The New York-based company is developing AI tools to give teachers and students immediate feedback on papers, exams, recorded presentations and even artwork to the 400 public and private schools in the consortium.

Legend.org co-founder Matt Sornson said the company’s platform lets teachers upload student work — either digital files or even photos of handwritten work. AI will then use state, school, or teacher standards to evaluate the work.

The technology will go even further for mastery schools, which gauge how students improve toward mastering soft skills such as communication, collaboration and critical thinking. The AI tools will help teachers track progress on these more subjective skills using indicators educators and researchers are still developing.   

Sornson said that AI tools he is working on will evaluate communication skills, for example, from recorded verbal presentations.

“There’s some pretty pretty cool models around where you can do tone of voice, you can do body language and posture, you can do eye contact,” he said. “There’s a lot of really really cool things you can do with video.”

Sornson said AI would not judge whether a piece of art work is “good,” just technical aspects of it. 

For visual art, he said that could include composition, technical execution, use of materials, visual communication, and originality.

For music, Sornson said, AI could judge “rhythm, pitch and intonation
.” The technology could also “review recordings, video, written scores
and student reflections,” he said. 

He stressed that AI won’t be giving student work the final ratings, just acting as an aide to teachers.

“It does the first pass of assessing (their) rubric and what (they’re) trying to grade,” Sornson said. “(AI) would ingest those assignments, those artifacts, and then do the first pass of assessment. It’s always the teacher choosing the final grade.”

“We are just taking the first version, showing them where they should focus their efforts, and trying to save teachers time,” he added.

That middle ground could be an important one, as educators and researchers nationally sort out how AI can be best used to help teachers grade student work and offer meaningful followup instruction. Some researchers have found AI feedback too lenient to students or to

Several colleges and schools are trying to so it can help teachers and also protect student interests. 

Experts have stressed the importance of being transparent with students about how much teachers use AI and of making sure the technology isn’t showing any troublesome biases. Having humans make important decisions also matters, wrote Amanda Hirsch, an assistant director of the Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning at Northern Illinois in a

“As we stand at this crossroads of education and emerging technology, the question isn’t whether to use AI in grading, but how to use it ethically and intelligently,” Hirsch wrote.

The Mastery Transcript Consortium is a group of schools that has developed a new report card and transcript model that skips A-F grades in favor of tracking student progress on dozens of academic and soft skills, such as collaboration, communication and critical thinking.

In 2024, it merged with the Educational Testing Service, the company known for running the SAT and GRE college admissions tests, joining the Skills for the Future effort by ETS and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching to better assess how well students are learning skills and to prove those skills to colleges and employers.

But ETS decided to focus on creating new assessments and less on report cards. It sold the consortium and its transcript model last month to the for-profit for an undisclosed amount.

Consortium founder Scott Looney, head of the private Hawken School in Cleveland, Ohio, said he is also excited about how AI can help teachers. AI, he said, can reduce the time teachers spend reading and grading student work and can offer immediate feedback to both students and teachers that they can discuss and shift quickly toward improving. 

Gauging how well students are doing on soft skills — such as self-direction, generating solutions or synthesizing information — isn’t simple, either, he said. Students build portfolios of work across multiple courses that show their progress on multiple skills. AI, he said, can evaluate progress across many pieces of work and summarize them much faster than teachers — and later college admissions staff — can.

“If we can make this easier for students to pull their portfolios together, easier for teachers to get feedback to the kids about the quality of the work in their portfolios, and then easier for the receivers of our transcripts that are full of portfolios to interpret them, I think this is going to go exponential,” Looney said.

Over time, Looney said, he hopes students could even submit work to the platform on their own for suggestions before turning it in to a teacher.

A key feature of the upcoming tools, Sornson said, is that student work can be measured against any standards a school chooses. That could include public breakdowns of skills and subskills — such as those from ETS and Carnegie, , or — or any that schools develop themselves.

Looney said colleges or employers might eventually be able to submit their own standards for skills they want from applicants for AI to use to measure student work from all four years of high school.

Though Looney said one of his campuses that uses the mastery report cards will try the AI tools out as Legend offers them, other schools in the consortium are still learning about the sale and haven’t said yet what they plan to do. 

“I would be surprised if schools decide to forsake the AI tools as they will be highly accurate and save students and teachers time,” Looney said.

Looney said he was concerned at first that the transcript model he created with other schools would turn into a for-profit product. But he said the partnership relied on grants to operate that are not sustainable. The computerized system that creates the transcripts also needed improvements Legend is already doing, making it easier for new schools to join.

The split from ETS and Carnegie is friendly. Both Looney and Laura Slover, who heads the Skills for the Future effort of ETS and Carnegie, will be on an advisory board to the new company.

My job is to tell a student, kindly, when an argument is not working yet. But the machine had just told them it was. Not because the machine was broken, but because it had been optimized to agree.

For two years, educators have warned students that artificial intelligence makes things up. It can give a wrong answer wearing a confident face, a phenomenon known as hallucination. But there is also a quieter failure we have barely named, and it is more corrosive because it feels like support.

Researchers call it sycophancy: when an AI system flatters, agrees with or validates a user even when a correction would be more truthful. A hallucination is a wrong answer. Sycophancy is a wrong relationship.

When students head back to school at the end of the summer, AI will already be part of their schoolwork. Last year, the ⁠ that 84%of high school students used generative AI for schoolwork, and a February ⁠ found that 54% of U.S. teens had used chatbots for assignments: writing, summarizing articles or videos, studying, and creating or editing images.

A from Turkey illustrates why this is a problem. Nearly 1,000 high school students were given help from an AI math tutor powered by GPT-4, the technology behind ChatGPT, while practicing math. They solved more practice problems with the tool. But when the tool was taken away for the real test, students who had used the less restricted version, which could provide more direct answers, scored 17% worse than students who had no AI help. In the same study⁠, a guarded tutor – designed to give hints instead of answers – avoided that drop in test performance.

AI can make learning look easier while quietly removing the struggle that makes learning stick. In writing and analysis, where judgment matters, it can even encourage students to do inferior work.

Learning runs on friction: the red pen, the Socratic question, the “not yet, try again.” Education often tells students they are not right yet so they can become right. A tool engineered to affirm removes a core foundation that education depends on.

In April 2025, OpenAI rolled back a version of GPT-4o after it had become, in the company’s words, “⁠.” The company later admitted it hadn’t tested for sycophancy before rolling it out to hundreds of millions of users. OpenAI pushed a temporary system-prompt fix, then returned users to the earlier version. The rollback fixed that release, but it didn’t address the broader problem of AI systems becoming too agreeable when users need correction.

The pattern is not limited to one chatbot. In March 2026, a Stanford-led team published a ⁠ across eleven leading models. When users asked for guidance about personal situations and relationships the models affirmed their actions 49% more often than humans did. In prompts involving deception, illegality or other harms – such as lying, manipulation or socially irresponsible behavior – they endorsed the behavior 47% of the time. People who interacted with sycophantic AI became more convinced they were right and more likely to trust and reuse the tool. 

A student who asks whether a weak thesis is strong, whether thin evidence is enough or whether a draft is ready to submit may not be looking for praise. They may be looking for a teacher. If the tool offers confidence instead of correction, the student never feels the discomfort that turns a half-formed idea into a real one.

I am not arguing that students should avoid these tools. But every student using AI should ask: When has this tool stopped helping me think and started flattering me into not thinking?

That confusion may cost the most among the students I work hardest to reach. At a historically Black university, I teach young people who are brilliant and underestimated, who are wary of how institutions judge them and who sometimes turn to AI because it does not seem to judge at all. 

For students surrounded by regular, trusted feedback, an over-flattering tutor may be an annoyance. But for those with fewer chances to get honest, trusted feedback, it can become a closed loop: The student asks, the machine praises, and no one tells the truth. 

A 2026 Stanford study of ⁠ makes that worry more concrete: identical essays received different feedback depending on how the student was described, with essays attributed to Black students receiving more praise and less substantive criticism. That is not reassuring.

So what do we do?

First, educators should teach AI as something to interrogate, not an answer machine. Assign students to make the model disagree with them, hunt for the moment it praised a weak argument, and grade that catch. “Where did it just agree with you?” is a teachable skill.

Second, instructors and advisers should change the question they ask about AI help. Not just, “Did it give you an answer?” but, “Did it make you explain your thinking?” “Did it ask what evidence you had?” “Did it push back?” “Did it make the work harder in the right way?”

That kind of friction has worked before when it is built into the tool, giving hints instead of answers, asking questions that make students show their reasoning and offering prompts that slow them down before they accept AI advice. In the Turkey study⁠, the guarded version that guided students instead of simply spitting out answers largely avoided the learning harm. Other studies have found that prompts requiring users to ⁠, ⁠, and make their own judgment can reduce blind acceptance of AI advice. Until every tool is designed to slow students down in those ways, adults must teach students to add the friction themselves.

We spend our careers teaching students to tolerate being wrong long enough to get it right. The best AI tutor may not be the one students like most in the moment, but the one that refuses to finish the work for them. The friction was never an obstacle to learning. It was the learning.

NEWNAN, Ga. — Arnco-Sargent Elementary sits in a wooded area on a two-lane road about 50 miles south of Atlanta. Across the street is a child care center. A Baptist church is less than a mile away. 

But if developers get their way, the school’s newest neighbor could be a sprawling data center campus housing the networking infrastructure needed to help power Americans’ reliance on the internet, and increasingly, artificial intelligence.

Families, some who have lived in the area for generations, are opposed, concerned about traffic, noise, water-quality and other adverse effects. In April, the rezoned 832 rural acres to accommodate the industrial development. Project Sail, as it’s called, could be under construction for the next 10 years.  

“I have a first grader. He’ll be in high school by the time it’s even finished,” said Laura Beth, whose tree-lined property backs up to the proposed site. “This will be his whole childhood.”&ČÔČúČő±è;

She chairs , which is to stop the project, while also leading a petition drive to get a referendum against it on the ballot. The battle is one of several nationwide in which the rapid expansion of these “hyperscale” centers is colliding with the daily lives of public school families and staff. Americans depend on data centers to work, shop and learn. Despite the recent backlash to ed tech, one research firm estimates that the global in education will grow to over $136 billion by 2035. 

As demand surges, tech companies look for land that is relatively close to customers and existing electricity and water sources. 

“The closer data is stored to the people and systems relying on it, the faster it loads — a benefit that touches everything from healthcare to the classroom technology students and teachers use every day,” said Dan Diorio, executive vice president of state policy and government affairs at the Data Center Coalition, a membership organization. 

But with concerns about energy use and environmental impacts, local governments — and — have on new data centers, and opponents say officials should restrict building near schools and residential neighborhoods. 

“I would like to say our situation’s unique,” Beth said. “It hurts me that it’s not.”

Nationally, 1,878 public schools sit within a mile of at least one data center or a future facility that is approved for construction, according to researchers at Brown University. Shared exclusively with Âé¶čŸ«Æ·, the analysis of and National Center for Education Statistics data shows that California has by far the largest number of schools close to data centers or buildings-in-progress: 602, representing 32% of the nation’s total.

Ahmed Saeed, an assistant professor in computer science at Georgia Tech, explained that the infrastructure data centers rely on is more widely available near “population centers.” But because dense urban areas don’t have enough affordable land, developers often gravitate to suburban and exurban areas. 

“As the number of data centers continues to grow, it becomes increasingly likely that some will be located near schools and residential neighborhoods,” he said.

The latest , fueled by advancements in AI, is fairly recent, so researchers know little about the long-term effects of attending school near a facility. The Brown team, however, will soon release research showing that math scores are lower among students whose schools are closer to a data center. Companies say they take measures to minimize disruption, like planting trees to absorb sound, and some argue the downsides . 

‘This buzzing noise’

District leaders are among those who say data centers pose too many risks to ignore. 

“AI is not going anywhere,” said Marcia Andrews, a school board member in Palm Beach, Florida. “My biggest concern is that these data centers should be far enough away that it doesn’t harm the community, it doesn’t harm the schools.”

The Palm Beach County commission agreed. In July, members , a 202-acre near the Arden subdivision that would have been “just a football field away,” from Saddle View Elementary School, Andrews said. The vote, however, leaves the door open for the developers to revise and resubmit their plans in the future. Andrews, whose district includes Saddle View, grew curious about the site when she saw crews widening the roads and planting palm trees. 

“People across the country are waking up now saying, ‘My gosh, we never dreamed that we would hear this buzzing noise 24/7,’ ” she said.

One frequent complaint against data centers is the sound coming from cooling systems, fans and generators. In , a resident likened it to a jet engine. Another in , known for having the of data centers in the world, said the inescapable humming makes him “want to curse.”

A from a former NASA safety manager and planning commissioner in Prince William County, Virginia, predicted that classroom noise from data centers near schools would likely exceed recommended levels. A separate in the state found that the sound is “generally quieter than a lawn mower or nearby conversation,” said Diorio, with the Data Center Coalition. But opponents there often share from a mother at Chris Yung Elementary who said her child wouldn’t go outside for recess because of the sound. 

Many data centers use , which would be like “a bunch of semi trucks idling right next to the school,” said Jessica Owens, the director of data at Science for Georgia, a nonprofit. “Would you want your child in a facility next to a place that’s emitting pollutants, especially in the South when we have heat waves that exacerbate those pollutants?”

Noise, she added, would impact a school within a mile, but they also create “heat islands” that can extend up to six miles. 

The closest Project Sail building would be about 1,000 feet from Arnco-Sargent Elementary “with setbacks, tree buffers, berms and other screening incorporated into the design,” said  Mattie Sorrentino, a spokeswoman for Prologis, the company behind the Coweta County project. The site is “well-suited” for the data center because of its close proximity to Plant Yates, a Georgia Power facility. 

The company “will meet or exceed every requirement,” she said. “Our goal is to keep the project out of sight as much as possible.”

‘Impact on achievement’

Even if students can’t see a data center from the playground, their learning may be at risk.

In a forthcoming paper, Brown University researchers will show that students who attend school within a mile of a data center have lower math scores than those who are farther away.

“You can rule out all other factors,” said Samantha Kane, a research associate and part of the university’s Sustainable Education Research Initiative. “It’s actually the proximity to the data center and the potential pollution coming from the data center that is having the impact on achievement and not other things about the region.”

Critics often as one way data centers put a strain on local resources. Early estimates said Project Sail would use 6 to 9 million gallons per day. Now Prologis says it would draw up to roughly 300,000 gallons a day from the Chattahoochee River, and some comparisons from 2023 show data centers use far less water than , like golf courses.

To reduce dependence on the local water supply, Project Sail would use what’s called a “closed-loop” cooling system. But there are . To keep the hardware inside from overheating, those mechanisms are “blowing hot air into the area and increasing the temperature” as much as , Owens said. If there’s already a heat wave, kids might get less recess time outside. The soaring temperatures also on the power grid as residents, businesses and schools crank up the air conditioning to stay comfortable. 

