.

There is another important part of the Alabama approach.

The standards give classroom teachers and school leaders room to build their own AI literacy as well. Teachers in the early grades are not being told they must suddenly put general-purpose AI in front of children. They have space to learn what these systems can and cannot do and, as their own confidence and judgment develop, introduce AI incrementally and selectively, not as a substitute for learning but as a scaffold for it.

That is probably how much classroom AI adoption will happen anyway: teacher by teacher, lesson by lesson. Not through one top-down decision that AI is either allowed or banned.

New York’s action is explicitly a moratorium, not a permanent prohibition, and teachers there may continue using AI, though not for grading. Los Angeles is also using its pause to develop a longer-term approach.

A moratorium can create time. A framework can help schools decide what to do with it.

The sequence matters because AI represents a different relationship with technology.

For most of the computer age, school technology has been about conveyance. Students type, search, create, store and share work. The student was still expected to supply the thinking.

AI changes that relationship. It can interpret a question, summarize material, propose an answer, create an image, write software and now take action. The digital environment is moving from one that mostly carries our thoughts to one that increasingly participates in them.

Personal computers, the internet, search, smartphones, social media and now AI can look like separate waves. Underneath, they are the same thing: more computing power, more connection and more data, moving closer to daily life each time.

Children need to understand that environment even before we, as adults, decide they are ready to use its most powerful tools. That is different from putting a general-purpose chatbot in front of a third grader.

And school boundaries do not make AI disappear. Students with access at home will continue to encounter these tools, often with uneven levels of adult guidance. A developmental approach gives every student a common foundation for understanding them while giving the technology, and our understanding of its effects, time to settle.

The child we protect at 8 is the same person we need to prepare for work at 18 or 22.

After 40 years in enterprise technology, I sometimes tell the high school students I work with something more plainly: If you plan to make your living in an air-conditioned building, you are going to need command of these tools to compete with the people who have it.

That is shorthand, of course. AI will not belong only to office workers. Knowledge work is embedded in almost every occupation. A technician diagnoses problems. A nurse documents and interprets information. A contractor prepares estimates. A supervisor plans work and manages people. AI will touch those parts of the job, too.

The, then, is not simply knowing how to operate an AI product. It is knowing how to use these systems to extend your own capacity: to frame a problem, find and interpret information, generate options, judge what comes back and know what judgment should remain your own.

Most workers will not need to build AI systems. But they will increasingly work alongside people who have learned to use them well.

We waited too long to teach children how the social-media world worked. They entered it first, and adults tried to understand the consequences later.

With artificial intelligence, we can reverse the order: protect children where protection is warranted, progressively teach them how the digital world works, and eventually give them command of the tools that will help shape their livelihoods.

This time, we can teach the child before the technology does.

The body regulating Florida public schools and state colleges Wednesday approved what the Florida Department of Education calls 鈥渙ne of the most comprehensive, parent-centered AI frameworks in the country.鈥�

The State Board of Education  require public school districts and charter school governing boards to amend their internet safety policies to include specific guardrails and directives related to AI by July 1. 

鈥淲e are neither going to one extreme, i.e. banning AI, nor are we going to the other extreme, which is just unfettered access,鈥� Education Commissioner Henry Mack said during the board鈥檚 meeting in Winter Haven.

Districts and charter schools, at a minimum, must make policies to 鈥減rotect students, parents, and instructional personnel from unlawful, deceptive, unsafe, or unauthorized uses of artificial intelligence systems, services, applications, and tools used in connection with educational programs and operations in Florida public schools,鈥� according to the public school rule. 

The idea, the rule states, is to 鈥渆nsure that any approved use of artificial intelligence protects education records and student information, while supporting student achievement, civic literacy, academic excellence, and workforce preparedness.鈥�

More specifically, schools will have to notify parents when teachers approve an AI instructional tool for use, including the name of the platform and classes in which it would be used and the nature of student interaction.

The policy must include a process for parents to object to AI use and provide alternatives to the tool.

鈥淔lorida will not outsource childhood to a chatbot,鈥� Gov. Ron DeSantis said in a news release following the meeting. 鈥淲e welcome tools that help teachers teach and students learn. We will not accept tools that hide from parents, harvest student data, grade kids in secret, or pretend to be a friend. In this state, a teacher stands in front of the class, a parent has the last word, and a student still has to think.鈥�

Schools will be required to conduct additional reviews for AI tools used in PreK-5 to ensure they are age-appropriate. 

The rule looks to protect the teaching profession from being replaced by computers. It calls to 鈥渆nsure that the use of AI instructional tools is limited to supplementing, and not replacing, the professional judgment of teachers and the primary right of parents to direct the upbringing and education of their children.鈥�

Further, the policy must ensure AI is 鈥渁ccurate, transparent, viewpoint neutral, accessible to students and educators with disabilities.鈥�

State colleges

The board approved a similar for the state college system, directing the 28 boards of trustees to create policies 鈥渢hat provide for the use and limitations of use of artificial intelligence tools in order to ensure quality of education for students, efficiency of operations, and a safe learning environment for the whole college community.鈥�

鈥淭he rule that you accepted is not a prohibition, it empowers faculty to decide what to do, it allows the instructor to explicitly permit it or prohibit it with respect to their assignments,鈥� Mack said of the college-level policy.

鈥淚 just think it鈥檚 a great thing that we put the guardrails, but the guardrails are so nuanced that it allows for flexibility and innovation and faculty ownership in a way that does not compromise or usurp the faculty鈥檚 ability to teach what they want.鈥�

This story was originally published by Florida Phoenix.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Florida Phoenix maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Michael Moline for questions: info@floridaphoenix.com.

Co-founder and CEO of , a Nashville-based nonprofit that works with teachers to provide high-quality resources and instructional support, she got curious about AI after seeing the tool in action. 

It鈥檚 designed to help students read texts closely, and it did it in a way that was 鈥渧ery different than any tech I had seen,鈥� Freitag recalled. It made her think that AI 鈥渕ay be a horse of a different color. It may be really, actually a step forward in capabilities.鈥� But she wanted to look past the hype. 

A former assistant commissioner of curriculum and instruction in Tennessee, Freitag got the idea to take a closer look at the full spectrum of AI tools. 鈥淚 wanted to see it as a mom. I wanted to see it as an educator, and I wanted to see it to be a good partner to our schools.鈥�

So she and a colleague last January began a six-month investigation that would eventually take them to 16 school systems in seven states. They sat with students as they worked through AI-enabled lessons, watched teachers teach with AI, and interviewed more than 100 teachers, school system leaders and ed-tech CEOs.

The results of their first foray are : Instruction Partners on Monday released the initial findings in what it is calling its AI in Action Learning Tour 鈥� a year-long effort to observe how actual students and teachers use AI. 

The report looks at 20 student-facing AI products already in classrooms, broken down into three categories: general-purpose chatbots such as ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini; education-focused platforms such as Brisk Teaching, Google Classroom, MagicSchool and Playlab, and targeted instructional tools built around a specific instructional jobs 鈥� they include Amira Learning, Khanmigo and Quill.

鈥淎I is definitely not a single category,鈥� Freitag said. 鈥淲e saw a huge range of products designed to do a huge range of things.鈥�

They framed their inquiry around two questions: 

1. How does it compare to paper-pencil instruction?
2. How does it compare to the best possible learning experience in that subject?

Freitag and her colleague found a decidedly mixed bag, with a few key surprises.

鈥淚 saw tools that held a higher bar for learning than we see in paper pencil instruction and did more to tailor the questions and the feedback for kids to the specific sort of responses they were giving than a teacher could possibly do all at the same time,鈥� she said. 鈥淪o I really walk away thinking there’s a lot of good here that we need to leverage 鈥� and a lot of bad here we need to mitigate.鈥�

They found that general-purpose chatbots like Claude and ChatGPT pose the biggest threat to student thinking, while the platforms 鈥� Brisk, MagicSchool and the like 鈥� produced different results, depending on how teachers used them.

The targeted tools, such as Khan Academy鈥檚 Khanmigo and Quill, a writing app, produced the most consistent and strongest learning experiences, they found.

And teachers told them they鈥檙e frustrated by apps kids can easily game 鈥� in one case, students found that by simply hitting the 鈥淩efresh鈥� button on a computer, they could complete an assignment by answering the same question repeatedly instead of the lesson鈥檚 full list of questions. Many students also learned that they could simply Google an answer and paste it into their lessons. 

In another case, an app gave students detailed feedback on their writing 鈥� 鈥淚 thought the feedback was really good and useful and actionable,鈥� Freitag said. But she watched in horror as students simply ignored it and began rewriting without consulting it.

In another instance, she sat with a student as he worked on writing a book based on characters he liked, focused on letter sounds he needed to practice. 鈥淗e created the book, and he said, 鈥楴ow it’s your turn. Let’s create a book for you.鈥� And I was like, 鈥楤ut are we going to read your book?鈥� And I realized he was just making books without reading them.鈥� 

The boy, she said, simply liked making the books.

鈥淎s someone trying to make sense of where AI has a role to play or not, I think seeing how kids are actually using products matters much more than understanding what they’re designed to do,鈥� Freitag said. 鈥淎nd there are many cases where what I saw in action was quite different than what I expected to see based on the product demo.鈥�

In fact, many of the apps that give students the ability to work together shone in Freitag鈥檚 review. By contrast, several apps designed for solo use turned out to be 鈥渂oring鈥� to many students, who spent perhaps 10 minutes engaged. 鈥淏y minute 42 of the lesson, they are just tuned out.鈥�

In many cases, she said, the same product produced dramatically different results 鈥� and gave kids different experiences 鈥� depending on whether teachers built in clear routines and actively monitored dashboards in real time.

In one instance, a teacher taught a lesson with a math app that allowed her to display four students鈥� solutions to a problem side-by-side on a Smartboard, allowing students to evaluate the solutions. 鈥淚 was stunned by how much kids learned from looking at each other’s work in that way,鈥� Freitag said. Even with just a little feedback, it was effective. 鈥淲hen it was used socially, it really created a ton of learning opportunity for kids.鈥�

The apps that worked did something that teachers couldn’t do alone, such as offering instant feedback or a quick analysis of an entire group鈥檚 work. Those, she said, 鈥渨ere the products where I was like, 鈥榃ow, this is extending what a teacher could do.鈥欌��

But the report emphasizes that AI shouldn鈥檛 cut teachers out of the equation. They still have a vital role to play and AI should never be seen as replacing teachers. 鈥淢y take is that the future is hybrid,鈥� Freitag said. 鈥淭eachers have a key and lead role, and there’s tech that gives them an assist.鈥�

In fact, one of the most promising AI innovations is its ability to identify where students are struggling with foundational skills 鈥� and where they need more practice. But forcing students to practice those skills in isolation could be counterproductive. 鈥淚f we help kids practice a bunch of reading skills without actually paying attention to the text or the knowledge that they need to access that text,鈥� Freitag said, 鈥渨e’re not going to see reading scores improve.鈥�

She also worries about AI鈥檚 near-miraculous ability to re-level reading passages with a single click, one of the most popular features of most reading tools. While it can help slower readers understand a text, that releveling can become 鈥渁 permanent lower setting鈥� rather than a bridge back to grade level.

Arman Jaffer, CEO of Brisk Teaching, one of the apps reviewed, said his philosophy is that releveling 鈥渟hould be used to increase entry points to high-quality instructional material,鈥� but not to limit how far students can go.

鈥淎I is something that’s incredibly powerful that can help you do things like relevel,鈥� he said. 鈥淵ou can make the entire internet accessible to your students, but at the same time, a teacher who might not have the best instructional practices might be using it to hold back students.鈥�

Jaffer said the findings underscore the need for coaching and professional development for teachers as AI emerges in the classroom. 鈥淚 think every AI company, every technology company, every vendor, truly needs to be a partner to their district or their school or their organization.鈥�

Peter Gault, CEO of Quill, an AI-powered writing app that was also reviewed, said Freitag and her partner watched students using the app in New Jersey and worked hard to unpack how it worked. 鈥淚 was really impressed with how much due diligence they did. They really went under the hood to understand what works and why it works.鈥�

The duo, he said 鈥渄id the most thorough deep dive of anyone who has looked at our AI.鈥�

Alex Sarlin, co-host of the podcast, called the new report 鈥渁mazing work,鈥� noting that Freitag spoke not just with teachers and students but with tech CEOs. 鈥淪he’s talking to all sides of the equation,鈥� he said. 

The time she and her colleague spent in classrooms is key, Sarlin said. 鈥淭hat gives a much richer picture of how AI is actually being used in the classroom than we usually see, and certainly more than we see in mainstream coverage, which tends to be very surface level and a little panicky.鈥�

This fall, Freitag鈥檚 team has grown to three people 鈥� they鈥檒l soon look at 30 more products and report on them this winter. And Instruction Partners plans to work with Stanford’s AI in Education Lab to independently vet impact claims by winter 2027. The new report notes that just seven of the 20 products have independent studies examining outcomes across student subgroups.

For her part, Freitag said teachers are hungry for clear guidance around AI. 鈥淲e work with instructional leaders across the country, and they said, 鈥榃e are getting inundated with sales pitches, and we are getting inundated with calls now to 鈥淏an it all,鈥� and we don’t really understand where there’s value in this.鈥� So that helped me see that the debate about AI in schools is moving faster than real information.鈥�

More than 139,000 students ages 10 to 13 from all backgrounds and 3,100 educators from 126 cities in 39 countries have connected via e-classrooms over the past decade. 

I am one of them.

Participating in a global digital exchange program helped foster a deep curiosity about the world and made me realize that it is a bigger, more connected place. It inspired me to serve on the University of Hawai驶i Board of Regents and to seek out programs and opportunities like the , which centers intergenerational collaboration to move toward a sustainable future. I have kept chasing that same feeling of being genuinely changed by someone else’s reality.

As a student at the University of Hawai驶i at M膩noa, I think often about what education is actually for and what it represents. Right now, everywhere I turn, the conversation seems singularly focused on one question: 鈥淲hat do we do about artificial intelligence?鈥� The debates around artificial intelligence in education usually center on whether students are using AI to cheat or as a learning resource. Questions like: Can students use AI on assignments? Will AI replace teachers? How do we design curriculum for a post-ChatGPT world? 

These are real concerns, but in our urgency to respond, we’re neglecting something equally important that AI can’t replicate: human connection. 

Being able to talk with a student across the ocean whose daily life looked nothing like mine, or hearing another student鈥檚 perspectives on climate and the future, created a human connection that AI could never replicate. That connection required me to listen, to challenge my beliefs and to update my thinking in real time 鈥� not because I鈥檓 asking a chatbot, but because a real person is trusting me with their experience. 

I was reminded how valuable this is last April when I flew to Madrid to meet Global Scholars alumni from around the world. Seeing everyone in person was a completely different experience from interacting online. Shaking hands, sharing meals and being vulnerable with one another face-to-face strengthened the cross-cultural bonds we started building online.听

AI can expose you to diverse viewpoints. It can summarize them, translate them and even argue them. However, it cannot make you feel empathy for someone else’s world or help you grasp its weight. It cannot hold you accountable to another person across a cultural divide. It cannot recreate a substantive discussion about solutions to urgent global problems.

I remember my first live conference call 12 time zones away, with middle school students in Barcelona. I told them about drought concerns on Kawaihae, where it used to be green. And they told me about water restrictions in Catalonia, a place I’d never heard of. 鈥滵o you really live near volcanoes?鈥� someone asked me. I almost laughed, until I realized how little we actually knew about each other’s worlds. A kid from a small town on Hawai驶i Island had just as much to contribute to the conversation as a student in one of Europe’s great cities. 

In Hawai驶i, human connection is embedded in our culture, in the concept of aloha, in the practice of showing up for your community. We understand that relationships are not just a part of learning; they are the learning itself. Developing cross-cultural empathy comes from building strong relationships and having meaningful conversations that challenge your own beliefs.

I sometimes think about that classmate in Barcelona and whether she remembers the eighth-grader from Hawai驶i who thought volcanoes were just part of the backyard. I hope more kids get the opportunity to be surprised by each other in ways no algorithm or AI chatbot can replicate. We should be building more of those connections. Not less.

Across the country, elementary schools employ an estimated 67,000 speech language pathologists 鈥� experts on the front lines of diagnosing early language and reading struggles. 

The problem? To meet , schools of them. 

It鈥檚 the same for reading specialists, highly trained educators who have made literacy their professional calling card. There are simply out there with that expertise. 

These shortfalls are part of the reason that students’ reading proficiency is . Today, 40% of fourth graders can鈥檛 do things like provide support for ideas related to a story鈥檚 plot or characters. That鈥檚 up from 33% in 2022. A third of eighth graders can鈥檛 pick out the main idea of an informational text. 

Ensuring that every child has foundational literacy skills is going to be a Herculean task. Based on my work with researchers and technologists, I see enormous potential in automatic speech recognition as a tool for helping to make up for the shortage of specialists. After listening to children read aloud, this artificial intelligence-powered technology can help assess their progress by identifying weaknesses, provide them with feedback and give teachers and parents recommendations for interventions. The promise of this technology is substantial 鈥� if platform developers and their funders can get it right.

This is particularly true in K-2, when students are learning skills that for lifelong reading and success. By assisting speech pathologists and teachers, automatic speech recognition could make sophisticated early literacy screening more accessible and affordable 鈥� and it should only get better as AI advances.

Speech recognition technology has a , and it has been used to support literacy development in young readers since 1990. That鈥檚 when Carnegie Mellon University launched , a computer program that displayed stories on a screen and listened to children as they read the text. The program intervened when the student made a mistake, got stuck or asked for help. It also gave teachers feedback and advice on the child鈥檚 progress and struggles.

The approach worked. A compared the literacy skills of students in grades 1 to 4 who used the program with those of classmates who engaged in sustained silent reading. Those who used the technology-powered intervention, especially in first grade, outpaced their peers in word identification, comprehension, fluency, spelling and understanding of individual sounds.

Some modern versions of automatic speech recognition serve primarily as a screener, like Amplify鈥檚 , which provides teachers with immediate feedback on students鈥� reading fluency and specific areas where they need extra support. Other innovations use the technology to not only assess, but intervene in real time, like 鈥檚 AI reading tutor. An , the tool works in English and Spanish and serves 5 million students in all 50 states. Amira is also collaborating with the Children鈥檚 Hospital of Philadelphia and the University of Pennsylvania Data Center to develop an for neurodiverse students. 

Automatic speech recognition is particularly strong at helping students decode words, as it improves their ability to match written letters to the spoken sounds they make 鈥� a key skill in literacy development.

This spring, Renaissance Philanthropy launched with one moonshot goal: develop AI-powered tools that, over the next five years, will reduce the number of struggling young readers by half. 

Short for Learning Engineering Virtual Institute, LEVI provides five years of funding to researchers and developers who share their knowledge and learnings while tackling big challenges. We recently the teams selected to work toward the literacy moonshot: Reads Labs at Harvard University, OxEd, LitLab.ai and Project Read with the University of Florida Literacy Institute.

Of course, there are challenges to deploying automatic speech recognition in classrooms if it is to reach its full potential. Developers, companies and researchers need to invest in the that are needed to train the AI behind these tools. Importantly, these must include a range of children 鈥� English learners, special education students, etc. 鈥� so the apps and platforms can assist kids with diverse needs. Finally, developers must ground their tools in cognitive science on how the human brain learns, then validate their platforms through rigorous classroom testing.

Automatic speech recognition can never replace a skilled and caring teacher, but it can serve as a patient, non-judgmental expert companion for every educator trying to better understand who is struggling to read, and why. With thoughtfully designed, research-backed screeners and tutors, the nation can have a powerful new tool to tackle its literacy challenge, and give all students more of the personalized reading help they deserve. 

Disclosure: Walton Family Foundation provides financial support to LEVI Literacy and 社区黑料.

A blank document had become intimidating, not because she had nothing to say, but because she forgot how to say it alone. 

That scene from one of our classes underscores the unique challenge our generation faces as the first to grow up with artificial intelligence being a part of everyday life. High school students across the country share the struggle of navigating education with this new technology. 

According to a , the vast majority of teens who use AI for schoolwork do so without clear guidelines from their teachers, turning generative tools into an easy shortcut rather than an educational aid simply because no one ever taught us how to use them properly. 

This isn鈥檛 the first time a young generation has grappled with new technology in everyday life. During the rise of the internet in the late 1990s, the original digital divide was a battle of infrastructure and wealth. It split our parents鈥� generation into those who had computers and dial-up at home, and those who were left completely offline. 

Decades later, proved that this original physical gap directly fueled a deeply polarized labor market. This divide compounded existing socioeconomic inequalities, leaving those who lacked technology access with restricted career and wage prospects. The difference between the rise of the internet and AI is that the AI divide is defined by agency 鈥� who is taught to command systems and who is left to navigate them in the dark 鈥� not access.

Some school districts have acknowledged this and have taught students how to use AI tools by practicing prompt engineering, learning to verify AI-generated facts and enhancing the skills that the workforce will demand. For instance, partnered with higher education and industry leaders to launch a district-wide AI literacy initiative. The district integrated specific frameworks into high schools to ensure students graduate with the critical thinking and ethical skills necessary to navigate an AI-driven economy.

However, in other schools, students are banned from using AI entirely and are not taught how to spot bias, talk to AI, or to use it ethically. For instance, has adopted strict frameworks that restrict major AI platforms, except Microsoft Copilot and Canva AI, across school networks 鈥� treating any unapproved use as an academic integrity violation. 

Simply warning students against using AI without teaching them how the technology works or how to question its outputs doesn’t stop them from using it. It only leaves them to use it passively, without developing critical thinking skills to optimize it. 

According to the Lumina Foundation, over half of high school students regularly use AI tools for schoolwork, even though . When policy ignores this reality, schools fail to eliminate AI use 鈥� they only succeed in eliminating AI literacy.

In addition to students, many teachers and administrators are also being left behind simply from the lack of guidance and necessary digital infrastructure. In fact, as of 2026, lack the time to develop an AI training curriculum, and 75% lack the knowledge to do so. Without a standard curriculum that simultaneously educates our teachers and students, schools risk creating a future workforce where those unfamiliar with AI tools are systematically left behind. 

Although AI currently poses challenges in schools, it can transform learning if integrated deliberately. As students from Virginia and Wisconsin, we call on state legislators and school boards to pass legislation mandating AI literacy standards tied to industry benchmarks as a graduation requirement. 

To enforce this, state boards of education must tie direct funding to AI-resilient curriculum compliance, while also allocating funds for teacher professional development so educators across all subjects 鈥� not just technology fields 鈥� are trained to teach ethical AI usage.

Educational communities do not need to start from scratch: Successful models already exist. recently implemented an initiative that involves its members working with high school teachers to develop a curriculum 鈥� based on Google鈥檚 AI Essentials online course 鈥� designed to teach high schoolers how to safely use AI.  

If we as a society don’t teach all students how to interact with AI, young people will not only be given a weaker education, they will be locked  out of the new AI-integrated economic ecosystem. Legislators, school boards and educators have a responsibility to ensure that young generations are able to use AI. 

That鈥檚 progress. But at this rate, it would take over 30 years for schools to reach the the American School Counselor Association鈥檚 (and still overwhelming) 1:250 ratio.

Students and schools aren’t waiting for human help to arrive. Nearly of students are already turning to artificial intelligence chatbots for college and career guidance, and schools are starting to use AI to answer students鈥� frequently asked questions to free up counselors鈥� time.

Turning to tech is rational when human resources are scarce. But swapping chatbots for overworked counselors masks a more fundamental problem: For decades, schools have tried to make a one-to-many advising model work.

AI could be a tool to help schools create something different: a many-to-one model in which each young person is surrounded by a strong network of teachers, alumni, family, mentors, employers, coaches and counselors working together to help students make progress.

That model is fundamentally grounded in a proven driver of student success: relationships. Research has long shown that relationships lead to success in , increase and , and ultimately unlock . 

That was the vision behind a pilot project my colleague Anna Arsenault and I led with 10 college and career guidance technology platforms, exploring how to build tools that didn鈥檛 just give AI-generated advice, but made it easier to find, reach and rely on their broader human networks. We worked with the designers of each platform to create and test features that would help students recognize their existing connections, practice reaching out and find new ones who assist them in achieving their goals.

Our new report, “,” describes three trends that highlight what schools and tools can do to move toward a many-to-one model of college and career support.

First, students need help recognizing the network they already have. This includes not only the many assets around them, but also the relationships students overlook entirely.

ESAI, a college admissions platform, piloted a network-mapping feature where students organized extracurricular activities and identified the “people in their corner” who could help them pursue their out-of-school interests. Family and teacher connections together accounted for 40% of selections; counselors made up just 10%, peers only 4%. Another platform, iCouldBe, analyzed student network maps from the past school year and found 54% of relationships were family members, 30% school-based and but just 1% came from work, internships or volunteering, school alumni, neighbors or faith communities.

Data like these don’t just diagnose a gap; they hand students and counselors a starting point to act on it, surfacing potential guides and mentors in students’ lives who would otherwise stay invisible.