In Virginia this summer, officials in Henrico County, , asked the school system to help cut energy costs that are expected to increase by $5 million. District spokeswoman Eileen Cox said the system, with 81 schools and more than 50,000 students, already takes a “proactive approach” to conserve electricity, like setting thermostats higher and operating a four-day work week during the summer.

The state, however, just enacted a new on data centers to offset some of the decline in revenue from tax breaks. from state and local taxes also make Georgia a preferred site for the industry. At this point, how many data centers are operating or proposed in Georgia, but Arnco-Sargent isn’t the only school in the state near land eyed by developers.

Closer to Atlanta, residents in Lovejoy are petitioning against a facility that would potentially sit between Michelle Obama STEM Academy and Eddie White Middle Academy.  

The site plan envisions about 3.5 million square feet and 15 buildings of data center space on at least 400 acres, said Clayton County , who has scheduled a community meeting for this Saturday. 

The community, she said, “naturally has serious, legitimate questions about the cumulative, long-term impacts.”

Traffic concerns

Schools in the vicinity of these facilities can feel the effects even before sites are operational. An elementary school in northeast Louisiana last year to protect students from the thousands of cement trucks and 18-wheelers traveling every day to what is expected to be . There were at least three truck crashes last year, and one smashed into the school’s gate. 

For Project Sail, Prologis agreed to some road improvements as a condition for the rezoning. Sorrentino said construction trucks would be routed away from the school and that when finished, the project would “generate limited traffic.”

But families are still worried. The intersection that parents and school bus drivers navigate for drop off and pick up every day doesn’t have a traffic light. 

The school has a long history in the community. Now 70 years old, Arnco-Sargent consolidated two older schools that used to serve children from local mill villages. But in 1996, the area’s leading textile company went bankrupt, families moved away and the area, Beth said, has never prospered like other parts of Coweta County. Nearly 60% of the school’s students live in poverty. 

“These people are just trying to make a living,” she said. Compared to those who the Palm Beach project, Arnco-Sargent parents perhaps have been less outspoken. “They don’t have time to go to a meeting at 6:00 on a Tuesday. They’re working and have young kids.”&ČÔČúČő±è;

But Beth is hopeful. At the first signature-gathering event, as residents waited to sign the petition. The organizers have nearly reached their goal of 14,000 signatures 

“I feel that this is what it took for the county to listen,” she said.

Drawing on this source material, Claude can generate lessons and materials aligned to an educator’s state standards and curriculum. Given how much teacher time goes into that kind of planning, it’s easy to see why CfT is appealing.

We’re glad to see artificial intelligence’s potential being tapped to help teachers individualize instruction at a scale that wasn’t possible even a few years ago. We are also happy to see a major frontier lab with the resources and technical skills to do it. But public school systems don’t operate like the private companies and government agencies Anthropic is used to working with. Teachers face legal exposure around sharing student data that simply doesn’t exist in those sectors.

This creates a severe employment risk for educators. 

Anthropic’s own shows the problem: “Analyze class data to plan instruction. Hand Claude a folder of data — roster, diagnostics, attendance, your own notes — and it builds a clear picture of where every student is, allowing teachers to better tailor instruction. You control what data is shared; nothing you share is used in model training.”

While this pitch appeals directly to overburdened educators, encouraging them to hand over those kinds of data immediately puts them at risk, because it invites teachers to sidestep district policy and, potentially, state and federal law.

CfT’s privacy terms are stronger than those of ordinary consumer AI products: It does not train on teacher inputs or outputs, and it offers data encryption, deletion rights, audits and breach notification. Anthropic says its with teachers is “written to comply with FERPA” — federal student privacy law — but that’s a claim about how the contract is drafted, not a promise that any individual teacher’s use is lawful.Ìę

Here’s the problem: The marketing prompt to “hand Claude a folder of data” (even with the added disclaimer to check district policies) directly conflicts with CfT’s terms of service in two ways. First, the terms require that the teacher have the authority to designate Anthropic as a “school official.” But FERPA dictates that a vendor qualifies as a “school official” only if the district designates it as such and if the vendor is under the district’s “direct control.” An individual teacher can’t make that designation.Ìę

Second, the terms of service require teachers to indemnify Anthropic for claims arising from what they upload. These terms also cap Anthropic’s liability. In short, the educator, not Anthropic, is assuming the risk. 

While the marketing describes an appealing set of features, the terms lay out requirements that are legally impossible for a teacher to meet. If educators agree to these terms and upload data, they could potentially be fired for it. These risks are even greater when any information about students with disabilities (like an individualized education program) or medical conditions (like a Section 504 plan) is shared. 

Both authors have spent years working with school district bureaucracies, so we know firsthand how hard the purchasing process can be and how legal barriers around data privacy and security can slow the adoption of innovative technology. We both agree that the procurement and purchasing process needs reform to enable such adoption, but bypassing districts and going straight to individual teachers defies fundamental tenets of education policy and practice. 

We want tools like CfT to work and to be used. But there need to be changes in how Anthropic (and other large-scale AI providers gain access to data. The way to make this work is to build data access and governance rules that school systems themselves control. Currently, several initiatives are underway to make this a reality. For example, the , the and the are active state- and district-led initiatives working to develop sophisticated, standards-based AI data access systems within district control. They ensure that AI models can draw on state-specific standards and curriculum and local classroom data where allowed, without requiring individual educators to take on the risk of feeding sensitive student information into third-party tools without the authority to do so.Ìę

Building such technology systems and their governance is hard and time-consuming work that may go against the “move fast and break things” ethos that many tech companies embody. But Anthropic and other AI labs should be collaborating with states and school districts to help build and even assist in funding such systems for the public benefit. They would be part of the solution to this knotty problem instead of fueling the growing AI backlash in public education.

When students return to school this fall in the Salamanca City Central School District in Western New York, a new kind of teacher will be ready to greet them. The small, rural district located on the Seneca Nation reservation is set to be one of the first in the country to put a humanoid robot in a classroom. It will not replace the classroom teacher, but is programmed to provide learning support to both students and educators. 

At a board meeting last month, the Cattaraugus County school district agreed to purchase the robot from Realbotix, a tech company, along with an artificial intelligence teacher’s assistant program allowing students to interact with an avatar of the robot on laptops. 

“This deployment in a working school district represents a landmark moment for both AI and humanoid robotics,” said Andrew Kiguel, CEO of Realbotix, which is currently building the robot. “Salamanca marks the beginning of a new era where humanoid robots and intelligent AI assistants become standard tools in STEM ±đ»ćłÜłŠČčłÙŸ±ŽÇČÔ.”&ČÔČúČő±è;

The female robot, named Sally, will have a “lifelike appearance” with silicone skin and long brown hair, Kiguel said in an interview with New York Focus. It will be stationary in a seated position but have a wide range of upper-body movements and facial expressions.

Students will use a unique identification code when interacting with the robot during class, allowing it to access their learning data and provide personalized support based on their past communication with the avatar, Kiguel said. “They’ll be able to say, ‘Hey, I’m student number 1234,’ and then the robot will be like, ‘Hey, we were talking about this yesterday, do you want to continue that conversation?’ ” 

Salamanca plans to introduce the robot and avatar in its high school AI and robotics courses, which use developed by Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak to prepare students for high-demand tech jobs. The district plans to expand it to high school students in other classes if the pilot is successful. 

Salamanca Superintendent Mark Beehler explained the district’s embrace of AI. “Many schools are taking the easy solution of simply banning it, but I have found that students will find a way around most rules that schools put in place,” Beehler said in a written response to questions. “I also believe it is critical for schools to teach proper use of technology, not simply exclude it.”&ČÔČúČő±è;

During and after school hours, students will be able to use the avatar to receive help with assignments. Kiguel said students could upload photos of homework for feedback, ask the avatar to generate lessons on topics that interest them, or receive real-time translations in over 100 languages. Unlike other Realbotix robots, Salamanca’s robot will not have advanced features such as facial recognition and recording. 

The robot will also serve as a classroom resource. If a teacher loses their place during a lesson or needs a prompt on what comes next, Kiguel said, they can ask the robot for guidance because it has been loaded with the district’s curriculum. 

The products cost the district $57,590, according to  attached to the school board agenda. Kiguel said the price was discounted; the company’s website lists the M-Series robot, the model purchased by the district, at a starting price of $95,000. 

The plan has sparked debate online, with some calling it a forward-looking, innovative step for the district and others expressing concern about the broader implications of further integrating AI into schools, particularly in an underserved area. 

Salamanca is the only incorporated city in the United States located entirely within a Native American reservation. The school district serves roughly 1,300 students, including 32% who identify as American Indian or Alaska Native and 79% who are economically disadvantaged.Ìę

“We already have so many issues in our community, including environmental issues. I just don’t understand the concept of adding AI onto that,” said local parent Sierra Abrams, who learned about the technology in a . “Bringing it into the school district is contradicting everything we believe, in my opinion.”&ČÔČúČő±è;

For the past few months, the company has worked to establish guardrails to ensure student safety. Kiguel said the robot and avatar were trained on the district’s curriculum and will always redirect the conversation back to education. References to suicide, self-harm, or other flagged terms would automatically alert school administrators.

In a demonstration for New York Focus, Kiguel told the avatar that he was being bullied at school and wanted to get revenge on the student. 

“I’m really sorry that happened to you. Being picked on and having rocks thrown at you is not okay, and that must have felt upsetting and maybe even scary,” the avatar responded. “The best next step is to tell a trusted adult at school right away, like a teacher, counselor or principal, and let your parent or guardian know, too.”&ČÔČúČő±è;

Beehler emphasized the importance of safety and privacy, noting that the robot and avatar operate on a closed system that is not connected to the internet, and that Realbotix will not have access to personally identifiable student information. 

To avoid AI-generated inaccuracies, Beehler said Realbotix trained the robot and avatar to say, “I don’t know,” instead of generating fabricated or misleading responses known as “AI łóČč±ô±ôłÜłŠŸ±ČÔČčłÙŸ±ŽÇČÔČő.”&ČÔČúČő±è;

The Trump administration has promoted the expanded use of AI and technology in education. Early in his second term, President Donald Trump  establishing a taskforce to help integrate AI into curricula and teacher training. In March, First Lady Melania Trump entered a White House technology summit  and invited guests to envision a future where robots educate children in literature, science, art, philosophy, mathematics, and history. 

At the same time, there has been  nationwide, with parents forming groups to push for stronger oversight of AI, and clearer guidelines to limit screen time and ensure digital resources are used appropriately in schools. In May, the New York State United Teachers union called for strict  and screen time in schools, and earlier this month, New York City Public Schools Chancellor Kamar Samuels announced  until the school system finalizes guidance on artificial intelligence later this summer. 

The classroom marks a new venture for Realbotix, a Toronto-based robotics company formerly known as Tokens.com, that helped customers use cryptocurrency to rent “digital land” in the Metaverse. In April 2024, the company acquired Simulcra, the Las Vegas parent company behind RealDoll, which has spent decades  and later expanded into sex robots that remain on the market today. 

In a statement to New York Focus, a spokesperson explained that over the past two years, Realbotix has built a new team focused on education, health care, and wellness applications, and that Realbotix and RealDoll do not share employees, payroll, physical locations, or technology. She said Realbotix “is pursuing a transaction with a Nasdaq-listed company that is intended to separate the businesses at the ownership level” with completion expected by September. 

In recent years, Realbotix has worked to expand its presence in commercial settings. Still, it is best known for its “companion robots,” which are different from sex robots and intended to address what it’s described as a “loneliness epidemic.” Kiguel has previously said the company’s goal is to produce robots and AI that are “indistinguishable from humans.”&ČÔČúČő±è;

Beehler, Salamanca’s superintendent, said the partnership with Realbotix began after a former colleague met an investor at a dinner and discussed the possibility of bringing the company’s robots into the education sector. He was initially cautious about the partnership because it represented uncharted territory for both Realbotix and the school district. But he said the company was receptive to feedback and willing to adapt its products for the unique demands of an educational setting. 

The superintendent acknowledged concerns about students’ increasing screen time and emphasized that AI and robotics should support, not replace, the human connections at the center of education. 

Beehler said the district will measure the success of the program primarily through qualitative feedback from both students and teachers. 

Ryan Schaaf, associate professor of educational technology at Notre Dame of Maryland University, said he was optimistic about the initiative, but cautioned that its success hinges on thoughtful implementation, with teachers actively monitoring and guiding students’ interactions with AI. 

Schaaf acknowledged the backlash against AI in education, but said ignoring the technology is a mistake. “It gives students a true disadvantage because once they leave school, they are going to be immersed in AI technologies.” Instead, he argued that schools should balance AI-assisted learning with traditional instruction to prepare students for life after high school.

State Senator George Borrello, who represents Salamanca and surrounding areas of Western New York, said the program could help level the playing field for students by providing tutoring access to those who might not be able to afford private options and sparking greater interest in STEM. 

Borrello said local leaders have long struggled with keeping young people from leaving Upstate New York after high school. He said investments in technology and STEM education could help show students they can pursue fulfilling, high-paying careers in tech while still building their futures in rural communities like Salamanca.

“One of the biggest things we see right now in technology is people fearing what the future will be with AI. Will it replace the workforce? Will it grow out of control?” he said. “I think this is a great way to get not just the kids but the teachers and the parents more comfortable with what the future may hold.”

This was originally published on .

Taking a computer class at her Fayetteville, N.C., high school, she handed in a paper with the offending word: .

“[The teacher] called me over, and she was like, ‘I don’t want to see you using AI,’ ” the 16-year-old rising junior recalled. If she’d asked, Reaves would have said she didn’t use AI to write the piece — that’s just the way she talks.

“So it was kind of tense,” said Reaves, “and I was definitely upset because she gave me a zero for that assignment.”&ČÔČúČő±è;

High school students, steeped for nearly the past four years in generative artificial intelligence, face this reality daily, attending class largely without a set of agreed-upon guidelines. Over the weekend, a small group of students came together to hammer out a few basic principles for the technology, something akin to an AI Bill of Rights.

Sponsored by a group that includes an and a national , 100 students from all 50 states gathered here to debate a first-of-its-kind set of recommendations, to be shared with district leaders nationwide as AI proliferates rapidly in the lives of both students and teachers.

The nonprofit , which brought the group together, didn’t make the final recommendations immediately available — they’ll be released in coming weeks. But students told Âé¶čŸ«Æ· in interviews they are concerned about a host of problems: cheating, transparency, hallucinations, cognitive offloading, mental health and environmental factors, among others.

Two students from every state debated and ultimately approved the recommendations by a Senate-style roll call vote on Sunday at the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the United States Senate, a museum and conference center that features a of the U.S. Senate Chamber where Kennedy served from 1962 until his death in 2009.

Despite the democratic nature of the proceedings, Day of AI refused to grant Âé¶čŸ«Æ· access over three days to any of the student debates, save for the closing speeches and final vote. 

The organization also clamped down on the text of the proposal, refusing to release a draft that students spent nearly three days discussing freely.

By the time of Sunday’s debate and final vote, nearly 100 students sat in replicas of U.S. senators’ seats, paging through their copies of the bill as staff members and security personnel closely guarded the proceedings. A reporter who picked up a stray copy of the bill on an upholstered bench had the paper quickly snatched away by a staffer, while another swept the area for more copies, gathering them up and tucking them under an arm.