Second, connection has to feel authentic. Even after students identify who鈥檚 in their corner (and who they might be missing), it’s often hard to get them to engage with those connections. The thing that mattered most: authenticity. Students didn鈥檛 want outreach to feel transactional or one-sided. 

Overcoming that involved creating content in which students talk about the benefits of networking in their own words, rather than adults explaining it to them. For example, Reach Pathways recorded videos of students describing how their relationships helped them accomplish their goals. Other platforms found it was critical not to force students to make an ask before they feel ready. For example, ESAI ‘s team discovered that after identifying “people in their corner,” over half (53%) of students first wanted to express gratitude to those supporters before asking them for something. Only 14% made an outright request for help. 

In other words, students are more likely to turn toward their networks if they see their peers doing so, and if they can start real gratitude 鈥� not with a premature request.    

Third, students need help turning relationships into sources of support. Even with more emphasis on authenticity, many students still reported that connecting with people and asking for help is daunting. Students wanted more assistance in reaching out and meeting the right people to support their college and career aspirations. 

To address that, some platforms, like Climb Together, Roadtrip Nation and FutureFit AI, built chatbots to coach students in seeking help, offering the chance to draft emails and even rehearse conversations with industry professionals. (Unlike most college and career chatbots, these tools weren’t meant to provide postsecondary advice 鈥� they were designed to build the confidence to reach a real person.) Across the board, students in the pilots using these chatbots reported modest increases in awareness of the networks around them and confidence in reaching out for help.

Other tools sought to curb anxiety by helping adults, like counselors and educators, step in to offer warm introductions. For example, Overgrad, a college and career planning platform, piloted an alumni directory to help counselors connect students with recent graduates in the colleges or industries they hoped to pursue. 

Taken together, the three trends show that a many-to-one advising model isn’t just a nice idea 鈥� it’s already taking shape with AI tools specifically designed to foster, rather than shortcut, connection. Platforms can help students see their networks, engage them without it feeling transactional and get the coaching or introduction that turns a contact into a helpful connection.

What’s possible, however, isn’t inevitable. To date, no state-level request for proposals 鈥� the documents that steer what ed tech companies actually build 鈥� lists stronger student networks as a desired outcome for college and career advising tools. Even states and districts that require postsecondary plans rarely ask whether a student can name who will help carry that plan out.

That needs to change. States and districts should demand that advising technology help students identify, strengthen and expand the human networks around them and measure whether those networks actually grow.

We could wait 30 years for the counselor ratio to reach 250:1. Or we could start building toward a different ratio altogether: many people, supporting every one student.

The 2025 administration of the Programme for International Student Assessment, or PISA, showed reading scores of America鈥檚 15-year-olds falling by 14 points since 2022, when the exam was last conducted. Math scores fell by only two points over those three years, but have now sunk 15 points lower than in 2018. Performance in science is essentially unchanged over the last several rounds of the test.

Somewhat perversely, these deflating results mean that the United States has essentially maintained its relative positioning against the dozens of other national and regional school systems that participate in the assessment. In many of those jurisdictions, achievement in math and especially literacy has fallen even further than it has domestically. 

The ongoing slide in all but a few countries 鈥� exceptions include perennial overachievers like Singapore, Taiwan, and Japan, but also the European states of England and Estonia 鈥� indicate that the U.S. is subject to the same educational trends influencing the rest of the world. Clearly, it is not alone in suffering through a 鈥渓earning recession鈥� that began over a decade ago. Likewise, survey responses included with the PISA report show that students overseas are just as willing as their American counterparts to rely on AI chatbots: Far fewer than half of respondents across 82 participating jurisdictions said they used AI 鈥渘ever or almost never鈥� for purposes related to schoolwork. 

Michael Petrilli, president of the right-leaning Thomas B. Fordham Institute, called the scores 鈥渁larming,鈥� adding that they largely conform with those of other high-profile exams, such as the U.S.鈥檚 biennial National Assessment of Educational Progress. While academic outcomes have fallen more or less continuously for K鈥�12 students since the Obama administration, he wrote in an email, researchers and advocates shouldn鈥檛 take solace in the equally poor performance of other countries.

鈥淭he fact that other advanced nations are also seeing declines, especially in reading, is cold comfort,鈥� Petrilli said. 鈥淜nowledge is not a zero-sum game; we should want every child, everywhere, to achieve their full cognitive and academic potential, and that’s clearly not happening.鈥�

Created and managed by the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, PISA made its debut in 2000. Across all students participating in the 2025 assessment, the group announced, average results in math and reading were the worst ever recorded.

Whether or not that result represents rock bottom, it follows a prolonged tumble over multiple iterations of the test. Math and reading scores have either dropped or stagnated since 2009, while reading scores have plummeted since 2012. Just in the 10 years preceding the most recent testing round, OECD reported, average reading scores fell by the equivalent of 1.5 years of classroom learning, while average math scores fell by over one year.

Vicki Phillips, head of the National Center on Education and the Economy, that most PISA participants were experiencing a pronounced diminishment of the very skills that 鈥渨ill increasingly shape individual opportunity and a country鈥檚 ability to innovate, adapt, and grow.鈥�

鈥淎t exactly the moment our economies and societies are asking more of young people, too many education systems are struggling to build the knowledge and capabilities they will need,鈥� Phillips argued.

Amid the general nosedive, America鈥檚 downturn looks less extreme. But it distinguishes itself in terms of inequality, with exceedingly large disparities separating its top-scoring and lowest-performing test takers. The 鈥�90-10 gap,鈥� measured between struggling students at the 10th percentile and high-flyers at the 90th, grew by 50 points in reading since 2015. The gulf in science scores now stands greater than 290 scale points (out of 1,000 total), far more than any other country except Luxembourg. 

Those developments are fairly well-established, with tests such as NAEP repeatedly pointing to widening divergences over the past decade. But this year鈥檚 PISA brings some of the earliest international indicators of AI鈥檚 widespread penetration into schools. 

In a questionnaire accompanying the test, over half of all students said they enlisted chatbots like ChatGPT at least several times a month to conduct their research, write first drafts of papers, or summarize a text required for class. The percentage of students who said they seldom or never used AI for such tasks fell below 30% in every country except Japan, where 39% of respondents said as much.

Notably, too few U.S. students took part in the OECD questionnaires to reliably report their responses. But recent polling evidence strongly suggests that American pupils are highly dependent on AI to help complete their day-to-day academic assignments. 

In by the Fordham Institute, 48% of high school respondents said they regularly had AI solve math problems for them. Over one-third said they asked AI tools to summarize texts to avoid reading them, while over one-quarter said they used it for help during quizzes and tests.

Dan Goldhaber is an education professor at the University of Washington and a longtime observer of tests like PISA. In an interview, he said he worried that K鈥�12 students would increasingly come to depend on AI for routine academic work 鈥� and, in so doing, deprive themselves of meaningful learning opportunities.

鈥淚 hire people that AI is supposed to replace,鈥� Goldhaber said. 鈥淚 worry that it makes some things so easy that people don’t learn those things, and that will lead to a huge gap in knowledge for whole cohorts of students. I’m not sure what to do about it, but I see that problem on a micro-level and think, ‘My God.’鈥�

He warned them up front: 鈥淭his is going to be the hardest class you鈥檝e ever had.鈥�

His students鈥� response left no doubt: They eagerly dug into the so-called Redhead Murders, unsolved killings of at least six young women whose bodies had been dumped along roadsides across the South from the late 1970s through early 1990s. They soon tracked down an FBI profiler, interviewed a victim’s brother, built timelines out of decades-old case files and identified several new victims. They brought in a true-crime podcaster who was already poking around the killings, developed their own profile of the killer and landed on a theory of the cases that the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation eventually supported.

Their work became the basis of their own 2024 true-crime podcast, . Later that year, Campbell gathered a new group of students to continue the work 鈥� it became the basis for an of the same name that in July cracked the streaming service鈥檚 rankings.

In an interview, Campbell said the daunting project succeeded not because his students found the work easy 鈥� just the opposite, actually. 

鈥淚 make it obvious to them up front that this is going to be very hard, but they’re going to be invested, and so that makes it easy to do hard work,鈥� he said. 鈥淚f you ask people about the most meaningful experiences of their life, they’re almost always hard.鈥�

That insight sits at the center of a conversation now surfacing among educators. As generative AI drafts essays, solves equations and summarizes novels in seconds, a growing number of teachers say the technology has stripped away the last excuse schools have to address a problem they鈥檝e long avoided: chronically low student motivation.

AI didn’t create the crisis, they argue. It just exposed it. In the process, the technology, which relies on random word generation, could help make deeper learning a must-have feature of K-12 education.

鈥楢 very transactional educational process鈥�

In interviews, Campbell and others described a kind of one-two punch that schools have withstood since the COVID pandemic in 2020 and, more recently, the advent of AI models such as ChatGPT. 

Since COVID, many students have simply concluded that school attendance is optional, said Campbell. 鈥淲hy do I need to go down there when I can watch YouTube videos and get on Khan Academy and you can send [work] to me through Canvas?鈥� he said. 

His answer: School must now offer challenging-but-doable experiences that students can鈥檛 get anywhere else.

This idea is by no means new 鈥� at other schools, students have worked with engineering firms to design houses, built a smartphone app for a children鈥檚 hospital and, in one case, helped planners rethink what services Kansas City鈥檚 updated airport needs. At one New Mexico high school, students can now earn FAA certification to operate drones designed to modernize farming techniques on their families鈥� ancestral land. 

Many scholars trace the movement鈥檚 roots back nearly half a century. In the mid-1980s, educator Seymour Papert, the co-founder, popularized the phrase 鈥渉ard fun.鈥� A developer of the computer language , Papert reportedly once heard a student describing how fun he found a difficult coding assignment, later , 鈥淚 have no doubt that this kid called the work fun because it was hard rather than in spite of being hard.鈥�

Then as now, the idea was something of an alien concept in most schools.

Chris Hulleman, a University of Virginia researcher and founder of the university鈥檚 , has been studying student motivation for more than 20 years 鈥� he wrote his 2007 doctoral dissertation on the topic and noted that student complaints about schoolwork鈥檚 lack of relevance go back much further. 鈥淲e have just not done a great job overall in education in making school interesting and relevant to kids,鈥� he said.

Much of that stems from a basic structure that prioritizes efficiency, usually in the form of higher scores on standardized tests. 鈥淚f that’s the primary output we’re looking for,鈥� Hulleman said, 鈥測ou’re not going to have a very interesting system. And that’s sort of what we repeatedly do.鈥�

But over the past four years, he and others said, AI has introduced its own kind of brutal efficiency, one that removes the key steps that have long forced students to at least go through the motions of an assignment. In a sense, Hulleman said, the social contract between kids and schools has changed.

鈥淭hey’re questioning the 鈥榳hy,鈥� and then they’re looking at what they’re being asked to do,鈥� he said. 鈥淎nd if it’s boring or seems stupid to them, then yeah: Why wouldn’t I use this free thing that’s at my fingertips?鈥�

Recent research suggests that millions of students are reaching for the free thing: The College Board that the share of high school students using AI for schoolwork rose from 79% to 84% between January and May 2025, with about half using AI to brainstorm, revise essays or research topics. 

A from the University of Southern California found that most college students default to what researchers call 鈥渆xecutive help,鈥� using AI to get a fast answer with minimal effort, rather than 鈥渋nstrumental help鈥� that deepens understanding 鈥� unless a professor actively steers them in the other direction.

Left to their own devices, researchers found, students tend to take the AI path of least resistance, even if they learn less.

Darren Lam, 18, a recent graduate of New York鈥檚 , said that while many of his classmates won鈥檛 use AI on principle, many others use it to automate school, despite concerns about academic integrity. They鈥檙e 鈥渏ust not even really at school anymore 鈥� basically the AI is the student.鈥�

Even students who haven鈥檛 taken their AI use that far, he said, are still using it to do 鈥渦ndesirable assignments鈥� or to get 鈥渟ome sort of additional time benefit that they probably wouldn’t have if they were completely honest with their work.鈥�

Colorado math teacher Dylan Kane, who writes the Substack newsletter , said AI is automating cognitive effort at a scale far beyond earlier tools such as calculators or search engines. He used the metaphor of indoor plumbing, which freed people from hauling water, but which also erased the daily walking that once kept them healthy. As a result, people typically got less exercise. 

But he and others worry that AI might be automating cognition faster than we can find other ways to incentivize it. In the long run, he said, chatbots might be contributing to a reversal of , the decades-long rise in IQ scores generally attributed to a more cognitively demanding world. Though the phenomenon predates 2022, educators like Kane say AI is certainly worsening the slide.

鈥淧eople are getting dumber,鈥� he said, 鈥渁nd this is a cross-generational phenomenon.鈥�

The response, Kane said, should be similar to the one we turned to when walking became optional: 鈥淢y take is that we should just be honest about what’s happening.鈥� 

Invoking Papert鈥檚 principle of 鈥渉ard fun,鈥� he noted, 鈥淥ne of the best ways to get someone hooked on exercise is to get them doing something hard, but within reach, show them the progress they make when they put effort in, and hope to create a situation where that effort is self-sustaining. We should, I think, put the same effort into 鈥榗ognitive exercise.鈥欌��

For many students, that might still be academic learning 鈥� reading, writing and math, etc. For others, it might be chess, robotics, woodworking, debate, drama and the like. 鈥淪hould those play a larger role in today’s public education?鈥� he said. 鈥淚 think there’s a good argument the answer is yes, not only as something to expose students to, but something to try and help students get good at, to experience hard fun, to show themselves what their minds are capable of.鈥�

Rebecca Winthrop, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and co-author of the 2025 book , said that when tools like ChatGPT AI arrived in 2022, they came face-to-face with a school culture already ripe for change. AI quickly became layered over 鈥渨hat has become, sadly, a very transactional educational process.鈥�

In a , fewer than half of middle- and high-school students said their coursework challenges them or gives them the opportunity to do what they do best. It found that just 17% 鈥渟trongly agreed鈥� with the assertion: 鈥淚n the last seven days, I have learned something interesting at school.鈥�

What鈥檚 worse, Winthrop said, AI arrived at a time when what it means to be well-educated is rapidly changing. For decades, most students could coast through school, learning basic literacy and numeracy and still find their footing in the job market. That’s no longer true. 鈥淵ou’ve got to have a lot of higher-order thinking skills,鈥� she said. 鈥淭he bar has shifted, and it鈥檚 much higher.鈥�

Educator Priten Soundar-Shah, author of the recent book : How Educators Can Lead on AI and Digital Safety in K-12, said teachers can use that dynamic to their advantage. If students, for instance, scoff at foreign language instruction, insisting that their AI-powered make French class obsolete, ask them who they鈥檇 rather rely on in a pinch in Paris: a fluent French speaker or someone standing there waiting for their earbuds to process the conversation?

Students get the difference, he and others said. Perhaps as a result they鈥檙e often more conflicted about AI than adults might assume. They genuinely want to learn and are uneasy about assignments they could easily 鈥渉ack,鈥� Winthrop said, but they worry about being the only one in class to refuse a shortcut 鈥� a sort of academic in which each person thinks primarily about their own welfare.

Ben Riley, founder of and the think tank , described the dilemma more bluntly: Students, he said, 鈥渄on鈥檛 want to be suckers.鈥� If classmates are using AI to boost their grades, few teens would want to fall behind doing school the hard way.

Ask students why they go to school, said , an Ohio State University educational psychologist, and the answers typically split into two camps: some say they’re there to learn, but many say they’re there to get grades. When teachers emphasize tests and grades over mastery, he said, cheating rises; when the message shifts to learning, it falls off sharply. 

Anderman, who studies motivation and academic dishonesty, typically tells pre-service teachers, 鈥溾�楢鈥� stands for 鈥榓rtificial.鈥� We made it up.鈥� He added, 鈥淲e need to do a better job of training teachers to not talk so much about the test.鈥�

鈥業 deserve meaningful work鈥� 

While events of the past four years have forced teachers to rethink motivation, Campbell, the Tennessee teacher whose school is located near Knoxville, said the dilemma was on his mind nearly a decade ago when he conceived of the cold-case project. 

Inviting students to solve a problem that no one 鈥� not even experts 鈥� can solve sends a powerful message, he said. 鈥淭hat really tells kids, 鈥楬e does believe that I can do something. He does believe I can be anything I want to be. He does believe I deserve meaningful work that has real consequences.鈥欌��

The key was in easing students into the cases鈥� complexity, not just dropping them into it. 鈥淚 try to build them a ladder,鈥� he said. 鈥溾�楯ust step up on the first rung.鈥欌��

That may be meeting with a victim鈥檚 brother to hear a family鈥檚 story. Then he invites students to meet with police and go through case files. 鈥淏efore you know it, they’re building timelines,鈥� he said. 鈥淭hey’re doing profiles, they’re doing geographic studies, and then they slowly begin to step up and realize they’re learning the skills, they’re meeting the people.鈥�

But what really made the project work, he said, was its authenticity 鈥� and how it visibly helped victims鈥� families. 

鈥淜ids can spot a fake in about two seconds,鈥� said Campbell. 鈥淭hey know when you’re fake. They know when your problem is fake. So whenever you say, 鈥極h, this is an important problem,鈥� they鈥檙e like, 鈥楴o, it’s not, because the answer’s in the back of the book. That’s stupid. Somebody already found the answer.鈥� 鈥�

Nearly a decade after Campbell first brought the cold cases to students, many questions remain unanswered, foremost among them who actually did the killings. But the projects have activated his students like little else could, largely because the inquiries have given victims鈥� families hope for justice.

Ulcca Joshi Hansen, an education researcher, futurist and author of the 2021 book , said teachers like Campbell, who draw students into big, relatively high-stakes projects, are tracing what may be our only logical path to progress in the Age of AI. Project-based schools like , the private in Idaho, in California and those in the network nationwide, she said, take as a given that an education built around intrinsic motivation, not extrinsic markers such as grades, simply works.

Big Picture schools, for instance, are small, personalized high schools built around career-focused aspirations and a seemingly endless parade of internships with local businesses and nonprofits. And while a few students focus early on dream careers, most spend four years zig-zagging through multiple internships and experiences, often in wildly divergent fields. 

Hansen said schools can also learn from youth development programs such as and summer camps, which offer kids access to real-world, often challenging activities. 鈥淵ou have to start with young people being invited into their education around things that they care about,鈥� she said. 

The obstacle, in her view, is less pedagogical than structural: our accountability system is still anchored to sit-down, written standardized tests that effectively tell schools, 鈥淵ou don’t know math if you can build something. You only know it if you can show it on a piece of paper.鈥�

Educator Soundar-Shah said redesigning assessments could be a key part of solving the motivation crisis. He has moved toward what amounts to a in which students spend their out-of-class time reading books, watching video lectures or even interacting with AI chatbots role-playing as historical figures. That frees up class time for discussion, debate and writing 鈥� under his supervision. 

鈥淚 don’t do any instructional time during class,鈥� he said. In its place, very often, are assessments in the form of in-class presentations. 鈥淭here’s no point in offloading your conversations to an AI chatbot if you’re going to have to show up to class and still demonstrate that knowledge tomorrow,鈥� he said. 

He’s also increasingly drawn to , which lets students retake assessments until they’ve actually learned the material rather than treating a single test as a final verdict.

Whatever happens, said Hansen, change is badly overdue: 鈥淔or 10 years, we’ve had moment after moment after moment where the invitation to the dominant system has been actually, 鈥楻edesign and let go of some of the stuff you鈥檙e holding so tightly onto.鈥欌�� 

While teachers like Campbell and Soundar-Shah are looking at redesigning the education system, Hansen said, most remain satisfied 鈥渢weaking and altering it to try and make it work better 鈥� and bludgeoning kids to do it better, or do more of it. And that has not worked.鈥�

A former health industry reporter, Singer sees parallels between Silicon Valley鈥檚 campaign for coding, among other measures, and Big Pharma鈥檚 influence on medicine, noting huge school investments over the past few years by Apple, Google and Microsoft, among others.

鈥淣ever has so much market power lined up behind a single curriculum cause,鈥� she writes.

As a result, a movement that could have helped build data science or other less glamorous, evidence-based reforms has in many cases ended up offering students 鈥渙nly half an education in computing, the rosy upbeat half that casts tech giants as benevolent, world-changing innovators.鈥� 

In one chapter, Singer examines a 2019 Advanced Placement Computer Science course developed by Apple that teaches students how to code in Swift, Apple鈥檚 programming language for building iPhone apps. It鈥檚 as if schools embraced a 鈥淩aytheon-branded AP physics course or DuPont chemistry course or Pfizer AP Biology course,鈥� she writes.

Singer finds both problematic and promising moves by tech over the past decade or more. While she calls out the nonprofit for skewing the idea of computer science to coding that often helps serve corporate interests, she lauds its founder, Iran-born entrepreneur , for making coding appealing and fun to millions of young people, telling 社区黑料鈥檚 Greg Toppo that U.S. public schools likely wouldn鈥檛 offer computer science at this scale if not for Partovi.

鈥淚 don’t know anybody else that’s been able to do that,鈥� she says. 鈥淚 think that did change the world.鈥�

Ahead of the book鈥檚 release on Tuesday, Toppo and Singer talked about her findings and the lessons that the tech industry is now taking into the fight to get into schools. 

The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

The book spends a lot of time with Partovi and Code.org. Would you say it is basically a positive influence?

Natasha Singer: Code.org catalyzed computer science in schools. They also partnered with a lot of big tech companies and brought in commercial things 鈥� the Hour of Code has the lessons and Elsa the lessons and the Microsoft lessons and the Code Your Own lessons, and so it also brought in a kind of commercialism that I have questions about. I don’t think we would have computer science at this scale in schools if not for Code.org.

One of the key takeaways of this book is that there are other ways to do computer science in schools. In fact, if there’s a hero, it’s , who says Code.org and other groups are mostly just getting middle-class white boys interested in coding. Can you tell us about her? 

Jane Margolis is an incredible researcher. She grew up in Berkeley, Calif., during the ’60s, and she went to UC Berkeley. She was a Vietnam War protester and then she was a labor activist. She worked for the telephone company 鈥� at the time, it was Pacific Telephone and Telegraph, and there she saw these gender biases at work because she worked as an operator, the person who sat at the switchboard with all those wires plugging in calls. Male employees were allowed to be linemen, and they would go outside and climb these telephone poles and install phones, and she was trying to unionize the women to say that job should be open to everyone. Her view was that women need to have technical skills and equal opportunity to technical careers. Eventually, she goes to Harvard and gets a Ph.D in education, and she’s looking at gender disparities. Harvard has this government department, and it was inhospitable to women, and so she did her thesis about why boys were shouting down girls and pushing girls out of political science. 

She starts in computer science in the ’90s at Carnegie Mellon University. Carnegie Mellon, as you know, is at the forefront of computer science education and robotics and computer vision. They were one of the first to start a dedicated college of computer science, as opposed to a major. But a couple of years in, they realize that only 7% of the people majoring in computer science are girls, and they can鈥檛 figure out why. 

, who’s the associate dean at Carnegie Mellon, hires Margolis, and together they do a study looking at why it is that women are not going into computer science and are dropping out. And they find there are all these factors, one of which is that families are buying personal computers. She found by interviewing male and female students that the boys would be like, 鈥淥h yeah, my dad or my uncle went to Radio Shack and brought home this TRS-80 computer and put it in my room, so I fooled around and learned to code, and then my neighbor came over 鈥� he’s a software engineer.鈥� So by the time the boys show up at Carnegie Mellon, many of them have already taken computer science in high school. They know what they’re doing. And some girls have no experience, so they’re already feeling behind by Day One. 

It wasn’t just that girls were left out. It’s that when girls tried to take computer science in high school, often the guidance counselors would say to them, “Oh, you don’t really want to do this,” or “You’re not going to do well,” or “It’s going to hurt your grade-point average.” There were all kinds of socio-cultural things going on 鈥� sexism and a whole bunch of other stuff that dissuaded girls. 

And so they wrote this report at Carnegie Mellon, and they did all kinds of things to attract girls to computer science. There had been a requirement that if you wanted to major in computer science, you had to have taken it in high school. But of course, girls were dissuaded from taking it in high school. So one of the things that Carnegie Mellon did, they looked at other students who might have been good at math or sciences but didn’t necessarily take computer science, or who were leaders in their schools 鈥� perseverance qualities that make you good at computer science. Within a few years, the percentage of girls taking computer science shot up. 

And then Jane Margolis was like, “O.K., we now understand how to get more girls in computer science, but the percentage of African-American students, Latino students, lower-income students is even worse. She then becomes a researcher at UCLA. She works with Los Angeles public schools. They find similar problems of Black and brown and low-income students being dissuaded from taking computer science. So they come up with a course to make computer science more welcoming. 

Her whole idea is that if you do not grow up with a computer in your house, or you don’t know how to code, and you show up to computer science class and the first thing is computer programming, and the second thing is computer programming, and the tenth thing is computer programming, you may be turned off before you even know what it is.