During the proceedings, a few participants called the proposal flawed or incomplete and even, at times, incoherent — one student referred to it as “a block of Swiss cheese.” But in the end he voted “Yea.” In all, 83 students approved the measure, with 15 opposed — two students weren’t present for the final vote.

‘It’s an easy way out’

In the students’ conception, Al literacy instruction should be mandatory as soon as they start using devices in the classroom. The lessons should focus not just on appropriate academic use but on misinformation, plagiarism, bias in Al systems, privacy, environmental impacts and how Al really works.

Ethan Liu, 17, a recent high school graduate from Morgantown, W.Va., said the recommendations are “pretty fair,” especially the section on students. “We basically outline that AI, with the proper supervision, is a great tool for brainstorming and studying,” he said. Liu was one of several students who spoke to Âé¶čŸ«Æ· during breaks in the deliberations.

Liu recalled asking ChatGPT to create sets of practice problems. “That was one of the best ways that I would use to study for a test.”

But he said using AI to answer test questions or to generate art, for instance, is a bridge too far. The guidelines, Liu said, suggest that AI should be a tool “to help kids truly understand the topic without just spoon-feeding them the answer.”

In candid conversations throughout the weekend, students said AI is basically turning their school experience upside down, simultaneously supercharging their ability to learn while threatening to derail many of their classmates — and sowing mistrust between students and teachers.

“It’s an easy way out,” said James Baxter, 14, from St. George, Utah. “People like to know hard things, but learning it is a different story for most people.”

While he relies on tools like Google’s Notebook LM to help him create study guides, Dillian Campbell, 17, a rising senior in Fayetteville, N.C., said that when teachers pass out assignments, he most often sees classmates simply pull out their phones and snap a photo, asking AI to do the rest.

He recalled a math teacher telling students, “I don’t care if you use AI, but if you fail your test, that’s on you because you don’t really know the work.”

Jaelyn Jensen, 17, a rising senior in Lee’s Summit, Mo., noted that early on in discussions, the group concluded that while limiting AI use for young students is crucial, giving middle- and high-schoolers more autonomy with AI makes sense. Teens, she said, need “to make their own decisions, to learn from their own mistakes with AI.” But schools must also teach them how to use it responsibly “and let them know that it is something that is going to be in their future.”

Lucia Herrera, 17, a classmate of Jensen’s from Missouri, said AI has even crept into the speech and debate world, with debaters asking ChatGPT to help them respond to questions about their cases — this, in a world where critical thinking and original voice are a key to success.

While she can make a case for AI aiding in research, Herrera said, “I think it just takes all of the human out of [it].”

Bihmanji Acho, 16, a rising junior from St. Cloud, Minn., said she’s most troubled by the ways in which she sees AI undermining interpersonal relationships. She recalled attending a recent summit in which adults said they use AI “at like two a.m. as a therapist. And I just don’t 
” She paused for a moment. “It hurts my heart. I feel like it hurts my heart to hear that.”

While — or is it whilst? — many might believe that AI offers a crutch for low-skill students, Reaves said we should think again: Many of those who use AI most are “super-smart kids that are, like, just checked out.”

That loss of student agency might be among the most pressing problems AI presents, said Gyimah Whitaker, of the Decatur, Ga., school district. That results in fewer students able to think critically and take risks.

Whitaker, who chaperoned two Georgia students to the event, said her 5,400-student district proudly embraces and the rigorous curriculum. But AI, Whitaker said, undermines the values in both systems, driving students toward completion rather than helping them master difficult tasks.

Luckily, young people are, for now at least, fighting back. She noted that students in her district’s IB program “can be truly offended” if a teacher uses AI to grade their paper. They’ve even proposed a “three-strikes-and-you’re-out” AI rule — for teachers. 

To be sure, the students urged AI literacy for teachers, and Cynthia Breazeal, who directs MIT’s RAISE research program, said that’s no longer optional. 

Actually, the advent of generative AI may require more than just literacy. To truly combat the technology, she said, schools may need to adopt an entirely different pedagogical model, one that encourages students to more deeply engage with material.

She invoked legendary MIT mathematician and computer scientist , who co-developed the Logo programming language in the 1960s and founded what became MIT’s Media Lab. Papert helped popularize the term “” to describe the productive struggle learning something complex often requires. In his conception, children should be encouraged to build things and embrace difficulty, not shun or outsource it. Upon hearing a teacher describe the difficulties a child encountered programming in Logo once in the 1980s, he concluded, “I have no doubt that this kid called the work fun because it was hard rather than in spite of being hard.”

‘A Sputnik moment’?

Chase Johnson, 15, a rising junior in Kenai, Alaska, uses AI “a lot” in his personal life. These days, he said, it’s helping him develop a business to automate processes such as customer service. 

As if to prove it, he’ll pull out his phone to show off no fewer than 10 apps, all of which allow him to explore AI in different ways. “I do a lot of research,” he said.

But in his high school, he said, generative artificial intelligence is largely banned because of students using it to cheat.

Some of that responsibility should be borne by teachers, he said: In writing, for instance, instead of assigning essays that are easily outsourced to a bot, teachers should assign research projects that require students to present their findings in front of a class. “You can’t cheat your way out of that,” Johnson said.

Sarah Zahka, a rising junior in Weston, Fla., said she’s not above using AI when needed. “If I’m stuck on a math problem, I’ll ask it, ‘Hey AI, help me solve this problem step-by-step.’ ”

While she’s worried about AI causing students to lose foundational skills, sometimes she simply needs help brainstorming. In writing, Zahka said, she might ask an AI bot how to approach a topic, “but then I’ll write ethically on my own. Although I’m going to sound like a teenager writing an essay and I might not get the grade that the cheaters get, ultimately I’ll know what level I’m at.”

Jeff Riley, the former Massachusetts who now leads Day of AI, said he’s both excited by the technology’s possibilities — and a bit terrified. He predicted that AI could “kickstart the next revolution in education,” particularly with its ability to help teachers differentiate instruction and personalize learning. “But there’s some bad stuff with it too, right? Bias, voice clones, deep fakes, hallucinations, companions, energy concerns. The list goes on and on and on.”

While deadly serious, he said, those concerns aren’t activating enough adults — this should, by all rights, be “” pushing schools and communities forward, but he sees little urgency. He noted that in 2029, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s international PISA exam will for the first time assess . “I can almost guarantee you right now: American schoolchildren, 15-year-olds, are going to score 30th in the world on AI literacy — on a technology that was largely created in this country.”

On the flight back to Atlanta on Sunday night, Whitaker, the Georgia superintendent, recalled that the two students she accompanied told her they’d split their vote on the recommendations, one approving the plan and one voting No. The one who opposed the measure told her the proposal “didn’t meet the mark completely” and needed more work.

“I think that’s exciting,” Whitaker admitted. “What excites me is that our children are wrestling just like we are — and that level of inquiry as a superintendent is what you want to see in students every single day.”

Now, it is artificial intelligence. And educators must ask: What does this innovation help students learn that they couldn’t without it?

Unlike previous classroom technologies, generative AI can perform the very thinking that many lessons are designed to develop. It can write essays, solve problems, summarize readings and produce analyses that students are meant to do themselves. 

 have now issued AI guidance for schools. Much of it centers on data privacy, human oversight and teacher training, rather than whether a given use of AI is developmentally appropriate for a child.

That leaves the question most states have been skipping: What thinking should students do themselves? To answer that, it helps to look backward. In 1958, psychologist B.F. Skinner designed a  around a simple principle: Students could not move to the next problem until they had produced the correct response themselves. The machine provided immediate feedback, but it never completed the work for the student.

Whatever one thinks of Skinner’s broader work, he understood that students learn by responding to problems, answering questions, making mistakes, receiving feedback and trying again. The student must do the thinking.

But today, generative AI can complete the assignment without the student.

This is referred to as cognitive offloading, handing one’s thinking off to an external system. A  involving about 1,000 high school math students tested this, comparing two versions of an AI chatbot. One answered questions outright. The other offered hints and guidance, but not the answer. Students with the first chatbot performed worse on later exams than those who did not use AI at all. Students who received only hints and guidance performed as well as the no-AI group. One tool did the thinking for students; the other made them think first.

The rule that should anchor any school AI framework is simple. Its role should expand only as a child’s own foundation grows.

In kindergarten through second grade, students are building the skills everything else depends on, including sounding out words, forming letters and developing number sense. How well a child masters these literacy skills  in third and fourth grade, and  is indicative of math performance years later.

Children build those skills by doing the work; such as sounding out words, making errors and trying again. If AI gives students the answer, that productive struggle never happens, and the skill never truly forms.Ìę shows that the more students hand a task to a machine, the less able they become to do it themselves.Ìę

So, in K-2, AI belongs only in the teacher’s hands. There, it can help educators in planning phonics instruction and generating practice at each student’s level.

Third grade marks the shift from learning to read to reading to learn. The same shift happens in math and writing, where the foundational skills become tools for building arguments, drawing inferences and working through problems. That’s what makes a different kind of AI use possible. 

In grades three through five, students should use AI only after they’ve done an assignment themselves, and only under a teacher’s direction. A teacher might take a paragraph a student has written, generate an AI version, and have the class pick out errors and find weak reasoning, wrong facts and claims that do not hold up.

Working with flawed examples is one of the oldest ways to teach analysis, and AI produces an endless supply of them. A  found that when students critique AI-generated work with a teacher’s guidance, their critical thinking improves. The same research points the other way, too; the more readily people trust AI’s output, the less they think for themselves.

By middle school, AI should become something students should study, not just something they use. This is the age when the judgment to evaluate information .ÌęEvery eighth grader should be able to explain how these technologies work, where they fail and why they can produce convincing but wrong text — the beginning of true . Students’ own work should still come first, with AI used afterward and under a teacher’s direction.

By high school, students who can read critically, write clearly and work through problems independently can get real value from AI. In writing, they can first draft an essay, then use AI to help identify gaps or missing arguments. The students would then weigh the feedback to decide whether to follow the tool’s suggestions. AI could also work as a tutor, helping students, say, catch up in algebra or progress beyond grade level, giving feedback faster than a teacher with 25 students can.

High schoolers are also entering a world where AI is embedded in most professional fields, and they need to learn to use it well. That means having the capacity to think, write and reason without it, direct the tool and catch its errors. Those skills are the prerequisite to AI readiness. 

One principle should hold across all grades: Keep assessments AI-free. Tests should measure what the student can do, not what a chatbot knows.

Technology has never been the goal of education. Learning is. Schools exist to help students develop knowledge and skills they couldn’t develop on their own, and every technology should earn its place by helping accomplish that. AI may become one of the most powerful instructional tools schools have ever adopted. But its success shouldn’t be measured by what it can do. It should be measured by what students can do as a result of it.

Anthropic, one of the world’s most prominent artificial intelligence companies, is launching a version of its AI-powered assistant Claude for teachers, entering a race by technology companies to infuse AI into education.

Anthropic boasts that its product can incorporate academic standards from all 50 states, and teachers can use it to help devise lesson plans, personalize instructional materials to students, and harness data to improve instruction, according to a company news release.

Claude for Teachers joins Google, OpenAI, and Khan Academy — among others — in marketing AI products specifically to K-12 educators. The new product launched Tuesday and is available for free for verified educators in the U.S. It will also be piloted in Detroit Public Schools Community District for a study on educator well-being and practice.

Claude’s formal arrival into the classroom comes during a complicated moment at the intersection of technology and education. The , the , and have all encouraged educators to adopt AI. But a is simultaneously gaining momentum, prompting some of the nation’s largest school districts to rethink how much time students spend in front of screens, as well as the contracts they’ve signed with huge players in ed tech.

Drew Bent, education lead for Anthropic, said that teachers using Claude’s educator product could, for example, pull in a student’s past assessment data and assignment data, along with past lesson plans, and ask Claude to build lesson plans for individual students based on that data — all while they’re sleeping.

In developing Claude for Teachers, Bent said Anthropic staff often heard that while teachers are already using AI to generate lesson plans, the plans generated were often detached from the content teachers actually needed to address. Anthropic’s tool will help teachers save time and toil less to improve student outcomes, he said.

“There’s a lot of evidence of what works well for teachers in terms of aligning with high-quality instructional materials, formative assessments, differentiated instruction,” he said. “But of course, if you have 30 students in your class, you’re not able to do all of that.”

Bent said Detroit was already using other Claude products, and in a “human-centric” way that impressed Anthropic, leading to the pilot program in the district that will start next school year. Anthropic will train teachers at a handful of schools in Claude for Teachers, and evaluate how the product may shape teaching practices in the district.

While AI companies have been eager to cement the technology’s status as a classroom staple, tech giants likely have a long way to go to quiet skeptics. Student-facing AI and so-called cognitive offloading, a reference to the reliance on AI to complete tasks instead of using critical thinking skills.

Bent emphasized that Anthropic is focusing largely on teachers, and that most K-12 students can’t access the company’s Claude assistant, due to an age restriction for anyone under 18.

Daniel Buck, a research fellow at the right-leaning think tank American Enterprise Institute, argued that if teachers outsource work to AI, “don’t be surprised when classroom community and academic outcomes rapidly deteriorate.”

Skeptics have also raised questions about student privacy in using AI, such as Claude.

Anthropic is working with the American Federation for Teachers on aligning the product’s privacy practices with what the labor union has said will become a “gold standard” in best practices around safety, according to the news release.

Among the privacy features in Claude for Teachers: It won’t use conversations between the AI assistant and teacher accounts to train its AI, student information will be protected in a manner built to comply with the federal law governing student privacy, and privacy terms of service are written without jargon so teachers can understand what they’re signing up to use.

“It’s important that Anthropic is committing to these principles in their new Claude for Teachers — a tool designed by and for educators to assist them instructionally and hopefully give them more time for the human relationships at the heart of learning,” wrote AFT President Randi Weingarten in the company’s press release.

Weingarten has been walking a tightrope when it comes to AI. She’s in elementary grades while promoting teacher training in the technology. Just a day before calling for the ban, she , an AI chatbot from Khan Academy, in action.

While AFT is working with OpenAI, Microsoft, and Anthropic on privacy standards and AI training for educators, it is notably not working with Google, .

Utah’s state education board recently made a deal with the tech giant , promising personalized instruction tools for educators.

It’s not yet clear whether one AI product reigns supreme in schools, but more teachers overall are using AI. Around 61% of teachers , compared with 32% in 2024.

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 .Ìę

“I’m not going to pretend like you aren’t,” he tells his students. “I know it’s readily available for most of you, if not all of you.”

A math teacher at in Fullerton, California, where he works with students as old as 19 who are struggling to get enough credits to graduate, Rabanera has watched AI creep into homework assignments over the past few years as students use powerful tools like ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini to race through assignments. 

It has forced him to change his approach. 