So they created a class to explain to students who were first-timers: How does the internet work? How does a computer work? What is a motherboard? What is a central processing unit? And how are you using tech in your life? And do you know how an email gets to you? How are platforms 鈥� at the time it was more like and Facebook 鈥� shaping your life as a student? And then eventually, when they learn a whole bunch of stuff about how the technology works and why it’s interesting, then they start programming. 

And it’s not programming for programming’s sake. They made wearable computers 鈥� they had wristbands that had LED lights so they could make creative patterns. They could spell out their name, these wristbands, but they had to use computing to make it work. They had to program the designs. They made a lot of progress with this course, not just in Los Angeles but in Chicago. It was called Exploring Computer Science, and it began to grow slowly. 

Then the tech industry comes along and says, “We have this crisis: We need more programmers and software engineers, and every kid needs to learn to code.” And a lot of those courses were programming-centric, and I have to say some of them also included social aspects such as the ethical use of computing. But this notion that we live in a world surrounded by machines and it’s crucial for young people to understand how these things work in order to have agency and navigate them, that’s the idea that Jane Margolis was arguing for 20 years ago.

I want to ask about this story from 2015 that you tell about the course, which brought together the National Science Foundation, Code.org, Apple, and others. Can you briefly tell that story?

There was a leader at the National Science Foundation named . She was running a program called . And she was charged with broadening participation at the university level 鈥� that is, getting more women and African-American students and Latino students and students with disabilities and Native American students and others in computer science, because they’ve been historically marginalized. And she’s watching what Jane Margolis and others are doing in Los Angeles and around the country. And she realizes that the problem starts before kids get to college. 

So she gives millions of dollars to universities to develop different AP courses. The kind of course she envisioned to broaden participation in computer science didn’t exist at universities because universities took hardcore first-semester computer science that was designed to weed out people, and so she funded different universities, including UT Austin and the University of Washington and Trinity College, to develop more like Computer Science Zero, an online course that would look similar to what Jane Margolis was doing. It would teach you how the internet worked, it would teach you some data science, it would teach you some programming, it would teach you to think about the social impacts of technology. It would be a new AP course called Computer Science Principles, and you could take it as the intro. And then if you liked it you would go on and take AP Computer Science, which was much more rigorous and much more programming oriented.

So she convinces the College Board that they need to do this. And then, from Jan Cuny’s point of view, out of nowhere, The College Board announces that it’s partnered with Code.org to launch , a Code.org course, and then they announce that they have endorsed specific curriculum, including the Code.org one, but they later endorsed an AP Computer Science course from , which teaches kids to code in , Apple’s programming language for iPhone apps, and they also endorse a Microsoft course called . And Jan Cuny 鈥� NSF has funded a lot of this 鈥� is really stunned because nobody had told her beforehand that the College Board was going to . But also: Why weren’t they endorsing the ones that she funded? 

So she called The College Board and was like, “You’ve got to endorse all these courses then.” And by the way, the [AP] course was a smash success. Hundreds of thousands of kids took it. It was an introduction to computing that was broad for a lot of kids who didn’t know what it was. It did diversify who was taking computer science, although it’s still very skewed toward boys.听

But her point was that if you are trying to make a broad course that tries to get more kids of different backgrounds into computer science, Apple products skew to higher-resourced schools and higher-resourced kids. I read some of the Apple textbook, and there are lines like, “You can use this to make an app for your iPhone or even your Apple Watch.” This Apple course assumes that you have an Apple Watch. And Jan Cuny was like, “That’s not what we were doing when we were trying to broaden participation in computer science.”

I went back to the College Board, and they said, “When you’re broadening participation in computer science, you have to broaden it to everybody, and there are schools that do have MacBooks, and so maybe this course will work for them, whereas other courses won’t. It’s an array; you don’t have to use this one. You can use all of them or different ones.”

But for me, there are anomalies with having companies operate in schools, and the AP Apple curriculum and AP Microsoft curriculum show the unusual ways that tech companies influence schools that many other industries do not.

Fast-forward to 2026: Now we’re dealing with AI, and obviously tech is reading from a similar playbook. But it feels somehow different to me. I mean, we’ve had social media trials and , and these tech bros aren’t the white-hatted heroes we used to think they were. Does this moment seem different to you?

This moment is different, but also similar. We are in a moment in society where a lot of people have increased distrust of these huge tech companies, and we see a wave of parents pushing back against tech in schools. But we also see waves of people pushing back against , against , that there’s this feeling that tech has taken so much, and that people feel like they have lost control 鈥� that tech is being enacted on them.

And then when we talk about the social media trials and the big verdicts against Meta, both the one with dozens of states where Meta now has to pay $17 billion, but also the one earlier in the summer where New Mexico got in a judgment against Meta, those companies are no longer our darlings. And parents are worried about the effects of unfettered tech access and kids’ compulsive use of social media and phones, and so there’s a different climate. And yet there seems to be a disconnect in some ways with AI because you see that Microsoft and OpenAI and Anthropic and Google are all competing to get their AI tools into schools, and you see school districts across the country say “We’ve partnered with OpenAI.” “We are a ChatGPT Pioneer School,” or “We’ve partnered with Microsoft, and we’re going to use 10,000 licenses of CoPilot.” It’s amazing to me. We have had these cycles of tech in schools where there are all these promises about the latest tech, laptops, learning apps, massive open online courses, virtual reality, big data’s going to revolutionize schools and like democratize access to education for kids and get them these great career skills, and we keep having these cycles. My concern is that we don’t learn anything.

One of the reasons I wrote this book is because it feels like we have collective amnesia. Now we’re in the sixth or eighth cycle of this 鈥� and shouldn’t we be asking questions about the push for AI in schools, based on what we’ve learned about the push for all the other things that came before? 

I visited this school in Newark where two teachers had launched an AI literacy class because they were worried their high school seniors were going to graduate into a world with AI and not know anything about it. I went to the first class, and the teacher said, “We need to be honest with you. You’re the first kids we’re gonna do this class with. We don’t know how to teach this. We don’t know what you want to learn. And a year from now, this is gonna look completely different.” And there was this kind of honesty and humbleness: We, the teachers, are in it together with you, the students, and we’re gonna learn how AI works. 

They learned rigorous stuff, and they also learned to make stuff with AI. They weren’t just critical of AI, but they did it together. And if kids found something interesting, they went with that. And it’s a really hard thing for schools to know that we actually need to prepare kids about AI because they’re using it already, but in fact, we don’t know what to do yet, and this is going to rapidly change. That’s a really big challenge.

I was heartened by the chapters near the end where you go into classrooms. People are really embracing a new way to do this stuff.  

You know, I feel optimistic and upbeat about this new generation of teachers that want to equip students with broad critical thinking skills 鈥� and that involves both learning how the tech works and learning to use the tech and make stuff with AI, but also to understand the provenance of these AI tools and to understand that we have companies with more power than most countries, and we’ve never had that before. They are setting the rules we live by. So you have to understand how the tools are steering us.

New York City is expected to release its school policy for artificial intelligence on Wednesday, with a ban on student-facing AI tools for 2-K through eighth grade, according to four people briefed on the plans and Education Department documents obtained by Chalkbeat.

Under the new rules, the youngest children in the nation鈥檚 largest school system 鈥� those in its early childhood programs, elementary schools, and middle schools 鈥� would not have access to generative AI, including chatbots and AI tutors, sources said.

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The guidelines bar schools from giving individual devices to students in preschools through second grade, though classrooms will be allowed to have smart boards, sources said. For students in grades 3 to 5, the policy recommends limiting screen time on individual devices to 30 minutes and 45 minutes for middle school students.

High schoolers are expected to have restricted access to AI, but might be able to use it for literacy, career readiness programs, and in five pilot programs at an unspecified number of schools, according to the Daily News, . Screen time recommendations depend on subject matter and school approach.

The restrictions would represent a significantly more aggressive stance against AI and screen time in schools than the city had taken. Education leaders across the country are likely to be watching as they also grapple with how students should interact with the fast-changing technology.

鈥淵ounger students need hands-on learning, social interaction, play, and teacher-guided instruction,鈥� Education Department officials wrote in a presentation outlining the policy obtained by Chalkbeat. 鈥淩outine individual screen use can crowd out those experiences.鈥�

In high school, the presentation continued, 鈥渟tudents need guided preparation for a world and economy increasingly driven by AI and new technologies -paired with instruction on how AI works, its biases and risks, and how to evaluate its outputs.鈥�

Teachers will be allowed to use approved AI tools for such instructional tasks as lesson planning, translation, and drafting communications, according to the presentation. They will not be allowed to use the technology for grading, behavior monitoring, counseling, or developing special education plans.

City officials are in the process of creating a task force that will offer input on the policy鈥檚 implementation going forward, multiple people briefed on the Education Department鈥檚 plans said.

An Education Department spokesperson did not respond to requests for comment.

Multiple people said there would be some exceptions to the policy to account for regular assessments in reading and math that students typically complete on computers, as well as for some student groups, including English language learners and students with disabilities.

When the city unveiled its preliminary AI guidelines in March, forcing the city to rethink its approach and delay its timeline for a comprehensive policy by about two months, leaving little time for schools to prepare for the change before the first day on Sept. 10. It鈥檚 unclear how the Education Department plans to enforce the policy.

The initial guidance used a traffic-light framework to delineate risk levels of different AI uses in the classroom, mainly by teachers. Student AI use 鈥� one of the thorniest issues educators and families are currently confronting 鈥� got little attention.

The city seemed caught off guard by the momentum of grassroots parent groups calling for an AI moratorium, with thousands of people signing a petition to stop the use of generative AI in schools and scores voicing their concerns at school board meetings.

More than half of City Council members use in schools, citing concerns about learning and mental health. Samuels acknowledged in May that indicating that the final version would have more stringent rules on AI use, especially for younger students.

In July, as the city hashed out its new guidance, until officials released the new policy, who worried they would not have access to key software programs, such as electronic gradebooks and platforms to communicate with families, when welcoming students back to school next week.

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools. This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at

In concert, state bodies governing public pre-K through Ph.D. students are implementing policies addressing safety and classroom use of artificial intelligence.

Next week, the Florida Board of Governors, which controls Florida鈥檚 12 state universities, will review language directing each campus to 鈥渆stablish policies requiring all course syllabi to include a disclosure of faculty use and permitted student use of artificial intelligence.鈥�

The decision starts with the Task Force on Artificial Intelligence and Cybersecurity, which the Board of Governors created earlier this year to address the emerging technology鈥檚 permeation into higher education.

Policy proposals extend to Florida鈥檚 youngest students, too.

The Florida Board of Education, which oversees preK-12 and the Florida College System, has a vote scheduled to direct K-12 public and charter schools and colleges to regulate AI use.

The Board of Education will vote Sept. 16 during its meeting at Polk State College whether to require public school districts and charter school governing boards to amend their internet safety policy to include AI.

The rule is not expected to require legislative ratification and would have to be adopted by school boards by July 1, 2027. 

Districts and charter schools would, at a minimum, make policies to 鈥減rotect students, parents, and instructional personnel from unlawful, deceptive, unsafe, or unauthorized uses of artificial intelligence systems, services, applications, and tools used in connection with educational programs and operations in Florida public schools,鈥� according to a draft copy of the rule. 

The idea is to 鈥渆nsure that any approved use of artificial intelligence protects education records and student information, while supporting student achievement, civic literacy, academic excellence, and workforce preparedness.鈥�

More specifically, schools would notify parents when teachers approve an AI instructional tool for use, including the name of the platform and classes in which it would be used and the nature of student interaction.

Parental protection

Gov. Ron DeSantis鈥� administration did not return a request for comment.

The Florida Education Association supports guidelines for protecting children.

鈥淓very parent and guardian wants their child to succeed in their public schools. In today鈥檚 world, technology is a key part of what and how our students learn, and, like with all new technology, there must be rules and guidelines that center on protecting our children,鈥� FEA President Andrew Spar wrote in an emailed statement to the Phoenix.

The policy must require a process for parents to object to AI use and provide alternatives to the tool.

Schools would be required to conduct additional reviews for AI tools used in PreK-5 to ensure it is age appropriate. 

The measure includes language aiming to protect the teaching profession from being replaced by computers. It would 鈥渆nsure that the use of AI instructional tools is limited to supplementing, and not replacing, the professional judgment of teachers and the primary right of parents to direct the upbringing and education of their children.鈥�

Further, the policy must ensure AI is 鈥渁ccurate, transparent, viewpoint neutral, accessible to students and educators with disabilities.鈥�

Schools must make publicly available approved AI instructional tools and policies. Also, the tools must maintain student interaction for at least 30 days in the interest of accessibility to parents and district administrators.

However, the data collected on students must not be used for profit or to profile students to train commercial AI models. 

The state is proposing, the regulation draft says, that schools not deploy AI to:

• Meet a student鈥檚 social or emotional needs, including Social Emotional Learning.
• Simulate friendship, companionship, or an emotional relationship with a student.
• Employ relationship-building or anthropomorphic design features for the purpose of encouraging a student to continue interacting with the system or tool.

The rule would impose training for teachers and administrators on the safety, risks, and compliance regarding AI. 

The policy must address plagiarism, permissible classroom use, verifying student work, and demonstrating mastery without use of AI.

鈥淎t the Florida Education Association, we believe that any policy the state of Florida enacts must ensure parents and guardians are advised of all potential uses of AI in a public school, that student data is protected, that the use of AI and new technologies is safe, that use of technology in the classroom is age and need appropriate, and that educators are protected and that additional work is not placed on them without additional support,鈥� Spar said.

College system

The 28 state colleges have AI rules on the Board of Education docket, too. 

Those rules would place responsibility to create AI policies with college system boards of trustees

The Board of Education expects the 28 boards of trustees to create policies 鈥渢hat provide for the use and limitations of use of artificial intelligence tools in order to ensure quality of education for students, efficiency of operations, and a safe learning environment for the whole college community.鈥�

As with the pre-K-12 policy, the college policy would distinguish between instructional AI tools and other technologies. 

AI instructional tools could not 鈥渕eet a student鈥檚 social needs; simulate friendship, companionship, or an emotional relationship with a student; or employ relationship-building or anthropomorphic design features for the purpose of encouraging a student to continue interacting with the system.鈥�

The policy calls on colleges to protect student privacy with AI, allow notification of parents of minors taking college classes whether their courses involve AI, and factor for academic integrity and dishonesty.

The policy calls, too, for building a framework to helps students understand what AI is and how it incorporates into their education and building AI skills.

This was originally published by Florida Phoenix.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Florida Phoenix maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Michael Moline for questions: info@floridaphoenix.com.

Wendy Graham鈥檚 two kids first encountered Amira, a popular artificial intelligence tutoring platform, in 2025, during a summer reading program in New Mexico. She also used it at home with her daughter, now a fourth grader.

But she found that the purple-haired avatar with the big, round glasses didn鈥檛 seem to understand where her daughter was struggling. When she stumbled over 鈥渦sually,鈥� the 鈥渓earning agent鈥� wanted her to repeat the word and spend time defining it. 

鈥淪he knew what the word meant; she just didn’t decode the word,鈥� Graham said. Amira, in her view, 鈥済ot hung up on all the wrong things.鈥�

Her son, on the other hand, never gave Amira a chance.

鈥淗e just looked at me and looked at the screen like, 鈥楾his isn’t happening,鈥� 鈥� Graham said.

Her kids鈥� lack of enthusiasm for the program reflects what researchers have concluded so far about AI tutors. While some states are spending millions on Amira and other virtual tutors, most kids aren鈥檛 sticking with them long enough to benefit. For now, high-dosage tutoring models proven to be effective are human-led and depend on 鈥渁 relationship that keeps students showing up and engaged,鈥� according to from the National Student Support Accelerator, a Stanford University center that conducts tutoring research. 

鈥淲e don鈥檛 have solid research showing that AI tutoring can work in the U.S. at scale,鈥� said Susanna Loeb, the center鈥檚 executive director. Researchers鈥� 鈥渂iggest finding is that the take-up is very low.鈥� 

Amira鈥檚 leaders, however, say their platform was based on extensive prior research showing AI tutoring can be effective . 

鈥淣o other scalable instructional intervention has been interrogated as many times, by as many independent teams, with this consistency of positive impact,鈥� CEO Mark Angel said in a statement to 社区黑料.

The brief comes as Amira, which records students鈥� voices to test their reading progress, faces increased scrutiny from districts in New Mexico. Parents expressed over how long the recordings are stored and what Amira does with the data. The New Mexico Public Education Department to use the program three times a year to assess K-2 students鈥� literacy skills. But in response to the opposition, it is allowing districts to , and Amria says it does not use the recordings for . 

Last month, the Las Cruces Public Schools, where Graham鈥檚 children attend and where she also teaches high school history, told parents they have disabled the recording feature and that they could request a paper assessment instead of Amira鈥檚 digital version. Officials also said they would discontinue use of Amira鈥檚 tutoring program.

鈥淭eachers,鈥� the memo said, 鈥渨ill continue to monitor progress and provide support for students to become proficient readers.鈥�

鈥楽upercharge teachers鈥� efforts鈥�

New Mexico parents鈥� reactions to Amira reflect broader reservations about the use of AI in schools. In from the Century Foundation, a left-leaning think tank, 84% of Americans said they鈥檙e worried about tech companies using students鈥� personal data to make a profit, and nearly half want AI use in the classroom kept to a minimum. 

The vast majority of survey respondents, 81%, expressed concern that teachers are being pressured to use AI even if it hasn鈥檛 been proven to help students learn. 

But Angel, with Amira, said the tool 鈥渃an supercharge teachers鈥� efforts鈥� by allowing them to listen to every child read aloud and identify struggling readers before third grade.

In 2024, the Duval County Public Schools in Florida signed a contract with Amira to help about 2,600 students in grades second through fourth reading below grade level and then tied half of the $100,000 contract to students鈥� progress. According to a of the work, more than 1,200 of the students met their goals for oral reading fluency, which exceeded the expectations of the contract.

Five hundred students made gains on state tests and about 300 reached the proficiency level, but the report doesn鈥檛 identify whether those results met the targets Amira was expected to reach.  

Graham, who previously taught fifth graders, appreciates what districts using Amira hope to accomplish.

鈥淚 think they’re trying to take things that have historically been done by teachers and streamline it to free up teachers鈥� time,鈥� she said. But she still thinks states and districts aren鈥檛 getting their money鈥檚 worth. 鈥淜ids don’t do their best for robots; kids do their best for people.鈥� 

Tutoring programs, however, can benefit from AI, the Stanford team concludes. A 2024 study, also from Stanford, showed that human tutors can become more effective with prompts from an AI tool. Tasks like scheduling, tracking attendance, analyzing notes from sessions and giving students additional practice outside of tutoring sessions are other ways that AI can support tutoring, according to the researchers.

The North Little Rock School District in Arkansas used , an AI platform that measures kids鈥� reading accuracy and fluency, as part of a research study. Students were expected to read to the AI program for 20 minutes, read a physical book independently for 20 minutes and then write about the topic, said Carmen Langston, the district鈥檚 literacy coordinator. 

On the screen, students would find digital books that teachers assigned or could create their own version, picking animals or scenery they prefer. 

鈥淭he kids like to put their names in there,鈥� Langston said, and those who used it for the recommended number of minutes saw progress in phonics. But the district, she said, is trying to limit screen time. 鈥淲e tell our teachers that if you are doing [an] intervention, it has to come from a human teacher.鈥�

鈥楨ngagement was thin鈥�

The Stanford center鈥檚 research summary follows its of an AI tutoring program showing that students averaged about two minutes per week in one district and about five minutes in another 鈥� well under the two 30-minute sessions they were expected to complete each week.

A released last month tested the use of Khanmigo, Khan Academy鈥檚 AI tutor that relies on OpenAI鈥檚 technology. During the 2024-25 and 2025-26 school years, researchers Philip Oreopoulos and Nina Low randomly assigned students in 18 Hamilton County, Tennessee, middle schools to use the program for math practice. But while nearly all students with Khanmigo used it at least once, 鈥渆ngagement was thin,鈥� they wrote. 

Students only consulted Khanmigo a third of the days they practiced math and just 17% of the times they made a mistake. Learning gains were about the same as they would have been had students not used the program, the researchers wrote. 

The results disappointed Sal Khan, who told that for students, the program鈥檚 release was a 鈥渘on-event.鈥�

Education Secretary Linda McMahon recently discussed the use of AI during a , saying there are not yet 鈥渁 lot of metrics鈥� to determine its value in the classroom.

鈥淎re we seeing better outcomes in schools? And if we’re not, then they should be pulled out,鈥� she said, adding that she thinks a parent who is dissatisfied with an ed tech tool 鈥渉as every right to go in and say, 鈥楴o, I want something different for my child.鈥� 鈥�

The secretary, however, has repeatedly praised , a chain of for-profit AI-focused schools. Students spend two hours learning from AI and spend the rest of their days learning 鈥渓ife skills鈥� like running a food truck or producing a musical, according to the website.

鈥淭he beauty of that is that the student almost has a one-on-one tutor,鈥� she said. 鈥淭he teacher can monitor to see if the child is a bit behind and repeat information for them. If the child is really excelling, then their programs get sped up a bit, so it’s a great tool.鈥�

State contracts

Several states feel the same way about Amira and have spent millions to make it available to districts. New Mexico鈥檚 contract costs about $2.7 million a year. Iowa in 2024 to make licenses available to nearly 250 schools across the state and boosted the contract by to expand access to more schools.

The North Dakota Department of Public Instruction has a $2.6 million to implement Amira and points to showing that the more kids use it, the better their performance gets. But the data was self-reported by Amira and didn鈥檛 include a comparison group. The department declined to comment on research showing low student engagement. 

Utah doesn鈥檛 have a statewide contract with Amira and didn鈥檛 endorse it. An of interactive software programs showed that students considered at risk for falling behind in reading who used Amira outperformed a similar group of students who didn鈥檛 use the program. But of the 8,036 first through third graders deemed at risk, only 249 met the recommended usage time.

鈥淭herefore, these results should be interpreted with sample size in mind,鈥� the Utah evaluation said.

Amira also commissioned an analysis of the AI tutor鈥檚 use in Louisiana schools. showed better results for students who spent more time on the platform. That makes sense, Stanford鈥檚 Loeb said, but doesn鈥檛 prove the 鈥渃ausal effect of Amira.鈥� The state spent in COVID relief funds on the program and in December, authorized another for additional AI tools, including Khanmigo and Writable.

Ted Beasley, a spokesman for the Louisiana Department of Education, said high-dosage tutoring has helped drive recent improvement in reading on the National Assessment of Educational Progress. 

“As we’ve expanded tutoring statewide, AI programs like Amira give school systems another option to complement that work,鈥� he said. 鈥淎 number of school systems have chosen to utilize this tool and have found it useful.鈥�

As new research continues to emerge, other states are exercising caution. North Carolina鈥檚 recently for fiscal 2027 includes $500,000 for a dual enrollment math course using Khanmigo, as well as $2.5 million for Khan Academy partnerships with schools. Khanmigo can be turned off if districts decide. Lawmakers, however, originally recommended for the AI program.

Loeb still sees AI tutoring as promising, but said purchasing Amira or Khanmigo is not the same as 鈥渂uying tutors for everybody.鈥� She stressed that careful execution matters. That鈥檚 also what a on 鈥渋ntelligent tutoring systems,鈥� one of the studies that inspired Amira鈥檚 founders, concluded. Positive results depend in part on 鈥渢he adequacy of program implementations,鈥� the researchers wrote.

鈥淚f you choose a tool that has some evidence or that you think could be effective, you have to figure out how to actually get kids to use it,鈥� Loeb said. 鈥淚t鈥檚 going to take a teacher, a parent or some school person setting up the context where the students feel motivated to do the work.鈥�

But for that promise to be fulfilled, students have to use the AI tools. New research suggests that may be much harder to achieve than schools assume. 

In a describing the results of randomized controlled trials led by the , 355 students in grades 1 to 5 in two school districts were assigned either to use an AI literacy tutor independently or to use the same platform with support from a human tutor. In both, the goal was to improve reading achievement.

The human tutors encouraged students to participate, helped troubleshoot technology problems and established group norms, while building rapport and accountability. Their sessions followed a consistent structure: a brief check-in, time for students to work on the platform and final reflection. In the group with no human support, students were expected to work on the AI platform on their own. Each group was scheduled to use the tool twice a week for 30 minutes per session.  

The clearest finding from the study was that all students, regardless of whether they received human support, used the AI tutor far less than intended. For example, almost half the children in the independent-use group did not use the AI tutor at all. Those who did use the platform spent just two to five minutes per week, on average.

Students using the AI tutor with human support spent only slightly more time using the tool, but the effects were small: an increase of just one minute a week in one of the districts and 4.4 more in the other. 

There are a range of potential reasons for this low engagement, from students not finding the tool compelling to preferring to ask a teacher for help or needing more encouragement and accountability.

For both groups of students,  usage remained far below the 30-minute-per-week dosage recommended to reap academic benefits. At these levels, students likely did not receive enough of the intervention for gains in reading achievement to emerge.