He has stopped sending home problems that can be lifted wholesale into an AI chatbot and pasted back into an assignment. Instead, he builds lessons around what students actually care about, creating, for instance, a unit on buying a car that weaves together calculating interest rates and monthly payments with learning about credit scores. He has replaced rote problem sets with one-of-a-kind poster projects and in-class design challenges. 

When Rabanera assigns practice, he often has students devise their own word problems around personal interests to prove they understand the underlying concepts.

He’s hardly the only one scrambling to try something new: Nationwide, teachers at all levels are rethinking, scaling back or, in some cases, abandoning homework altogether as evidence mounts that students who outsource their assignments to AI aren’t just submitting work that isn’t theirs. They’re surrendering the cognitive struggle that makes learning stick and makes homework, well, work.

New large-scale research suggests that teachers’ fears are valid. A led by Sina Rismanchian of the University of California, Irvine, analyzed 3.2 million student math problems on the digital platform over a decade and found that after ChatGPT’s release in late 2022, high school students spent 31% less time on word problems — the kind easily copy-pasted into an AI — compared with graph-based problems that required a hands-on interaction with the platform. College students showed a 27% decline. 

When students were tested under proctored conditions with no access to AI, the copy-paste behavior vanished. And when researchers examined whether students had actually retained anything, they found that the odds of correctly answering AI-susceptible word problems fell by 25% in the post-ChatGPT years.

“Students are using AI a lot,” Rismanchian said in an interview. For those who do, “it’s coming at a cost for their learning outcomes.”&ČÔČúČő±è;

The College Board last fall that the percentage of high school students who said they use AI tools for schoolwork grew from 79% in January 2025 to 84% in May 2025.

In a , 37% of K-12 principals said students were using AI for homework help, slightly higher than the percentage who said students were using it to help draft essays.

John Singleton, an associate professor of economics at the University of Rochester and a co-author of the study, said the finding “certainly requires a rethinking of what the object of homework is.” For him, assigning short writing assignments to his college students is “insane these days, because you’re going to get back 25 AI-generated short essays, and so it’s really not gauging comprehension. It’s not even doing the work of forcing the student to engage with the material, because they can put it into the AI.”

Conscientious instructors are drafting AI policies that they post to class syllabi, he said, “but I think the temptation is there.”

Talking to colleagues, Singleton said, “Everyone feels sort of bewildered about whether they’re doing the right thing.” Moving toward presentations and oral exams make sense, but giving up traditional writing assignments as a way to assess student thinking, he said, “is too bad, in some ways.”&ČÔČúČő±è;

The irony of this moment is that AI was supposed to offer students a , capable of explaining concepts, adapting to individual learners and helping them work through difficult material at their own pace. Instead, many educators say, for a significant share of students it has become the most efficient cheating device ever invented.

“There’s a zillion people that are trying to come up with these guided learning environments and Socratic tutors and stuff like that,” said Justin Reich, director of MIT’s Teaching Systems Lab and host of the AI-focused podcast “.” “And I’m just like, ‘Guys, you’re putting the “Carefully teach me this stuff” button directly next to the “Do everything for me” button.’ ”

Reich has spent years studying why students cheat. When they’re being honest, they typically tell researchers that the assignment didn’t seem worth their time, or that they ran out of time. They felt pressure to perform or, in many cases, they found themselves stuck on a problem with no other help in sight. 

“What’s new now is that, with all the gen AI stuff, the cost of taking a shortcut is zero,” said Eric Cosyn, a researcher who co-founded the .

Ashley Kannan, who has taught eighth-grade U.S. history for 30 years in Oak Park, Illinois, said that if schools continue to go down the same path of assigning work and expecting students not to be tempted to take shortcuts, “the war is over — we’ve lost.” Classrooms, he said, will be left in “a race to see who can plagiarize and cheat the best, and who has the resources to do so,” a dynamic he calls a losing bet for everyone. 

Start your homework in class 

In interviews, many educators and researchers were quick to point out that AI didn’t invent academic dishonesty. 

Denise Pope, a senior lecturer at Stanford’s Graduate School of Education and co-founder of , a research and school reform project, has been tracking student cheating behavior for two decades. Long before ChatGPT, she said, copying a classmate’s homework was consistently the most commonly admitted form of academic dishonesty.

The group’s latest academic integrity study, drawn from nearly 30,000 high school students, shows that this pattern still holds: 32.7% of students reported copying someone else’s homework at least once in the past month, a figure almost identical to the share who reported using AI as an unauthorized aid: 32.8%.

Students, Pope said, are simply swapping out one shortcut for another.

“This sort of hand-wringing that AI is changing homework like never before is a little bit off,” she said, “because there were high amounts of copying and cheating homework long before.”

All the same, Pope’s team has surveyed more than 100,000 students since November 2022, and the results are unambiguous: They’re using AI to do homework. Many don’t frame it as cheating, making the case that consulting an AI is no different than asking a parent, calling a tutor or typing a question into Google. Echoing Reich’s findings, she noted, “Some of them are saying it’s another piece of technology that helps us when we’re stuck.”

Teachers, naturally, see it a bit differently. A Challenge Success survey of 678 faculty and staff members found that the most pervasive concern, raised by about 58% of respondents, wasn’t cheating itself but the erosion of critical thinking. Teachers complained that students aren’t developing the intellectual stamina that hard problems require. “If school is about skills and not content,” one teacher wrote, “ChatGPT takes away critical thinking skills at a time that we are supposed to be teaching those skills to the students.”

Pope said her group is hearing from teachers that they’re afraid to send homework home “because it’s even more clear that there’s this ‘Easy’ button, and students are not having the productive struggle that they need to really learn the material.”

She recommends rethinking homework, starting with what she calls a homework audit — a systematic review of assignments to ask whether they actually require a student to do the intellectual work required. Teachers should also be able to tell if the work was done by the student or by AI.

“Start your homework in class,” she advised. “You will get a really good picture of who understands what you’re asking and who doesn’t by looking around and seeing what happens in the first 10 minutes — one kid is done and one kid is still stuck.”

Kannan, the Illinois history teacher, has landed on a similar idea, built around conversations. He still assigns a version of the same paragraph students have long written to identify a historical figure and place them in context — but the process now unfolds through one-on-one conferences rather than solo writing. Because of the conferences, the writing looks different. 

The goal, he said, is to locate the assignment “in the hearts and minds of a student” rather than in a generic prompt that AI can complete on command. “I think that there’s a way to personalize rigor,” he said. “When students, when young people feel that something is personal to them, they do come alive.”&ČÔČúČő±è;

Kannan said this kind of individualization isn’t new — special education teachers and speech-language pathologists have practiced it for decades. “All I’m suggesting is that there are pathways that we know work. Why not bring it into the mainstream classroom for every student?”

‘How this could this stronger?’

Researchers are also grappling with the limits of what they can measure. Self-reported cheating data, as Rismanchian’s paper notes, is “the least reliable way to measure anything.” In his own earlier research on 70 undergraduates, more than half of students who were directly observed relying on AI denied using it. “We were actually observing this copy-pasting behavior,” he recalled.

A group of McGraw-Hill researchers co-authored the Rismanchian study, and Dylan Arena, the publisher’s chief of data science, said solving the AI cheating problem has two prongs: Better detection helps, but it’s insufficient without a cultural shift inside classrooms. Students who believe their sole obligation is to produce a completed assignment, he said, will always find the path of least resistance. 

“There are kids who are here thinking, ‘I need to punch my ticket, I need to get this thing done,’ ” Arena said. “What’s the most expedient way to do that? Hand it over to this tool.”

But he suggested that something deeper is actually happening as AI colonizes students’ thinking: They’re losing their tolerance for “not knowing” something at any given moment, for what he calls the productive discomfort of sitting with a hard problem before the answer becomes clear. “It used to be that we would spend weeks not fully understanding something, and we would read, and we would write, and we would talk, and we would try, and we would write drafts — and they wouldn’t be quite right. But there is now an expectation that I either instantly know what I should do, or I should turn to a tool.”

A few teachers are experimenting with a more informal version of that transparency, built on relationships rather than documentation. 

Kannan described pulling aside a student last year whom he suspected, based on months of conversation, of leaning on AI for most of his schoolwork. “I knew that because I was taking the time to talk to him,” Kannan said. 

Rather than report the student, he asked him to run his own writing through the same chatbot he’d been using, in a bid to “reverse-engineer” and improve it. “Let’s actually ask questions to ChatGPT about how this could be stronger? How is this weak?”

Kannan has since built that move into his regular teaching: After students draft work with AI’s help, he sometimes has them ask the tool to critique the output, with students in effect “co-designing” assignments rather than simply handing them to a chatbot and turning in whatever pops out.

In the absence of such guidance, he said, students will do what they must to complete assignments. He recalled a student who’d been assigned an essay on the American dream by an English teacher. “There was really no instruction as to what that was, and she said, ‘I carried on a conversation with Gemini about what the American dream was, and that helped me understand it more.’ Given the demands of what the student was facing, she used AI as a partner, as an opportunity.”

, a longtime education researcher who has studied homework, noted that teachers have been assigning less homework for at least a decade — and that the rise of AI might reduce it further if teachers lose confidence that take‑home work is genuinely done by students. But it could also work the other way: If teachers believe that AI is a kind of all-purpose helper, they could actually assign more homework because they believe students “are going to be helped out and kind of semi-tutored,” he said.

Many school districts are trying to reframe the relationship between students and AI from the ground up. The Laguna Beach Unified School District in California, working with researchers at Stanford, found that AI policies had generated a culture of suspicion in which teachers spent their energy trying to catch cheaters — and students felt guilty for using AI.

Michael Morrison, the district’s former chief technology officer, called it “the absolute worst culture that I can think of.”&ČÔČúČő±è;

In response, the district developed an add-on tool for Google Docs called , which asks students to disclose exactly how much and in what ways they use AI on a given assignment — a kind of nutritional label for AI-assisted work. Surveys suggest students generally use it honestly because the tool gives them something they didn’t have before: a sanctioned way to tell the truth.

Michael Keller, Laguna’s director of social-emotional support, noted that the district is already rethinking homework altogether for high school students, since 70% are athletes who devote an hour or more each day to practice and training. 

He sees the AI initiative as part of a broader commitment to treating students as full partners in their own learning. Monitoring how students are using AI, he said, is not the point. “We really view it as our moral obligation to make sure that we put trust and supportive relationships as the foundation to their learning experience,” he said.

For MIT’s Reich, transparency is necessary but not sufficient. The deeper challenge is motivational. “Kids are just natural boundary pushers,” he said.

And though they may not be able to articulate this, “the boundaries are what make them feel safe and loved and cared for.”

The problem, Reich argues, isn’t that students are weak-willed or morally deficient. It’s that the incentive structure of homework — grades for completion, not for thinking — has always been fragile. AI has simply exposed that fragility. 

“It’s not like homework is perfect,” he said. “Any teacher will tell you that some of the assignments are dumb or don’t work. But across the tens of millions of minutes of stuff that we ask kids to do in the afternoons, some of it’s got to be useful. And if we turn that spigot off, there’s just going to be less learning.”

That’s why our newsroom recently launched a new on Instagram () spotlighting a handful of important articles, case studies, data analyses and solutions snapshots that might have gotten lost in the noise. (You can also get these kind of daily highlights delivered straight to your inbox by signing up for our national newsletter.)Ìę

From the new demands facing college students in this era of artificial intelligence to a leadership transition at America’s largest union, here are five stories you might have missed this week: 

1. Elementary Principals Are Getting a Crash Course in How Young Kids Learn Best

Young children need different conditions than older students to thrive. Some school leaders are adapting their practices to reflect that reality.

2. Princess Moss Elected NEA President With Votes From 50% of Assembly Members

The former music teacher, who previously served as the union’s vice president, narrowly avoided a run-off in July 5 election.

3. What Today’s College Students Need That Previous Generations Didn’t

College degrees don’t guarantee good jobs anymore, so students must build resumes and AI skills in high school and college, experts say.

4. A Restored Detroit Rail Station Looks to the Future, Offering Training for Teens

Michigan Central Station, long a symbol of decline and decay, is now an innovation hub with workshops and cutting edge equipment for youth.

5. Q&A — ‘Rehumaning’ Education: Banning Screens Is Only Part of the Solution

‘We don’t have to remove all tech,’ author Stephanie Malia Krauss says. ‘We need to remove toxic tech’ and bring back play and adequate sleep.

But recently I have noticed something I never expected.

Many of my more thoughtful and honest students are becoming critics of the very technologies that shaped them. They are tired of the slop. Tired of content created by code. They say they are repelled by the prospect of an AI friend or romantic partner.

When it comes to the classroom, they willingly admit they prefer a lively class discussion to an online activity. They resent teachers who use AI to grade their papers. And most powerfully of all: They admit their use of technology is a hurdle to becoming the educated Americans they know they should become.

They speak almost like addicts.

They don’t want to be on their phones eight or nine hours a day. They don’t want to use AI to complete their assignments and short-circuit their ability to learn and grow. They know their attention span is stunted.

But in so many circumstances, they simply can’t resist. These observations may sound anecdotal. Let me assure you, they are not.

Over the past year, a series of highly publicized incidents have suggested the emergence of something larger: the first widespread cultural backlash by young Americans against the digital world that shaped them.

Multiple public speakers recently referenced the AI revolution now upon us—a at the University of Central Florida, a at Middle Tennessee State University, former at the University of Arizona. In every instance, young Americans either passionately booed or, in Schmidt’s case, the remarks.

A community college in Arizona to read the names of graduates, but the system quickly malfunctioned. When the college announced what had happened, the backlash was both raw and immediate.

These incidents may appear isolated or trivial.

They are not.

Together they suggest the emergence of something larger: the first widespread cultural backlash by young Americans against the digital world that shaped them. The generation that grew up on iPhones, spending much of every waking hour online, now seems to be awakening to the perils of a digital world neither they nor their parents fully understood.

And yet these young people are increasingly lending their voices to a growing chorus of educators, parents and policymakers who have begun to realize a painful truth: There is no quick technological fix for the crises consuming the modern American classroom.

, , emotional distress and a generation-long erosion in students’ ability to concentrate all demand a fundamental reassessment of the role screens now play in the educational lives of our children.

Every other day a prominent newspaper or publication now gives voice to this fundamental truth.

Whether it’s The New York Times explaining or prominent Substack columnists offering a American educators should take advantage of this moment by defending traditional instruction rooted in foundational human relationships.

A generation ago, young Americans had access to a diverse chorus of influential adult voices that tethered them to the mighty responsibilities and possibilities of adult life. Children lived with two parents, numerous siblings and often spent considerable time with grandparents. Life exposed young minds to a faith tradition with pastors and priests on Sundays, sports activities with coaches after school and maybe Boy Scout or Girl Scout leaders as well.

Many of these voices from ages past are silent today.

But that doesn’t mean our children don’t hear voices. They do, and they often come from people and digital spaces their parents never would have chosen for them.

This is why — especially in this era — the humanity of teachers and the personal vitality of our classrooms are essential. The voices of instruction our children hear should be the voices of teachers who know and care about their students — not Alexa, not Siri, not some anonymous digital interface designed to maximize engagement rather than human flourishing.