These findings underscore two important points: Access to AI tutoring does not ensure meaningful use, and, while human support can increase student engagement, it may not be enough to generate measurable learning gains. The study highlights the real-world implementation challenge inherent in student-directed AI tools: Kids need to be motivated to engage and keep coming back, or these products will never deliver on their promise. Human support can help, but in this study it wasn’t enough to bring usage close to recommended levels.  

But there are other promising approaches that flip the model: rather than asking AI to replace human tutors, AI can help them become more effective. In , an AI tool that provided real-time instructional suggestions to human tutors improved student mastery, with the largest gains occurring among less experienced tutors. This suggests a for the future of personalized learning, one where AI and human support work together to meet the needs of tutors and individual students. The right mix will vary depending on the subject and grade level. Assuming stronger engagement, some students may thrive with primarily AI-supported learning. Others may benefit from AI tutoring paired with periodic human encouragement and accountability. Still others will require sustained relationships with human tutors, teachers or mentors. 

That is where the field should focus next.

But before schools and districts implement AI tutoring tools with the expectation that they will transform learning, they need more, better evidence about what it actually takes to engage students. To date, the research remains surprisingly limited. A by the SCALE Initiative identified more than 800 studies examining AI in education, yet only 20 used rigorous designs that allowed researchers to examine the causal effect of the AI tool on teaching and learning. In other words, enthusiasm for AI in education has far outpaced rigorous evidence about whether students will use these tools, and whether they improve student learning. 

Widening the evidence base is essential. Funders, researchers and education leaders should prioritize uncovering which kinds of human supports are needed for which students, under which conditions and whether they generate enough meaningful engagement to improve learning. Also important is research to inform decisions about which models are both effective and scalable. Organizations like and the , both Overdeck Family Foundation grantees, are beginning to explore more cost-effective, hybrid approaches that use AI to personalize instruction while strategically deploying human support where it matters most. Whether these hybrid approaches can improve learning at scale remains an open question, and an important one to test. 

Education has seen this story before. New technologies arrive with the promise of reaching more students at lower cost, only to produce disappointing results because of implementation challenges. And while AI has enormous potential to expand access to personalized learning, there is no reason to assume it will succeed simply because the technology is more advanced.

The next generation of research should help education leaders and practitioners understand not just how to build better digital tools, but how to build learning environments where students actually use them and benefit.

Disclosure: The Overdeck Family Foundation provides financial support to 社区黑料.

Just as the technology has rewired the relationship between young writers-in-training and their teachers, it has also changed how student journalists and their editors work together 鈥� or, in some cases, don鈥檛. 

And AI has created headaches for these journalists that mirror those afflicting their professional peers, with school newsrooms struggling to figure out how to respond.

As with their schools more broadly, student newsrooms have spent these years deploying surveillance software and, in many cases, drafting zero-tolerance policies for AI. Different newsrooms have developed different answers to the same basic question: How much do we trust teenagers to not let a chatbot do their work? 

社区黑料 spoke recently to three student journalists from three very different newsrooms about their experiences:

• Cid Frydman, a rising senior at Berkeley High School in California, who writes for the ;
• Veronica Mollod, a rising senior and current events editor at , the student newspaper at the High School of American Studies at Lehman College in the Bronx, N.Y.;
• Tova Weiss, a recent high school graduate in Ann Arbor, Mich., who has split her time between Pioneer High School and . Weiss has written and edited for the and , a publication written by and for Jewish teens.

Here are eight-and-a-half ways 鈥� including one counterintuitive, not-for-attribution observation 鈥� in which AI is changing their realities:

1. In a few schools, AI has overturned the culture of newspapers.

Frydman, the Berkeley student, said strict AI use policies at her publication have bred resentment among student writers. 

鈥淚 think a lot of the people higher up on my paper, and in journalism in general, don’t have a lot of trust in writers anymore, especially with so many AI resources that are out there,鈥� she said. 

Editors are 鈥渧ery harsh on writers鈥� over worries that they鈥檒l use AI, keeping strict controls over documents, she said. They鈥檒l poke around writers鈥� search histories and analyze their typing speed and word choices, matching drafts to previous work. 

鈥淚t’s very strict when you put it all together,鈥� Frydman said. 鈥淭hey don’t have a lot of faith in our ability to actually produce real journalism, and so just assume the worst automatically, which can be a little frustrating when you’re just trying to do your best as a writer.鈥�

At the Berkeley High newspaper, staffers have been let go over suspected AI use. 

Frydman sees the high cost of such heavy-handed policies: 鈥淲e’re here because we love journalism,鈥� she said. 鈥淲e’re here to write about things that we’re hopefully passionate about, and the heavy approach of 鈥楾here’s no tolerance whatsoever,鈥� and not even giving writers the grace and the trust to make their own decisions and do this work on their own 鈥� just minding it and monitoring it so heavily, I think it’s very discouraging.鈥�

More broadly, getting caught using AI to write academic assignments carries weighty consequences, she said. You鈥檙e unable to get a letter of recommendation from any teacher, Frydman said. 

And a single infraction travels fast: Get caught using AI once, she said, and teachers will tell all of their colleagues 鈥渢o watch out because this student has used AI before 鈥� they might use it in your class.鈥�

2. AI is changing how 鈥� and how much 鈥� students write.

Frydman said she鈥檚 adopting what鈥檚 basically a minimalist approach to writing these days, holding back details so she doesn’t draw suspicion from editors or teachers. 

Though she doesn鈥檛 use AI for writing, she said, 鈥淎 lot of times, I find myself sort of slimming down my writing to not go so into detail on things because it鈥檒l be suspected to be something that’s not original. You don’t have a lot of room to be creative in this process, so it’s definitely been a little challenging.鈥�

Ann Arbor鈥檚 Weiss said she鈥檚 also seeing many young journalists 鈥渁djust their writing voice鈥� to avoid being flagged as relying on AI. Many students, she said, now intentionally add typos to their writing to support its legitimacy. 鈥淚t’s absolutely devastating to watch how many people are intentionally damaging or diminishing the quality and authenticity of their work,鈥� she said. 

At Berkeley High, school-issued Chromebooks are locked down to block access to ChatGPT, Claude and other major AI tools outright 鈥� and any attempt to reach them gets flagged. 鈥淚t notifies the teacher through this program that we have called Go Guardian, which is embedded into a lot of the Chromebooks, where they can sort of see what you’re doing and be able to call you out on it,鈥� Frydman said.

3. A few newsrooms are writing AI policies.

At Youth Environmental Press Team, where Weiss is an editor, staffers have been talking 鈥渋n pretty much every director’s meeting鈥� about the implications and problems surrounding AI. 鈥淲e are an environmental publication, which means a lot of us are very climate-conscious.鈥�

The environmental impacts of AI data centers are a cause of great concern, Weiss said.

After fielding a wave of questions from reporters, the publication developed formal guidelines rather than instituting an outright ban on AI. 鈥淚t was always very clear for us that we would not publish or even entertain the idea of publishing anything that was written by a chatbot or any kind of generative AI,鈥� Weiss said. But they soon got queries from reporters asking if they could use AI for outlining, for formatting statistics, for interview transcriptions and the like.

The policy that emerged prohibits AI-written and AI-edited work, including work that heavily uses tools like Grammarly. But transcription services and basic spell-check are still allowed. 

The organization, she said, wants to make writing 鈥渁s accessible as possible so people can have their work published 鈥� but not if that means it’s not really their work, and especially not if that’s at the cost of the environment.鈥� 

4. Other newsrooms rely on experience and vibes.

Weiss helped craft the formal AI policy at the environmental journal. At jGirls+ Magazine, by contrast, she said there鈥檚 no written policy. But in practice the standard is clear: Submissions and even staff applications that appear to be AI-generated are not accepted. In one case, she recalled, an obviously AI-written editorial board application 鈥� with a stiff style that lacked personal voice 鈥� tested with an AI detector as 100% AI, 鈥渨hich was really something none of us had expected.鈥�

Weiss said AI detectors should be used only 鈥渨hen there is already prior reason to suspect something might have been AI generated鈥� 鈥� a student with a track record of misusing AI, for instance, or because something just simply reads a little 鈥渙ff.鈥�

5. In most cases, AI detectors are widely seen as unreliable.

Weiss described a tiered system in the environmental outlet鈥檚 workflow, with writers operating on an 鈥渉onor system鈥� but with student editors flagging 鈥渟ketchy鈥� pieces such as those that are missing statistical sources or those that quote dubious ones 鈥� or writing that doesn’t sound like a typical teenager’s.

鈥淭he thing about student voices is typically each writer has a distinctive style of writing,” she said. 鈥淲e’re high schoolers: We have typos, we make mistakes in there. And if we’re finding something that’s void of personal style or just generally reads in a way that doesn’t seem like it was written by a student, we’re going to look into that further.鈥� 

But she and others worry that using an AI detector could unfairly flag strong writing as suspicious simply because it’s polished 鈥� a phenomenon that happens more than you鈥檇 think in many schools, Weiss suggested.

AI detectors aren’t really reliable, said Frydman, the Berkeley senior, 鈥渟o even if you write something really well, it’ll just automatically assume that it might be AI and your writing will get flagged, which has happened to a lot of my friends.鈥� 

6. A few simple rules can keep AI from taking over, journalists say.

Mollod, the New York City journalist, said a somewhat arcane editing rule at her publication basically serves to help keep AI-generated content at bay: At Common Sense, every article is required to include a quote from a student in each grade level 鈥� a structural feature that makes it hard for AI to intrude, since students typically remember what they鈥檝e said to a reporter. 

7. In a few cases, teachers are using AI more than students.

The journalists described several instances in which teachers, not students, were the ones turning to AI, relying on the technology to formulate lesson plans, create assignments and grade them.

One student who asked not to be quoted directly spoke of a teacher who 鈥渨ill just copy and paste straight off of Chat GPT or Claude, and just give us assignments that are so clearly AI that it’s ridiculous.鈥�

Others rely on it for grading assignments, which 鈥渓eads to a lot of people getting unfair grades, because AI can mess up,鈥� said the student.

The more teachers rely on the technology, 鈥渢he easier it is to just forget that you’re there for a reason, you’re trying to do your job for a reason 鈥� and AI should not be teaching kids Spanish or English or math or anything like that. It can’t reproduce real thinking. So it’s definitely a little dystopian.鈥�

8. For many students, refusing AI isn’t a school rule. It’s personal.

Weiss, the Ann Arbor writer, said she has never used Open AI鈥檚 popular ChatGPT, due to environmental concerns over data centers as well as personal concerns over AI more broadly. 鈥淚t just does not align with my morals at all,” she said. 

But casual AI use has become normalized among many of her peers, she said, with students openly saying, sometimes within earshot of teachers, that they ran an assignment through a chatbot the night before it was due.

The best way to fight AI, she said, is basically to boycott it. 鈥淭he strongest way anyone can combat artificial intelligence is just by refusing to have anything to do with it,鈥� she said.

While AI-generated writing more broadly can damage the way that people learn and is worth thinking about, Mollod said, she鈥檚 not sure that it has gotten to the point where 鈥渏ust everyone is just cheating, and no one’s really actually taking their work seriously.鈥�

She reads the coverage and believes most people who don鈥檛 spend time in schools overestimate how much teens use AI. 鈥淧eople not in school are like, 鈥榃ell, I didn’t have this great tool. If I had it, I wouldn’t have done anything,鈥欌�� she said. But relying on the technology, which showed up in the middle of her eighth-grade year, isn鈥檛 yet common practice for most students she knows. 

Whether future students will warm to it more isn鈥檛 yet clear, Mollod said.

Weiss, the Michigan student, said her work 鈥� especially at the environmental publication 鈥� has taken on a new significance in the age of AI, pushing to celebrate and highlight 鈥渁uthentic youth journalism and youth narrative鈥� in the face of encroaching technology. 鈥淚n my view,鈥� she said, 鈥渄emonstrating our talents as humans and as youth is a form of silent protest against AI by proving that artificial intelligence isn’t necessary to produce professional-quality journalism.鈥�

Bonus: Non-AI cheating abides. 

On background, one of the students said she thought a lot of the news coverage about AI cheating, while serious, simply misses the point. The old-fashioned kind of cheating, for now, remains much more common. In 2026, students are still relying on copying each other’s homework, just as generations before them did. 

鈥淢ostly it’s just, like, circles of people, where there’ll be a math class and five people do the homework 鈥� and the other 20 got it from this person, [who] got it from this person, [who] got it from this person 鈥� which has always kind of been going on.鈥�

On the second day, one of the teens was fed up. Gemini was broken, she told me. It kept asking her questions instead of answering them. She was adamant that ChatGPT was a better tool, and that we should use it instead. 