Eye contact. Conversation. Personal relationships. No code or product required.

The kids know this. The kids want this.

Shame on us if we fail to give it to them.

Your host in Osaka, Japan, slips on a and suddenly hears your words transformed into flawless Kansai Japanese. Even better, their reply in their native tongue comes through perfectly clear to you.

Has your kid ever used artificial intelligence to answer homework questions that their teacher used artificial intelligence to write?

It’s possible, according to a  from the Georgia Department of Audits and Accounts that found a majority of teachers in the state are using generative AI for planning or in the classroom, but also express concern that students’ use of the technology could harm their learning.

Teachers see promise in artificial intelligence

The poll, based on more than 13,000 teacher responses from across the state, found that 59% of those who responded said they use AI for teaching tasks.

Teachers were most likely to say they used AI to prepare for class — 95% of teachers surveyed said they used it for instructional planning and preparation at least a few times a year, with more than half using it at least once a week.

Venecia Whyte-Foster, a middle school English teacher in Savannah-Chatham County, said she was an early adopter of the technology.

“I embraced it immediately as it came out,” she said. “I’m like, ‘OK, this is not going away. My kids are going to use it. How do I use it in my class effectively?’ ”

Part of what she came up with involves personalized chatbots that turn classroom concepts into escape room-like games where students use what they’ve learned to solve puzzles and progress through levels.

“They have to ask a question directly toward the topic, and then the chatbot will give them more questions, give them information and then ask them questions, and until they’re able to answer those questions effectively, they cannot move on,” she said. “And they love those escape rooms, they love to be the first to get out of the room.”

The task the polled teachers were most hesitant to use AI for was grading student work, with 62% saying they never do that.

Of the teachers who use AI, nearly 90% said it had a positive impact on their classrooms, with majorities saying the technology helped save time, improve their lesson materials and increase student participation.

Teachers who do not use AI told state analysts they believe it invites students to become reliant on the technology, potentially damaging their critical thinking skills and encouraging them to cheat or become lazy. Teachers also expressed concerns about AI accuracy, data privacy and other ethical concerns.

University of Georgia associate professor Xiaoming Zhai directs the university’s AI4STEM Education Center, which focuses on using AI to advance STEM education.

Zhai said he understands teachers who don’t trust AI, but he still encourages them to keep an open mind.

“Regardless of whether they’re using AI in their own profession, their students in the future will be using AI in their career,” he said. “So if they’re not able to use AI, how can they expect them to educate the future workforce to be able to use AI responsibly and ethically?”

Zhai said teaching future educators how to effectively use AI will help them guide students toward the proper use.

“I think the key part is how can we guide a teacher to be responsible and ethically using AI so they can foresee any potential risk and challenge that the students might be facing when using the AI?” he said.

Middle and high schoolers are also embracing AI, to teachers’ chagrin

Elementary school teachers told auditors that their students were the least likely to use AI to complete their work, but adoption of AI for school use grows as students age. A majority of high school teachers report their students using AI on assignments at least half of the time.

Teachers whose students used AI were more likely to say that the technology had a negative impact on their learning, with a majority of middle and high school teachers reporting that AI had a very negative or somewhat negative impact on their students’ learning.

More than half of the teachers surveyed said they required in-class work or writing as a means of managing student AI use. Half of the respondents said they made an effort to clearly define AI abuse and what constitutes cheating, and 43% said they use software or apps to check for AI use in student assignments.

Whyte-Foster said she teaches about AI hallucinations — the word for when AI spits out a confident-sounding but totally fabricated response — and why it’s important to double check everything.

“We discuss why it’s important that we understand that it is not something that we just go through, but that we have to use our minds, that we have to put things into place to make sure we are thinking for ourselves, that it’s giving us information so that we can use it in our thinking, as a part of our brainstorming,” she said.

Despite that, Whyte-Foster said students sometimes try to pass along AI-generated work as their own. She said it’s usually easy to spot since she is familiar with her students’ writing abilities from their in-class work. When she gets an AI-produced assignment, she has a talk with the student about academic integrity and offers the chance to re-do the work for a reduced grade.

“They’ll tell you, yes, they’d prefer a 70 to a zero,” she said. “But if they get the 100 or the 90, I’ll put it there, and then put the minus 30 there and just say, ‘Hey, look at this, you did it, you could have done it before. The only reason you have a 70 is because you didn’t follow the guideline in the first place. Next time, choose the right way.’ ”

Guidance and training

About two-thirds of teachers reported that they had received guidance on AI use, while 70% reported that they had received training and 27% reported that they received neither training nor guidance.

Auditors noted that responses were inconsistent within districts, with a portion of teachers reporting they had received training or guidance and others reporting they had not. Auditors suggest that could indicate teachers were unaware of district resources or that guidance was provided to some teachers but not others. Teachers in districts with high poverty levels were more likely to say they had not received guidance or training.

The use of AI in K-12 education is not yet addressed in federal or state law, but the Georgia Department of Education and the Georgia Professional Standards Commission, the agency responsible for licensing teachers, have developed guidance.

In January 2025, the state Department of Education appointed an AI ethics and impact officer and released  best practices. In a statement, State School Superintendent Richard Woods said AI use should come with “serious consideration of the ethical, instructional, and privacy implications.”

“What I never want to see is AI being used to replace the skill and expertise of our teachers, or our students’ ability to develop critical thinking skills,” said Woods, a Republican who is running for re-election in November. “AI should always be a tool, never a replacement.”

That experience stayed with me long after graduation. It taught me something that is becoming increasingly vital in today’s digital world: Confidence is not developed by having the perfect answer but by believing in authentic ideas. 

Many young students are losing confidence in their own ideas. It is undeniable my generation grew up behind screens, with videos and phones embedded in everyday life. As a 16-year-old high school student, I don’t consider artificial intelligence a futuristic invention but rather a simple extension of the world we already live in. That is why I believe many conversations about AI in schools are missing the bigger issue entirely. The real concern is not technology itself but what happens when student voices become overshadowed. 

Technology has not only changed the way students learn but also the way we communicate on a daily basis. Many young people have become highly skilled at digital tools, with FaceTime and Zoom becoming frequent parts of everyday life. It is a common joke that if our generation does not put their phones down, they will forget how to talk to someone on a date! There is immense truth behind that. As we become more accustomed to immediate responses, we are slowly losing the patience to sit with a thought.Ìę

About 54% of students already use AI for schoolwork, a number continuing to rise. AI can certainly help students organize their thoughts. I even used it during the brainstorming process of this piece, but the important aspect is that my writing remained a reflection of my voice. With this expanding access to knowledge, an important question remains: Where does student voice fit in? If students begin relying on AI from the moment their education begins, they risk losing the discomfort that comes from developing confidence in their own ideas. That uncomfortable part matters. 

I have personally experienced how being in an uncomfortable position can lead the mind to function in ways AI cannot replace. It was the day of a long-awaited DECA business conference, and I put on my dress and blazer, a stark contrast to the comfortable clothes I wear at school. I had recited my speech until I knew it by heart, yet during the presentation, I felt the pressure set in and my thoughts begin to blur.Ìę

For a moment it felt as though all my preparation disappeared, but after taking a moment to slow down, I looked back at my notes and continued. It was not the polished performance I had imagined, but by the end I had conveyed what I wanted to say. More importantly, the experience taught me something AI never could, which was how to recover in real time.

Through these experiences, I have seen how much students can grow when they are asked to use their own voices. Recognizing this, I am proud to lead a summer program in the Chicagoland area called First Voice Academy. 

Here, middle school students learn and practice public speaking in a low-stress, immersive environment. Designed to promote interpersonal connection, the program walks participants through the importance of communication and concludes with their delivering a speech on their own. Taught directly by high schoolers, the program gives younger students the opportunity to learn from peers who have faced many of the same obstacles.

I can envision a student struggling to present during a speech, but that is the key: The words are theirs. The goal is not to ignore AI, but to ensure younger generations have opportunities to develop confidence in their own ideas.Ìę

Artificial intelligence can polish language perfectly and respond to a question in under a second, but what it cannot do is replace a student’s voice. Confidence is gained when students believe their own thoughts are worth sharing, even when they come out wrong the first time. Students who feel they have a voice at school are seven times more motivated to learn. 

A program like First Voice Academy allows for real world experience while in a learning environment. If similar programs can be expanded into schools, more students would build interpersonal skills at a crucial point in their lives.Ìę

I think back to the moment I stepped up to give my graduation speech and how scared I was. All it took was to say the first word, and suddenly I felt connected with the audience. Student voice offers a perspective unlike any other, and simply needs the opportunity to be heard. Technology may help develop ideas, but true opportunity comes from nurturing one’s own voice.

New York City education officials are hitting pause on releasing comprehensive artificial intelligence guidelines after their draft policy from March sparked .

Officials initially said their final guidance would be released in June, but backed away from that timeline during a Wednesday City Council hearing focused on AI in schools. Instead, the policy guidance will be released sometime this summer, First Deputy Chancellor Danielle Giunta said.

Giunta said the “shifting national conversation, which has really escalated over just the last couple of weeks alone” was one reason for the delay, along with nearly 6,500 comments responding to the March draft. Officials have not released those responses but told City Council members they would do so.

Worries about AI — and education technology in schools more broadly — have increased in recent months. More than half of City Council members urging Mayor Zohran Mamdani and schools Chancellor Kamar Samuels to pause AI use in schools citing concerns about learning and mental health. A broader petition seeking a moratorium on generative AI use in city schools has received .

The Education Department’s draft policy used a that spelled out various uses of AI and their risk levels. Assessments and grading are not allowed, for instance, but brainstorming lesson plans gets a green light. Student AI use was largely left out, even though it’s one of the most pressing issues schools face. In response to the draft policy, parents and largely criticized the approach.

Samuels, who did not attend Wednesday’s hearing, that the Education Department’s draft policy “missed the mark” that AI “is the most invasive technology that we’ve seen.” He suggested the final guidance would have stricter limits for the city’s youngest students.

Giunta said Wednesday that the city is considering different expectations based on age and grade level and thinking about how to prepare older students “for a world in which AI is already present without allowing AI to replace their own thinking.”

City Council members repeatedly pressed Education Department officials about the extent to which AI tools are already used in classrooms and indicated families should have a greater say over how their children are exposed to it.

“There are huge gaps in our understanding of how the technology is being deployed and when,” said Manhattan council member Carmen De La Rosa, who chairs the technology committee. “We do need the time to be able to wrap our arms around what is happening in our classrooms.”

Education officials said they are working with superintendents and principals to develop a more comprehensive sense of what tools schools are already using.

The Education Department’s stance on AI has whipsawed in recent years. When ChatGPT gained widespread use, city officials . Three months later, they rescinded the ban.

Former schools Chancellor David Banks , saying “AI can revolutionize how we function as a school system” and could be used for everything from college advising to assessing student work. But he never released a clear policy, leaving that task to Mamdani and Samuels to complete. Meanwhile, schools have been left to .

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 .

after laments the death of entry-level hiring, and according to the World Economic Forum, the they’re building will be out of date by the end of the decade. 

As both a mother of two teenagers and the head of one of the nation’s largest education , I’m asked a version of the very same question from both parents and policymakers: How can we ensure that today’s students are learning things that are actually going to matter?

I found part of the answer in an unexpected place: a high school theater.

My daughter recently performed in her school’s production of “Legally Blonde: The Musical.” She played Pilar, a scene-stealing member of Elle Woods’ sorority. After the show, she cried — not from exhaustion or stress but from pride. And not pride in the accomplishment, but the learning that came with it.

Of course, what she learned from that play won’t show up on a standardized test. Colleges won’t find it on her transcript, either. But like thousands of other theater kids, she’s building exactly the sort of skills that the labor market is demanding.

In the weeks leading up to the performance, she had to collaborate with a diverse cast, manage her time across competing priorities, take direction and feedback, recover from mistakes in real time and perform under pressure. She built confidence, resilience and the ability to communicate with clarity and presence. We used to call these “soft” skills. In the age of AI, they’re the hard currency of economic mobility. 

Perhaps it should come as no surprise that some kids who participated in the performing arts have landed themselves in positions of significant power and influence, including former Disney CEO and U.S. Supreme Court Justice .

As AI accelerates the automation of routine tasks, a suggests that the uniquely human capabilities are becoming even more valuable, not less. More often than not, these “durable skills” are cultivated in places we don’t traditionally count: theater productions, debate teams, student government, part-time jobs and community-based experiences. 

This raises an urgent question: If the skills that matter most for success in the world of work — and the world at large — are developed in unconventional ways, why do we continue to treat those experiences as peripheral?

The simple answer is that our education system is largely oriented around what is easiest to measure over what matters most. If we can’t measure it, we can’t evaluate it. And if we can’t evaluate it, why teach it? But when it comes to high school, what we measure is beginning to change.

In recent months, a growing number of states are changing high school graduation requirements and replacing traditional diplomas with “,” designed to provide a broader understanding of what students have learned that more holistically captures the skills necessary for success in life. 

The Carnegie Foundation recently a new set of skills progressions designed to complement “decode” the “skills genome” by transforming skills like collaboration and critical thinking into their component parts — a significant step toward developing new forms of assessment, curricula and ultimately teaching methods that bring “theater” skills to center stage.

As business leaders begin to question the value of longstanding skills-proxies — including even the college degree — they are signaling to young people that skills honed outside the academic context are not optional; they are essential. That includes designing hiring and interview processes that explicitly take human skills into account; assessing those skills as workers progress in their careers; and adopting training programs that focus on those skills alongside technical competencies.

 More and more businesses are recognizing that if the pace of technological advancement isn’t slowing down, the best way to keep up is to ensure that their employees have the resilience and agility to navigate a world of work defined by change.

And for parents, perhaps most importantly of all, it may mean recognizing that the path to opportunity is not always linear or confined to the classroom. It’s time to stop thinking of theater, sports and volunteering as ways of burnishing a resume for college. Those activities have always been the places where students learn to work together, navigate uncertainty and step up in scary situations. Reading and math will never stop being important, but without the skills to put academic accomplishments to work, too many of our young people will find those dire headlines starting to come true.

My daughter didn’t just perform in a musical. She practiced the very skills that will help her navigate a world where change is constant and careers are nonlinear. If we are serious about preparing young people for the future of work, we need to expand our definition of what counts as learning — and where it happens.

Appalled, Jessie turns around to find the twins’ discarded toys in the yard, looking worn and weary. 

“What happened to you?” Jessie asks them. 

“Tech,” the toys reply in unison. 

These toys explain to Jessie that, for years, technology has been “invading” homes, capturing kids’ attention and effectively ending imaginative play. 

“Your kid still plays?” one asks. “I don’t remember play.”

Jessie is skeptical, so they prove it to her: The toys climb to the roof of the twins’ house and look across the neighborhood, where they can see the blue light from screens glowing back onto children’s faces through each window.

“No wonder she can’t make a friend,” Jessie says, referring to Bonnie. “She’s the only one out there still playing with toys.”&ČÔČúČő±è;

It’s the type of exchange that stays with you â€” perhaps because, when depicted in a fictional animation, it’s clear just how representative it is of our current reality. 

The latest film in Disney-Pixar’s multibillion-dollar Toy Story franchise, which was released on June 19 and pits traditional toys against digital technology, comes at exactly the right time, multiple child development and media experts said in interviews. Children, even in their early years, are awash in screens and devices, and their overwhelmed parents often don’t know how to go about establishing guardrails — or what those guardrails should even be. All of this comes as AI is emerging as a threat to children, now embedded in toys and being used to generate videos that are served to children on YouTube without any real quality checks. Meanwhile, a chorus of critics — from the to the of one of the largest teachers unions in the country — are adding their concerns to the conversation.Ìę

“I think this is one of the most important issues of our time. I really do,” said Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, a professor of psychology at Temple University and senior fellow at Brookings Institution who studies child development. 

“We are at this inflection point,” she added, “where we actually have a technology that has the capability, if used incorrectly, not just to captivate kids’ attention but lessen kids’ attention. It takes away human-to-human interaction by displacing time and their imaginations.”

Indeed, “Toy Story 5” addresses exactly that. Soon after Jessie learns what’s been happening to children all over the neighborhood, 8-year-old Bonnie gets a tablet of her own, a frog-shaped device called Lilypad. 

Lilypad instantly grabs hold of Bonnie’s attention. Bonnie — a child who had previously relished in the rich stories and scenes she’d created with her analog toys using just her imagination — becomes zoned out, using the device day and night. She forgets about her beloved toys and the worlds she had dreamed up for them. 

Bonnie’s parents bought her the device in hopes that it would help her make friends. After all, everyone else her age seemed to be using one. While Lilypad does help Bonnie connect with her peers through a group chat, she soon learns that’s not quite the same thing as finding a true friend. After getting invited to a sleepover that goes all wrong, Bonnie finds out that digital connection is no replacement for authentic human connection. The child becomes more and more despondent and detached as the film progresses, leading her toys — Jessie, Woody, Buzz and the rest of the gang — to take charge on her behalf. They want to oust Lilypad and also help Bonnie make a real friend. 

The movie portrays technology as a force that can come at the expense of human relationships, which is often what experts warn about when it comes to children and screens. 

“We see human displacement as a very real threat,” said Michelle Culver, founder of the Rithm Project, a nonprofit working to reclaim and evolve human connection in the age of AI. So she loved that “Toy Story 5” was, in many ways, “a celebration of friendship.”&ČÔČúČő±è;

Dana Suskind, a pediatric surgeon and author of the forthcoming book “Human Raised: Nurturing Connection, Curiosity and Lifelong Learning in the Age of AI,” felt the movie did a good job of demonstrating “how screen time can erode creativity and connection and lead to bullying.”

“Even though the movie is about tech,” Suskind said, “it’s probably about something deeper that we’re all grappling with: the desire and the need for human connection, the important role the early years play in navigating human relationships and learning how to have relationships.”

Suskind saw “Toy Story 5” the day it came out. She went with two colleagues at the TMW Center for Early Learning and Public Health at the University of Chicago, including Liz Sablich, who brought her two young children along. 

Sablich’s 7-year-old son Jack had some astute questions and observations about the film later that night, after taking some time to process what he’d seen, his mom said. One of the first things he said, Sablich recalled, was that Bonnie seemed “hypnotized” by her device — that was the word he used. “It was like she worshipped it,” Jack told his mother. 

Sablich agreed and explained that some technology is actually designed to do that. Jack wanted to know why. When she told him that, in some cases, the more a person uses the technology, the more money a company makes, he became visibly upset and said, “That’s not right. That’s not fair. They should care more about the people.”&ČÔČúČő±è;

Jack was also perplexed that Bonnie kept her device in her bedroom, right next to her bed, at all times. (Jack is only permitted access to his tablet during travel, Sablich said.) He said he never wanted to use his tablet again and didn’t want his mom to use her phone. Sablich used that opportunity to explain how technology can work for and with us, too. For example, she was able to use her phone to arrange a play date for him the next day. “We can use it in limited ways to make it easier to play with friends and do things in the real world,” she told him. 

“I was pleasantly surprised by how straightforward I thought the message of the film was and that it sparked such an important conversation,” Sablich said. 

That’s exactly the type of dialogue experts are hoping the film will prompt. 

“We have to get this in the national conversation,” said Hirsh-Pasek. “The group that’s being left out of the national conversation is little kids, the 0 to 10 crowd.”

The film is giving families and young children an opportunity to “pause and reflect,” said Sunny Xun Liu, director of research at the Stanford Social Media Lab — and to ask some important questions.

“What are our values as a society for technology, especially for such young children?” Liu said. “What values should we hold together as a community and a culture about technology and screens? It gives us opportunities to think about this topic as families, communities and a society together.”

That Disney, a powerhouse media brand trusted by millions of American families, opted to tackle this topic at all was “bold,” Suskind said. Michael Levine, an early learning expert with more than two decades in the field of children’s media, called it “gutsy.”

“The fact they’ve responded to the cultural moment 
 is really smart and, I think, brave,” he said. “Hats off.”

Culver, at the Rithm Project, was impressed by how much “dimension” the movie had on the topic of technology, showing that, in addition to the harm devices can do, they can also help bring people together when used appropriately. 

“There’s always the opportunity for good,” Suskind noted. “It’s whether or not we make the design choices that actually allow it. I think Disney tried to show that.”

College grads are facing a tough job market, with headlines almost daily declaring their prospects or or call their a

High school students entering college need to think ahead and build work experience and skills as soon as they can, experts say. College is still key to long-term success. Just not on its own. 

It’s now what some experts refer to as “college and”: and an internship; and training in at least Artificial Intelligence basics; and a career credential; and some project or passion that demonstrates a student can use the skills learned in class in the real world.

“Durable” or “soft” skills such as teamwork, reasoning and collaboration are also considered a must in the workplace.Ìę 

 â€œWe’ve seen a transition into employers wanting a little bit more quantifiable evidence that students actually have skills,” said Scott Fleming, executive director of the State Council of Higher Education of Virginia. 

“Employers who are looking at first hires out of college
 they want to see that they already have work experience,” Fleming told a . “The degree is important. But did you also get work integrating the learning, or an internship, project based learning, undergraduate research, something else as part of that education enterprise? That, to an employer, signals as well that you have developed those skills along the way.”

AI which is automating tasks, is also disrupting the job market, experts noted, on top of the increasing demand from employers for more evidence than just a college degree that graduates have the skills they want.

Jeff Strohl, director of the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce, said he doesn’t envy students trying to chart a path toward a career with all the shifting demands of employers and the impact of AI on the economy.

“In the 1980s, you just got a BA, the employer would train you and everything would be nice,” Strohl said. “Now much more of that workforce preparation falls on the student.”

He still urges students to go to college, saying higher education degrees offers the best chance at long-term success. But he and several other career experts and researchers have a few key pieces of advice for young people as they prepare for a career:

• Learn how to use AI as a tool, not be replaced by it. 
• Build resumes while in high school and college with jobs and internships. Internships are scarce, but students still need to seek them out to build skills, contacts and references. 
• College majors can matter a lot, though AI is slashing the value of some once-certain degrees.
• Expect to be nimble and adapt as the job market changes.
• Consider how well a college provides AI training or work experiences when choosing a school.
• Find ways to show mastery of “soft” or “durable” skills through jobs, projects or new tests that are emerging that can certify mastery of them.

“Don’t get anxious,” Strohl said. “But be purposeful and deliberate
 Engage, engage. Be deliberate. Don’t let stuff happen to you.” 

The data on today’s job market is bleak, with college graduates finding fewer jobs to launch careers, and many having to take jobs below what their degree would usually allow. The unemployment rate for recent college graduates was 5.7% in the first quarter of 2026, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York recently reported, the highest rate since the pandemic.Ìę

A separate study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland found the advantage a college degree has in finding a job over just a high school diploma — independent of the pandemic and AI. College graduates, researchers found, are now having to search for jobs longer than high school graduates do.

Between 1976 and 2000, high school graduates had to look for a job for 11 weeks before finding one, while college graduates found jobs faster, in just eight weeks. Today, high school graduates are still taking 11 weeks to find a job, but college graduates are now job hunting for 12 weeks.

“That
 gap is now in favor of high school graduates,” said researcher BarÄ±ĆŸ Kaymak.Ìę

It’s not clear how much the recent growth of Career Technical Education programs in high schools has affected the difference between high school and college graduates. Though students who earn career credentials in high school can have better job prospects after graduating and could draw some students away from college, the value of credentials varies greatly, and national data hasn’t shown enough students shifting to CTE to affect the trend.

The New York report also highlighted a larger problem: More than 40% of recent graduates were underemployed — doing jobs that don’t require a degree.Ìę

Underemployment is both costly to graduates and hard to overcome. A by the Strada Education Foundation and Burning Glass Institute found that underemployment gives graduates a “heavy financial cost.” Though college graduates earn 25% more than just having a high school diploma, even in jobs that don’t require a degree, that’s much less than the 88% more they would earn if they found a job that matched their degree.

“This leaves underemployed graduates on weaker financial footing as they start their careers, especially those with substantial student loan debt,” the report stated.

It’s also hard to recover if the first job out of college isn’t a good one. Strada reported that 73% of graduates who started out underemployed after college remained underemployed 10 years later.

Strada identified a few keys to improving odds of finding a good job, with the most important being picking the right major and having job experience before graduating. An internship or job, Strada found, reduces the risk of underemployment more than 49%.

Even STEM degrees, once thought of as a guarantee of success, aren’t created equal. Strada found that computer science, engineering or mathematics majors were much better off than those in fields like biology.

Degrees in nursing, engineering, architecture and math-intensive business fields such as accounting and finance had the best chances of avoiding underemployment.

A by the Center for an Urban Future offered a snapshot of what underemployment can look like by analyzing how graduates of the City University of New York system fared after leaving school:

That report found that:

• Job postings for applicants with little experience have fallen 37% since 2022
• Internship opportunities for college students are also down 37% since the pandemic.Ìę
• Ten percent of CUNY graduates were working in retail or food service five years after graduation, rising to 13% for graduates of CUNY’s community colleges.Ìę 
• Surveys show that just 12% of CUNY graduates had a paid internship during college.Ìę

“In this challenging hiring environment, CUNY’s mostly low-income students will struggle to gain access to well-paying jobs unless CUNY develops far stronger connections with employers,” the report stated. 

Merrill Pond, executive vice president of the Partnership for New York City, a leading business organization, also called out a need for more work-based learning.

“If students are not given the opportunity to put something on their resume that will make them stand out or start to develop that network, they’re often going to be at a disadvantage,” Pond said as the report was released.  

Though CUNY was praised for progress in connecting students to work, including through partnerships with several nonprofits that train and mentor students and help them find internships, the report found  efforts are still falling short.

Lauren Andersen, CUNY’s vice chancellor for career engagement and industry partnerships, said some of the report’s findings were “sobering.” 

She said the university’s own data shows 22% of students have paid internships, data it just started tracking in the 2023-24 school year. The university also started a new effort, CUNY Beyond, in 2025 to improve career advising and make faculty more aware of how they can help students connect to jobs.

Students are three times more likely to have a job at graduation if they do a paid internship, Andersen said, and twice as likely to have an internship or job if they meet with a career advisor.

Many students come to college without family connections to business or clear ideas of how to seek jobs.

“CUNY has to take on the role, and higher education institutions have to take on the role, of building those relationships for their students, and that’s something that we’re not necessarily historically set up to do,” she said.

Western Governor’s University is another school that has made a deliberate effort to connect students to jobs. It’s also joining a push by some high schools and nonprofits to evaluate and rate students on their soft skills to validate those skills to employers.

Students need to be able to show employers what they have learned and how they can succeed at work, Western Governors President Scott Pulsipher said at the same panel as Fleming. Colleges need to help them do that, as well as help them try out jobs to see if they like them and find out which skills they might need to do them. 

“Every rising high school graduate should be more intentional about developing their vocational identity — meaning, how do they see themselves contributing to the world?” Pulsipher said. “It feels to me like they defer this too long.”

The emergence of AI has created new complications for young people. Changes are happening so fast, it’s hard to plan what the job market might look like in a few years.

Georgetown’s Strohl said new high school graduates might be better off in four years than today’s college graduates.

“The shocks that we’re seeing to the labor market today, and are clearly impacting recent college grads
 will be better understood,” he said. “The education system
 will have had a chance to figure out some strategies of response, and actually, to what degree is AI going to be a problem. “

He also cautioned AI might not be as big a disruption as some fear. Automation had the “same kind of hype that we’re hearing about AI,” but worries 40 million jobs would be replaced by machines turned into eight million jobs at most just adapted to work with automation, not replaced by it.

Harvard’s McKittrick urged students entering college not to be caught up in the “noise” of a changing job market, with some firms hiring few people, but others hiring many. Along with working jobs while in college to build a resume, she said students need to learn to use AI.

“What we’re hearing from employers is that they do want young people with AI skills,” McKittrick said. “They might not exactly know what those skills are, but they want people who are kind of comfortable using the technology. Young people should be thinking about, ‘Does the college have an AI literacy strategy?’ ”  

Others said it will be key to also develop “soft” or “durable” skills such as critical thinking and ingenuity to put AI to best use.Ìę

“AI still needs the humans to say, ‘Even as I’m using it, how should I be using it?’ ” said Pulsipher of Western Governors University. “Are the outcomes that it’s providing me useful and relevant to what we’re trying to do?”

Laura Ullrich, Director of Economic Research in North America of the job search website Indeed, is telling her three sons to find jobs while in school to explore what they want to do, while also making sure to build soft skills that are becoming more important in job applications.

“I think a few years ago, you would have seen very few computer science majors feel the need to call out that they were a good writer or maybe had more critical thinking skills, or had taken a bunch of philosophy classes,” Ulrich said. “But today
 young job seekers are thinking about this quite differently.”

Principals, superintendents and other school leaders are being subjected to sleek demos from presenters who know all the right buzzwords. Salespeople are showcasing technologies and hinting that, should administrators choose not to buy their product, students will be left behind. That the digital divide will grow — on their watch. 

This intense pressure will cause some school leaders to sign agreements that will not serve their students well. While most mistakes won’t rise to the level of prominent school districts supporting a failed startup, some administrators will nonetheless let anxiety rule the day. They will spend money on tried-and-true methods that could do more good than the shiny new thing. 

What can prevent this? Asking the right questions. 

I have spent years on both sides of the table. As a teacher, I used both good and bad ed tech, so I have seen what actually works in the classroom. As an employee of an ed tech startup I designed technologies that were sold to schools, so I know when promises are inflated to help the bottom line. As a professor of educational technologies and leader of the University of Southern California’s Center for Generative AI and Society, I study these technologies to know what works — and what doesn’t — when it comes to AI’s influence on education.

That is why, with the support from my colleagues, I have written a titled “Beyond the Salespitch: A Practical Guide to Questioning EdTech Vendors.” Below are some key questions every school leader must consider before signing on the dotted line and committing limited resources to AI-powered ed tech.