What she didn’t know was that I had told Gemini to behave that way, to question her about her daily reading instead of just handing her answers. Then she scrolled up and read the instructions I had written into the prompt, and her annoyance turned to understanding. She wasn’t fighting a broken tool; she was being forced to pause and think.

The next day, she scored 100% on a quiz covering the prior day’s reading. She started leaning into our daily lessons, taking the time to answer questions thoughtfully instead of rushing through them. During our final session, she was one of the last students to turn in her quiz, making her mom wait a few extra minutes while she finished. Unheard of, especially over summer break.

That moment showed what鈥檚 possible when AI tools are built to make students actively think rather than think for them.

Over the course of a week, I gave the students a series of short readings about how their own brains work, and each day they used AI in a different way to deepen their understanding. Some days, I had the tool summarize the reading and told them to simply use that summary to build their understanding of the material. Other days, the tool had them engage in a Socratic Q&A. And some days it made them write their own question first, letting their own curiosity lead the process.

Then I quizzed them on what they remembered, both after their study session that same day and again a day later.

The results were fascinating. On the same-day quiz, students performed about the same, regardless of whether the AI tool had summarized the reading or questioned them. But a day later, the students who had engaged in the Socratic Q&A remembered more, scoring, on average, 83% on a quiz about the material they had reasoned through, versus 67% on the material the AI had summarized for them. More than two-thirds of the students said the version of AI that questioned them helped them learn more than the one that just summarized their readings.

Throughout the week, the students鈥� perception of their own skill in using AI as a study partner rose sharply. But when I lined those ratings up against what they could actually remember, the two had almost nothing to do with each other. How much students鈥� confidence in using AI grew had almost nothing to do with how much they had retained. Feeling like you have learned is not the same as actually learning.

This should worry anyone who cares about education. AI is everywhere. Students carry these tools in their pockets. School districts are slated to spend in the coming years, without a clear idea of what they should be evaluating those contracts on. My week-long pilot program taught me that AI tools cannot be judged by student engagement or satisfaction alone. Success cannot be gauged by whether students finish a problem set, or whether they enjoy a particular lesson. It must be measured by what a student retains after the tool disappears.

My students told me one more thing worth highlighting. They want to learn to use AI as a thinking partner, but no one has taught them how. When they play around with AI to get answers, they often can鈥檛 obtain explanations at their own grade and language level. They told me it is sometimes harder to get what they need from these tools than to study on their own. The students who could benefit most from personalized learning get the least usable output, perpetuating the very inequity these tools are supposed to close. 

That is why AI literacy must be taught in schools. Kids with tech-savvy parents are already learning to use AI well; the rest are typing in prompts and hoping for the best. School is the one place that can close that gap.

A College Board last fall found that the share of high schoolers using it for schoolwork had climbed to 84%, with about half using it to brainstorm, revise essays or research topics. A follow-up found that high-achieving students 鈥� and those who are perhaps experiencing 鈥渟enioritis鈥� 鈥� are the most expansive users of AI. 

A new survey by the nonprofit Common Sense Media offers another set of key data points, looking at teens’ own sense of how they use the technology 鈥� and what AI is doing to their thinking.

The nationally representative sample of 1,017 U.S. teens ages 13 to 17, conducted in April and May, found that 70% now use AI for schoolwork, but that fewer than one in three say a teacher has ever talked with them about using it safely. And just one in four have discussed with a teacher how to tell whether AI-generated information is accurate.

Here are five things to know about the findings:

1. Most teens say they鈥檙e using AI to support their thinking, but nearly as many see it as an answer machine.

Among the 70% of teens who use AI, 77% say they use it as a support tool, using it for brainstorming, checking their work and getting feedback on writing, for instance. And 66% say it helps them understand schoolwork, not just finish it faster.

But 63% separately report going straight to a chatbot for an answer rather than working their way to it themselves. Of those, 25% use AI output as-is, while 31% rewrite it to sound like their own voice. Another 35% 鈥渋mprove it with what they know.鈥� 

And yes, the 77% and 63% figures add up to more than 100%. That鈥檚 because many teens say they are, at different times, different kinds of AI users, either looking for support and brainstorming or simply zeroing in on a quick answer, depending on the assignment. 

Former U.S. Education Secretary John King, an advisory board member for the nonprofit鈥檚 , said the 63% figure is worrying 鈥渂ecause we can’t allow AI to become a substitute for students doing the learning themselves.鈥�

Much of that will fall to teachers, he said, who must change their basic practices. 鈥淪ome of that is old-fashioned blue books and saying, 鈥榃e’re going to do some of the writing in class,鈥� complementing a written assignment with an oral presentation in class so you know that students are really doing the work.鈥�

He acknowledged that changing course design 鈥渋s really hard,鈥� there鈥檚 really no alternative. 鈥淚 think this is really a moment where the entire K 12 sector has to think through: 鈥楬ow do we help students understand AI safety and appropriate use of AI tools, and how do we adapt teaching and learning assessment so that students are doing the intellectual work?鈥欌�� 

2. Teens know that AI takes a cognitive toll.

Many of those who rely on AI for schoolwork acknowledge that it鈥檚 changing how they think: 38% say having AI available leads them to develop fewer original ideas, and 39% say that when they use AI to complete assignments, they feel they’re missing out on learning.

Darren Lam, 18, a recent graduate of New York鈥檚 , said AI use was widespread among his classmates. 鈥淎 very large percentage of people that I know either regularly use, or have at some point used, AI to just completely do an assignment for them,鈥� he said. 鈥淪o I think that the concern of AI being used as a cheating tool is definitely not invalid.鈥�

But he said the bigger problem is students not coming clean about their motivation 鈥� or lack of motivation 鈥� to learn. 鈥淚f students wanted to genuinely learn and were willing to be honest about their own work, then giving them free access to AI would not encourage them to cheat in the first place,鈥� he said.

As it is, for many students school simply isn鈥檛 relevant, he said. 鈥淭hey think that many of the things that they learn in the modern education system aren’t particularly beneficial once they leave the four walls, and I think because of that they want to just skip through it as fast as they can. And the fastest way is by just getting AI to do all your work and then submitting it.鈥�

3. School AI bans don鈥檛 really work. 

Among teens who use AI for schoolwork, 44% say they’ve had an AI tool blocked on a school device or network. Yet 59% of these students say they simply switched to a personal device with less oversight 鈥� and less support 鈥� than a school-managed device or network.

Lam, who plans to major in electrical engineering in college, said his Staten Island high school has a fairly open policy about AI 鈥� it鈥檚 full of future coders and computer engineers, after all 鈥� but he worries more broadly that schools limiting access to AI tools could backfire.

鈥淎lthough it can sometimes prevent some harmful behavior that may arise,鈥� he said, 鈥渋t also prevents students from learning how to use it effectively, which is going to be a very pivotal skill coming into this job market.鈥澛�

4. Teens are clear on which skills matter most going forward.

Asked to name the skills that matter most for their future, teens zeroed in on a few key ones, dubbed 鈥渢he human skills that AI can’t or shouldn’t replace鈥� by Common Sense:

• 55% chose 鈥渨orking well with others鈥澛�
• 50% chose 鈥渇act-checking and critical thinking鈥�
• 48% chose 鈥渞eading and understanding complex information鈥�

King, the former Education Secretary, who the State University of New York, said helping students develop these skills in response to AI will be difficult, but educators can鈥檛 bury their heads in the sand.

鈥淚 think a lot of teachers already, understandably, feel overwhelmed by the core challenge of getting students the academic knowledge and skills they need,鈥� he said. Noting that many schools are still doing 鈥渞ecovery work鈥� from the disruption of the COVID pandemic, he said, 鈥淚’m sure it feels like a lot. That’s certainly true for our faculty at SUNY, but I think the reality is these tools are here. Students are using them, and we have to respond thoughtfully.鈥澛�

5. AI literacy instruction in schools is the exception, not the rule. 

The new findings arrive Tuesday alongside the launch of a new Common Sense and a new AI and Student Well-Being professional development course. The curriculum offers a research-backed framework for building students’ AI literacy skills through two courses, one designed for K-8 students and a second for high school students.  

According to the survey findings, only 30% of teens overall say a teacher has ever talked with them about how to use AI safely 鈥� and just 26% say teachers have discussed how to evaluate whether AI-generated information is accurate or trustworthy.

Alex Kotran, CEO of the , said that鈥檚 especially troubling, given AI鈥檚 prominence in kids鈥� lives. 鈥淭he fact that 70% of kids haven’t had a conversation about AI safety is a pretty big alarm bell, because it means the kids are using this stuff, and a lot of them are flying blind.鈥�

Key to addressing the crisis of students using AI to offload cognitive effort, he said, is  training teachers how it works. 鈥淭here is no solution that doesn’t involve a teacher just understanding how AI can be used, and through that understanding [and] adapting assignments and lessons.鈥�

Like other observers, Kotran suggests that teachers use this moment to rethink assessments, turning to in-class demonstrations, talks and the like to ensure that students understand material. 

鈥淓ven if a student is going home and using AI, it’s not going to help them because ultimately they’re going to have to go and demonstrate their knowledge in the classroom,鈥� Kotran said. 鈥淚 think it is as simple as that. There are other ways to adapt assignments, but I think it’s really hard to adapt your assignments if you don’t understand what AI is actually capable of.鈥�

It鈥檚 move-in week for college students across North Carolina. And once students have gotten settled into their dorms, their attention will turn to getting the classes needed to fulfill their chosen major. But which career paths are a safe bet in 2026?

U.S. employers in July. Job creation for May and June was also revised downwards, showing a combined loss of 103,000 positions.

A report by outplacement and executive coaching firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas found artificial intelligence remains , accounting for almost 11,000 of the announced cuts last month. It鈥檚 the fifth straight month AI has been the leading explanation that employers have provided for eliminating jobs.

鈥淎I is shifting the labor market, it is not dismantling it,鈥� Andy Challenger, chief revenue officer for Challenger, Gray & Christmas, in their latest report.

Technology, financial firms, and the government sector accounted for the most job losses in July.

Gerald Cohen, chief economist with the Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise, calls the latest employment data worrying.

Cohen said economists are actively debating whether AI is going to create massive job losses in certain fields 鈥� careers one would want to avoid 鈥� or if it will create new career pathways.

Careers to see major disruptions in the near future include marketing and public relations, customer service, technical writing, journalism and web development.

Cohen says ultimately, it may come down to how a person uses artificial intelligence to their advantage.

鈥淚f you鈥檙e a critical thinker, learn how to use AI and learn how to leverage it, [choose] whatever field that鈥檚 going to inspire you,鈥� Cohen said in a call with reporters.

North Carolina State University economist Dr. Mike Walden said two or three years ago, he would absolutely have recommended a young person heading to college pursue a degree in technology. It鈥檚 a less safe bet these days.

鈥淣ow that鈥檚 up in the air because of AI,鈥� said Walden. 鈥淎I is a technology that can replace people.鈥�

Walden believes that while it鈥檚 unclear to what extent that may happen, AI is more likely to change certain jobs than to eliminate them.

鈥淭here鈥檚 a part of decision making that only humans can do,鈥� Walden said.

Walden told NC Newsline the uncertainty AI creates may help promote social sciences.

鈥淪ocial sciences are fields where you rely on human interaction, being able to assess other people, being able to work with other people,鈥� explained Walden. 鈥淭hat鈥檚 actually something that I would tell students going to college, and say, certainly look at technology, but don鈥檛 forget the social sciences. I think that may very well have a rebirth in the new economy that has AI.鈥�

Walden said skilled trades are another area where AI can鈥檛 easily replace humans.

鈥淚鈥檓 also a big promoter of skilled fields that maybe require just community college,鈥� said Walden. 鈥淲e need entrepreneurs, we need plumbers, we need electricians. That鈥檚 not what a lot of people think about when they go to college, but prospects for those jobs, I think, are very, very good.鈥�

For those newly graduated or early career professionals who are still struggling to land a job, Cohen says it may not be AI鈥檚 fault.

鈥淥ne of the reasons why the unemployment rate for folks with bachelor鈥檚 has been rising faster than the unemployment rate with folks without a bachelor鈥檚 degree is not because of AI, but because of the impact of remote work and the fact that it鈥檚 harder to gain [certain] skills from, and it鈥檚 harder to learn from other workers when you鈥檙e remote,鈥� said Cohen.

Cohen said he鈥檚 a big proponent of flexibility, but the truth is many employers are still grappling with managing and growing employees who aren鈥檛 on-site as the workplace continues to change.

This was originally published by NC Newsline.

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