Does the Tool Really Help Teachers in the Classroom?

• What specific cognitive skills does the product aim to develop (e.g., argument construction, data interpretation, metacognitive reflection)?
  
• How does it supplement learning rather than replace it? Ask for a step-by-step walk-through showing where student input is required and how feedback loops are built in.
  
• What evidence exists that students improve on the targeted skills? Request pilot study results, raw performance data or an independent evaluation report — nothing less rigorous will do. 
  
  

Does One Size Really Fit All?

• Which student populations were included in testing the product? Look for data on age, language proficiency, special education status and socioeconomic background. Biased data means biased performance.
  
• How does the system adapt to individual students’ profiles? Ask for a live demo of the personalization engine that shows adjustments based on prior performance and teacher input. 
  
• What safeguards are there for students who might become over-reliant on the tool? Ask how the product detects and flags excessive automation, prompting teacher intervention.

Who Owns the Content?

• Where is student data stored and processed? Identify the physical location of servers (domestic versus overseas) and any third-party processors involved. Ask how data breaches are handled and communicated.
  
• Who owns the text or media students generate using the tool? Ideally, the contract must state that all user-created content remains the property of the school district. Otherwise, your school becomes another content generator for a company. 

• Will our data be used to train future versions of the AI? If yes, require an opt-out clause and a clear explanation of how opting out affects service quality.Ìę
  
• What happens if protected information (FERPA/HIPAA) is entered by mistake? Insist on a documented protocol for immediate deletion and breach notification. Consider clauses that allow you to exit agreements when large enough mistakes occur. 

Are Students Protected From Bias and Misinformation?

• What filters prevent misinformation or harmful content from reaching children? Get access to a live example of the system handling ambiguous queries that could lead to falsehoods. Stress-test it!
  
• Who is responsible when the AI produces inappropriate output? The contract should assign liability to the vendor for any harm caused by the tool’s autonomous decisions.

Can You Walk Away From the Contract?

• What are the cancellation terms? Look for a no-penalty opt-out clause that allows the district to discontinue use if outcomes aren’t met. 
  
• Is there an outcomes-based pricing model? Vendors that are willing to tie fees to measurable learning gains demonstrate confidence in their product.
  
• What support and training are included? Clarify the depth of professional development, response time for technical issues and availability of on-site experts.  

While AI has the potential to be a powerful tutor, a strong assistant and an equalizer in under-resourced classrooms, it can do so only if educators adopt tools with full information. School administrators should demand transparency, evidence and ethical safeguards from the companies that build them. 

District leaders should take these questions back to their board, curriculum team and legal counsel. Let them, not the slickness of a demo, drive the conversation. This can turn AI from a tempting shortcut into a responsible ally in education.

In the study, , two unnamed school districts carved out dedicated time for hundreds of elementary school students to work with a well-known AI reading tutor, either during class time or after school. Researchers followed about 350 students across two randomized controlled trials. All of the students were expected to log on for at least two 30-minute sessions a week.

They found that of the students assigned to work independently with the AI, just over 60% in the first district and 53% in the second ever logged on to the platform — at all.

Among all students, average weekly usage came to just over two minutes in District A and just over five minutes in District B.

Those who did log on averaged 13.2 minutes a week in District A and 25.8 minutes in District B, using the tutoring for just four to five weeks on average in an “intervention window” that ran from 14 to 31 weeks.

For Carly Robinson, the paper’s lead author and research director for the , the gap between access and use isn’t a shock. “As we’re talking about bringing AI tools into the classroom, the challenge isn’t just building good AI tools,” she said. “It’s getting students to use them and engage with them effectively.”&ČÔČúČő±è;

That’s going to take “intentional design” that appeals to both students and their teachers, who must choose whether to offer access.

“Having these tools available, even if they’re really good, doesn’t necessarily mean they’re going to get used if they’re not being embedded into kids’ learning experiences,” Robinson said in an interview.

But she was careful to note that the study didn’t draw conclusions about AI’s effectiveness, or the degree to which students were interested or uninterested in the bot, saying many factors could be at play. “This is not necessarily the students not engaging,” she said. In the two districts, the AI platform “was likely one of many tools available to teachers.”

For the study, researchers randomly assigned a group of students to work on the platform alongside a few classmates and a human tutor whose job was to support their engagement and motivation and to troubleshoot any problems students might encounter. In District B, the tutors were actually middle-school students who “had a free intervention block in their school day.” A typical session included a short check-in, 15 minutes on the platform and a few minutes of reflection.

Pairing students with a tutor worked, Robinson said — to a point. Usage increased by roughly one minute a week in District A and 4.4 minutes in District B. The number of stories students completed each week jumped 71% in District A and 80% in District B. 

What the human pairing didn’t do was move the needle on reading scores: Neither district saw a statistically significant improvement in end-of-year reading achievement. But Robinson said the study wasn’t primarily focused on that. Rather it was looking at the overall impact of adding a human into the equation, someone who provides “accountability, motivation and relationship building.”

Wednesday’s findings mirror recent ones from Khan Academy founder Sal Khan, who that the rollout of his in 2023 was “a non-event” for many students. “They just didn’t use it much.”

Khan said AI tutoring doesn’t necessarily make students motivated to learn, or to fill in gaps in their knowledge needed to ask questions.

The new data also raise an uncomfortable question for educators: Among students who used the platform on their own, those who logged on tended to be higher-achieving and less likely to receive special education services. So the students who stood to benefit most from extra reading practice were among the least likely to get it. 

Robinson said she sees that as a red flag for anyone considering AI tutoring as a quick fix for underserved students: “I think it should give us pause about treating AI tutoring as an equity solution.”

Alex Sarlin, founder of the newsletter and a veteran industry watcher, said the new study “shines a light on several of the most persistent challenges in ed tech implementation: low usage rates that don’t meet dosage recommendations, differential technology usage based on prior student achievement, leading to lower usage among the neediest students, and a faulty assumption that students will jump into new tools without structured guidance.” 

The researchers’ approach showcases a promising direction, he said, “as it is increasingly clear that providing access to tooling is not nearly enough to drive usage, let alone outcomes.”

Amanda Bickerstaff, co-founder and CEO of , which provides AI literacy training to teachers, said results like these aren’t all that surprising, given what we know about these tools.

All GenAI chatbots, she said, can make mistakes, lack important context about students and how they learn best, and can provide biased outputs. Her group has recommended keeping these tools out of the hands of students through second grade, “and only with significant human oversight and AI literacy training” for students in grades three through five.

“At this stage, there has been little evidence that GenAI chatbot tutors meaningfully impact learning outcomes for students,” she said, “or that they are developmentally appropriate for students in elementary schools.”

Robinson, the study’s lead author, said she sees the usage findings as part of a larger pattern playing out as schools adopt AI tools more broadly. Schools, she said, should consider offering students “different iterations of these things based on what they actually need — and that’s probably a more likely pathway to scale than just saying, ‘Let’s give everyone an AI tutor.’ ”  

Historically, personalized instruction has depended almost entirely on human teachers, with the teacher-student relationship central to the experience. But advances in technology — most recently in AI — have changed this dynamic, Robinson and her colleagues write. Now, personalized instruction exists on what they term “a spectrum of relational intensity,” from a consistent one-on-one human tutor to a computer platform that students navigate alone. 

AI tutors may approximate human interactions, Robinson said, but students may still benefit from the care and companionship that humans provide. Logging on and sticking with something that might prove to be difficult, she said, is easier with a human in the mix. “There is just this component of accountability that a human can provide, where it’s so easy to look away or check out of something when it gets hard when you’re dealing with a screen.”

A researcher at , a nonprofit focused on human connection in the age of AI, Lee asked: Why not?

In a word, the girl said: Instagram.

“If you try to dance at prom, you’re going to look stupid at some point,” Lee recalled her saying. Eventually someone will pull out a phone and you’ll end up on someone’s feed, seen by “the entire school” with mortifying results. Better just to play it safe. 

“Everybody just goes to prom to look cute,” the girl explained, “take a picture for the ‘gram, eat and leave.”

For Lee, who has spent years studying human belonging, that exchange unlocked an important, if unspoken, part of why AI holds such appeal. “We’ve created this set of conditions where young people don’t feel like they have permission to be their real, unfiltered selves,” she said in an interview. So they turn to AI, which is programmed to affirm them at every step.

from Lee and her colleagues offer this insight among others, painting a detailed portrait of how young people use AI and why. They surveyed 2,383 people ages 13 to 24 across the U.S. and found that for nearly half of them, AI has already reshaped their relationships in ways that are largely flying under the radar of parents, teachers and policymakers.

Among the findings:

• Just 15% of young people are in relationships with “personified AI” characters — but for about 45%, AI is already reshaping their real-life relationships;
• 53% of young people say they set clear boundaries with AI, using it alongside — not instead of — human support;
• 61% say parents rarely or never talk to them about AI, and 53% say the same about teachers;
• Youth from low-income households are three times less likely as others to engage with AI, but they report greater feeling: 21% feel lonely often or all the time, compared to 6% of high-income youth; 57% feel like a burden to others, compared to 42%; and only 34% feel a strong sense of belonging at school, compared to 62%.

For the study, researchers sorted respondents into four broad clusters. About 28% rarely or never use AI, often out of ethical reasons or just disinterest. The largest group, 39%, uses AI primarily as a practical tool. They turn to chatbots such as Claude, ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini for homework and research, while keeping clear boundaries between AI and their emotional lives. 

Another 18% use AI for personal and relational support, such as venting about a tough day, seeking relationship advice and processing emotions. And 15% engage with AI characters and personas in more intimate, companion-like ways.

Within the four groups, researchers found nine variations that challenge the conventional wisdom around AI use. For instance, among those who use AI for emotional support were two very different groups. Rithm calls them “Social Processors” and “Private Processors.” While they may look similar from the outside — both say they have lots of friends and use AI to work through their emotions — surveys found that the Social Processors use AI as just one tool among many. The Private Processors, by contrast, use it as a substitute for real human interactions because they feel they can’t bring problems to those around them.

That data point could hold the key to understanding problematic AI use, Lee and her colleagues said, challenging the idea that lonely teens with small social circles are most at risk of unhealthy AI dependence. The data suggest something else altogether, said Kashyap Rajesh, a rising junior at Cornell University who consulted on the report.

“The driver of risky AI use is not necessarily isolation,” he said. “It’s feeling like a burden [to others] — and that came through in the research.”&ČÔČúČő±è;

The number of friends a young person has, the size of their social circle, how busy they are, whether they’ve got family nearby and even their feelings of loneliness barely predict whether they’ll fall into dependent AI use, he said. “What actually predicts it is specific feelings: Feeling like a burden to others, feeling like you can’t be your real self, feeling like there’s no one to turn to.”

Julia Freeland Fisher, a researcher at the Clayton Christensen Institute who advised on the study, said that finding should help start a different kind of conversation around AI. “Burdening one another is building reciprocity, which is how we maintain the social contract, how we maintain social cohesion,” she said. That young people are increasingly bypassing this step should be alarming, she said.

“AI companions wouldn’t be nearly so disruptive to human connection if we had a sturdier social fabric,” said Fisher. “It’s the weakness of our social fabric that makes these [findings] so worrisome, not necessarily the technology itself.”

‘It just keeps feeling easier than the alternative’

For Lee, the finding on being a burden reframes so much of our understanding about young people’s relationship to AI. Virtually every survey respondent reported a specific “relational rupture” or crisis that made them turn to the technology. 

One young woman’s first question to a chatbot was, “I didn’t get asked to Homecoming — am I unlovable?” Another: “I got into a huge fight with my best friend, and I don’t want to tell anybody else because I don’t want them to take sides, so I needed to ask AI.”

“Story after story after story,” Lee recalled, “of a very singular, acute, discrete moment when they really had a moment of need and needed somewhere to put it.”

Rajesh, the Cornell student, said the data reveal a steady shift in which perhaps millions of young people are quietly moving from letting AI help with homework to asking it to mediate their emotional lives.

“They start off using it to help them write an essay, or help them prepare for their interview, or to study for an exam,” he said. “And they’re like, ‘OK, damn, this is really good, this is really helpful.’ And eventually their interactions escalate.”

The drift happens gradually, he said. AI helps draft an email or respond to a text. Next it’s helping to navigate a social situation. Before long it’s processing a breakup.

Rajesh, who’s studying information science and AI policy, said his own AI use crept up on him: He went from studying with Claude to creating personalized AI study guides to wondering if even attending class mattered. 

“I found that how many times I go to class and how actively I’m paying attention in class is actually not the biggest indicator of my understanding of the content or exam performance,” he said. “It’s actually just how much time I spend with Claude dissecting the lecture slides and building study guides that work for me.”

The report notes that because even productivity-focused platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude are engineered to interact with warmth and reassurance, what starts out as homework help or playful experimentation can evolve into a substitute for human interaction.

What adults get wrong

Alongside the findings on AI use, researchers found that how adults talk about AI is also potentially problematic: Their conversations are almost always about academic integrity — cheating, plagiarism, source citation — and rarely about relationships.

Rajesh said adults should be asking directly whether young people are using AI to process emotions, to rehearse hard conversations and to get support when they’re struggling. “Those are questions that signal to a young person that the adult knows this dimension exists and isn’t going to freak out about it — which is, I think, the prerequisite for any honest conversation happening at all.”

Michelle Culver, the Rithm Project’s founder and a co-author of the report, said young people tell researchers that when the topic is AI use, they’re “navigating it alone.” She suggested that adults approach the topic with “curiosity” rather than “judgment or shaming.” That could help both sides gain insight into each others’ struggles in the face of a technology that’s constantly challenging their reality.

In the same way that educators are worried that young people aren’t engaging in the “productive struggle” of learning academic content, Culver said, “We similarly worry that young people might offload the relational work to AI and become ill-equipped to handle the very messy human friction of real relationships.”

With many students and educators already using widely available artificial intelligence tools, state lawmakers and school districts are playing catch-up on AI policies.

In Maryland, for example, AI usage policies for K-12 schools are “all over the map,” Democratic state Sen. Katie Fry Hester said.

In some school districts, she said, AI use is encouraged, while in others it is restricted, or — a worst-case scenario for Hester — there is little to no policy guidance at all.

“What we heard repeatedly is that the teachers were feeling like they had to navigate artificial intelligence entirely on their own,” Hester said.

Hester said square one for lawmakers is AI literacy, which was the aim of new legislation that she sponsored and that was signed into law in May. It requires an AI coordinator in each school system, a statewide AI professional development for teachers and AI literacy to be a component of career readiness and computer science standards for K-12 students. It also requires the state Department of Education to provide certain guidance on AI.

Many other states have also been trying to create AI policies for schools. Lawmakers filed more than 134 bills across 31 states this year related to AI in education, focusing on data privacy, usage restriction in the classroom, literacy and training, according to MultiState, a government relations firm.

A survey by the Center for Democracy & Technology showed that (85%) reported using AI in their classroom during the 2024-25 school year, while 86% of students said they’d used AI for either personal or school-related reasons. But only about half of teachers and students reported that they received some training or information about AI from someone at their school, and few received training or information on risks of AI use.

A turning point for schools came with the rollout of ChatGPT in 2022, said Noelle Ellerson Ng, chief advocacy and governance officer for the School Superintendents Association. “AI was something that could not be gatekept,” said Ellerson Ng. “It was in the classroom the minute students were able to access it.”

Her association does not take positions on state AI bills or policies. But she said districts are trying to avoid knee-jerk, reactive policies such as New York City’s brief 2022 ban of ChatGPT because of fears about cheating.

Some states have made progress in laying the groundwork for AI policy in K-12.

Ohio has set a July 1 deadline for every school district, community school and STEM school to adopt an AI use policy. The state’s model policy recommends that districts address student and staff uses, privacy, ethical use, teacher-specific uses, vendor agreements, third-party AI tools and student assessments.

A new signed in March requires local school districts and charter schools to devise local policies for AI usage in K-12 schools, requires state standards for AI literacy and education training and ensures that no AI “replaces or eliminates a human teacher.”

enacted last month requires AI tools to be age-appropriate and requires teachers to review anything AI produces before using it in the classroom. It also allows parents to opt their children out of using AI tools. The law also directs the state education department to develop AI guidance and requires local school boards to set policies before the 2027-28 school year.

Yet even as schools are being sold on AI products by numerous vendors, there’s a growing skepticism about AI in classrooms. It follows a similar backlash about social media and digital technology’s academic and mental health effects on students, which has led to more states and districts putting in place bans and rethinking their reliance on laptops.

In the Center for Democracy & Technology survey, half of students said using AI in class made them feel less connected to their teachers, and 70% of teachers said they were concerned that students’ use of AI was preventing them from learning important skills.

Schools need to weigh the benefits of adopting AI tools in the classroom against their effect on student privacy, mental health and social skills, said Sue Thotz, director of outreach for Common Sense Media, a nonprofit advocacy group focused on technology and its effect on children and families.

Schools, Thotz said, may be the “only mandated safe space” where students can learn to use and access emerging technology. But she and other education experts believe districts need to increase scrutiny of products.

Globally, the market for AI products in K-12 schools was worth around $391.2 million in 2024, and could rise to more than $9 billion by 2034, , a market research company. That includes AI products for tutoring, personalized learning, automated grading, lesson planning and administrative tasks.

“When I talk about AI literacy, it’s not how to use AI. It’s understanding how AI is built,” said Thotz. “Why is it being created? Who’s profiting off of this?”

‘Giving a tool to children’

New York Assemblymember Robert Carroll said he uses artificial intelligence in his own work and sees its value. As someone who struggled with dyslexia as a child, he also thinks technology can help students with disabilities.

But he also wants to keep AI out of most K-8 classroom instruction. Students should learn basic subject matter first — in conjunction with critical thinking — and then later use the tools that can assist them, he said.

Carroll, a Democrat, has that would prohibit the use of most AI in K-8 classrooms, with exceptions for diagnostic testing and support for students with disabilities.

“It is imperative that all children gain strong foundational skills, especially in literacy and numeracy, and it seems that AI is uniquely positioned to possibly undermine that,” he said. “There’s a difference between giving a tool to adults and giving a tool to children who have yet to master skills.”

Rather than full bans, most bills seeking to restrict AI have opted to focus on age restrictions, parental opt-outs, oversight and bans on using AI to replace teachers.

This year, Florida’s would have included a statewide restriction on student access to AI instructional tools before sixth grade, with exceptions for use supervised by school personnel, English-learner translation support and disability accommodations. It overwhelmingly passed the Senate 37-1, but died in the House.

A adds computer science to the required public school curriculum, including AI and emerging technologies. Connecticut lawmakers in 2025 failed to pass aiming to stop AI from “replacing” public school educators.

Sophia Romee, the general manager of the GenAI Studio, an initiative studying how students and educators use generative AI at the College Board, the nonprofit that administers the Advanced Placement curriculum and SAT tests for high schools, said she is concerned that only that allow students to use generative AI have a formal policy governing its use.

The College Board’s research, Romee said, shows many students are worried about becoming too reliant on AI, and that adults need to give clearer guidance about where using AI tools for brainstorming, revising and tutoring crosses the ethical line into cheating.

“Students are far more self-aware about AI’s risks than headlines suggest.”

Like aviation in 1905

Jason Coley, director of the Center for Academic Innovation at Maria College in Albany, New York, said the policy debate needs to move beyond whether schools are “for” or “against” the use of AI.

“The better question is what kinds of AI use are supervised, age appropriate, transparent, and tied to real learning,” Coley said. Schools need guardrails around privacy, student data, bias, teacher training and equity of access, he said, but also permission to “experiment responsibly.”

Ellerson Ng, of the School Superintendents Association, said superintendents see AI as part of a larger umbrella of disruptive technologies in schools that has evolved from calculators to laptops to cellphones. The lesson, she said, is that overreactive policy rarely works. She also said schools should not cover AI in a separate policy, but as part of a broader technology policy.

“I don’t have a calculator policy. Why would I have an AI policy?” she said, describing how some district leaders think about the issue. “I have a technology policy.”

With past technologies such as cellphones and laptops, adults could often control when students had access, Ellerson Ng said. With AI apps and platforms, many students accessed the tools before teachers, principals or state officials were even aware of them.

That makes bans difficult, she said. Schools can block tools on school-owned devices and networks, but “you’re only one personal device away from social media and AI being in your schools.”

Justin Reich, an associate professor of digital media at MIT, said that uncertainty around AI should make policymakers cautious about declaring best practices too soon.

Reich said states are trying to regulate classroom AI at a moment when the field is still so unstable that “writing a guide for AI in 2026 is like writing a guide for aviation in 1905” before airlines, airports or even commercial flight.

“If you were to take any of the AI literacy documents, AI readiness documents, even the moratorium documents, and put them against a checklist,” said Reich, “there would be a lot of boxes in the ‘we’re making this up’ column and not a lot in the ‘we have evidence’ column.”

State lawmakers and school districts should be honest that they don’t know what they’re doing, are relying on limited expert information and that policy is subject to change with new information, Reich said.

“Lawmakers will need to be honest that what they propose now could be completely outdated in two years.”

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For many schools, it’s a race to keep up. Others are leading the pack. And some are unsure what to do with it.

Artificial intelligence is playing an increasingly prominent role in Hawaiʻi education, from the recent opening of the state’s first AI-focused charter school to the development of new coursework teaching students how to navigate rapidly changing technology. Teachers are also coming face-to-face with new technology, whether it’s using AI avatars to test students’ grasp of Mandarin Chinese vocabulary or confronting kids who are submitting assignments written by ChatGPT.

But there’s wide variation in how much teachers and students are willing to engage with the new technology. Civil Beat spoke with nearly two dozen educators, administrators and students across the state about their experiences with AI in schools and what they expect the future to look like.

A few years ago, the focus of AI in education was preventing students from cheating, said Michael Latham, president of Punahou School. Since then, he said, administrators and teachers at the OÊ»ahu private school have pivoted to teaching students how to use new tools responsibly, rather than banning them altogether. 

“We wanted our students to become really thoughtful and critical users,” Latham said, “to be able to understand these tools, but do so really with eyes wide open, aware of what some of the challenges would be.”&ČÔČúČő±è;

Public schools are piloting their own technology, including MagicSchool, a platform with AI tools like image generators and chatbots that teachers can tailor to their own lessons, said Winston Sakurai, educational administrative services director in the Department of Education’s Office of Curriculum and Instructional Design.  

While teachers receive training on how to use these platforms, Sakurai acknowledges that some are faster to embrace technology than others. It’s important for schools to find a balance between innovating with AI and meeting teachers where they’re at, he said. 

“We want people to embrace it,” Sakurai said, “but we cannot afford to burn people out with the adoption of it.”&ČÔČúČő±è;

Students also have varying levels of enthusiasm for the new technology. Some are emerging as statewide experts in the field, with one Punahou student developing resources to help teachers incorporate AI into their lessons. Others are more skeptical of the technology after they’ve seen their classmates cheat on assignments or receive incorrect information from AI chatbots.  

“I think personally, AI is a useful and dangerous tool,” said Charwin Irebaria, a junior at McKinley High School. “People should be cautious about what they try to get out of AI, because it can really affect our future.”&ČÔČúČő±è;

McKinley High School

In Cynthia Reves’ McKinley High School classroom, an assortment of items litter students’ desks: a bear-shaped pencil case, neon highlighters, a manila folder stuffed with papers. 

Laptops and iPads are conspicuously absent from students’ workspaces. Teens place their cellphones in mint green containers minutes after the bell rings and leave their devices there for the remainder of class. 

Like many teachers, Reves is questioning if her students are using AI on their assignments – and whether it’s appropriate for them to do so. In the past year, she’s tried to eliminate some of the uncertainty by doubling down on paper and pencil assignments and reducing students’ use of laptops and cellphones in her class. 

“What is dishonest use of AI?” Reves said. “That implies there’s an honest use of AI. What is that?” 

On a Friday morning in May, Reves ran her students through a series of short writing exercises to prepare them for their upcoming Advanced Placement English Language and Composition exam. Although the test would be online, Reves tasked her students with annotating passages and writing thesis statements by hand. 

“It feels like this huge tension,” Reves said. “I feel like I’m walking backwards, and yet there’s this AI thing that’s pulling forward.”

Reves went to school in the 1980s, when students used typewriters to complete assignments and Macintosh computers were the newest technology. Reves has constantly adapted to change in her 30 years in education, from teaching remotely to managing cellphones in class, but she’s worried about how the latest AI tools could impact students’ learning. 

In the past, Reves said, she could quickly identify when a student didn’t write a paper on their own. Just by plugging the opening sentences of a paper into Google, she said, she could tell when students found a copy of a similar assignment online and claimed it as their own. 

Now, Reves doubts herself. While she occasionally questions if students have written an essay on their own, they’ll deny using AI – and there’s no way to prove it, Reves said. Many AI detection tools have proven unreliable. 

Reves now confines most of her writing assignments to the classroom, rather than assigning essays as homework. If students want to finish a writing assignment during study hall, she said, she requires their teacher to sign off on the paper at the end of the period, affirming that the student completed the work on their own. 

But Reves also knows she can’t avoid AI forever. At the end of a recent English class, she assigned her students homework requiring them to read a short passage and answer questions. Once they completed the assignment, she said, they could run the writing prompts through AI to see how their answers compared to what the chatbot suggested.  

She wouldn’t have offered this option in August, Reves said. But her students have developed stronger writing skills and judgment throughout the year, and she believes they can now evaluate the AI responses’ critically.  

“I trust you,” Reves told her students.  

Mid-Pacific Institute 

Leslie Gleim’s preschool students at Mid-Pacific Institute are confident they can outsmart ChatGPT.

On a recent Wednesday morning, Gleim led a small group of 5-year-olds in a lively conversation about the observations they made on a recent field trip to HoÊ»omaluhia Botanical Garden. She encouraged students to use their imagination to describe the clouds and explain how they came to life during their visit.  

“It was the happiest cloud!” one boy said. Another student speculated some of the clouds looked sad because the class hadn’t visited the garden for a few weeks. 

As the children chimed in, ChatGPT transcribed the discussion word for word on Gleim’s phone. Later, Gleim asked it to summarize the themes that emerged during the students’ conversation and compared the notes against her own observations.

The AI tool didn’t go unnoticed by the kids. 

“We seem smarter than Chat,” one student, Knox, said as Gleim checked the AI transcription on her phone. 

“Are you?” she asked. The group of kids erupted into cheers and enthusiastic nods. 

A few minutes later, Knox and his classmates put their theory to the test. One by one, they spoke into Gleim’s phone, asking ChatGPT abstract questions about their field trip to the garden and the personalities they gave the clouds during their discussion. 

After every question, Gleim asked her students to evaluate ChatGPT’s answers. Students were skeptical of the responses the AI generated – and Gleim was proud. 

“You guys won!” she said as students gave ChatGPT’s answers a resounding thumbs-down.

Using ChatGPT to record and transcribe her discussions with students has significantly saved her time over the past year, Gleim said. It also increases the stakes for students. When students know ChatGPT is listening to their conversation, she said, they’re more intentional with their words. 

But Gleim doesn’t want kids to think AI is the source of all answers. When she uses ChatGPT in front of her students, she said, she’s not afraid to point out its mistakes, using phrases like, “Chat didn’t get it.”&ČÔČúČő±è; 

“It’s not the gospel, but a tool,” she said. 

Hawaiʻi Technology Academy

Two years ago, Kingston Collman came to a sombering realization: AI was coming for his dream job.

Collman, a recent graduate from HawaiÊ»i Technology Academy’s Waipahu campus, spent his early years of high school studying game development and planned to pursue a career in computer science. But as AI became more advanced, he realized projects taking him a year and a half to complete could be completed in minutes by new technology. 

“I was like, freshman year, AI is going to take over,” the 18-year-old said. “I don’t want to study for six years ahead and then be jobless.”&ČÔČúČő±è;

Collman pivoted to using AI to pursue his passion of producing social media content. For his end-of-year project, Collman developed an AI assistant to expedite the process of creating videos for social media. The assistant can generate scripts, suggest a list of video shots and assist with creating social media posts in a matter of minutes — a process that previously took him over an hour, Collman said.

The goal is to increase content creators’ efficiency, not to remove humans from social media altogether, Collman said, adding that viewers still want to see authentic content. 

It’s hard to tell what the future will look like for social media creators, however, and he’s worried more content could become AI-generated. Already, AI slop — low-quality videos created with AI — are becoming  on YouTube and other online platforms.Ìę

“You don’t know what’s real or not,” he said, “which is very dangerous.”&ČÔČúČő±è;

Some of Collman’s peers are equally skeptical of AI and how it could dominate fields traditionally untouched by technology. 

Adriana Hunt, another recent graduate from HawaiÊ»i Technology Academy, is still reconciling how she can use AI to promote her artwork without compromising her creativity. For her end-of-year project, the 18-year-old asked ChatGPT to analyze her TikTok and Instagram art accounts and provide feedback on what types of posts were most likely to grow her online following. 

ChatGPT offered her advice she previously hadn’t considered, Hunt said, like adding more hashtags to her social media posts or posting more about her process of creating drawings. 

Hunt draws the line at using AI to create new art.  

When one of her teachers suggested using AI to generate ideas for her art or assist with her drawings, Hunt immediately rejected the idea. She uses art as a way to express herself and challenge her creativity — something that can’t be replicated by a few keystrokes on the computer, Hunt said. She’s also worried that relying on AI to generate art could set impossibly high standards.Ìę

“It’s never going to go away, because it’s now so woven into the fabric of everything,” Hunt said. “But we can learn how to rely on it less.”&ČÔČúČő±è;

KĆ«lia Academy

In James Morice’s data science class, sixth graders throw out phrases like “bimodal distributions” and “right-skewed graphs” with ease. 

At KĆ«lia Academy, a charter school in Kalihi, data science and coding are just as important to the curriculum as English and math. KĆ«lia is HawaiÊ»i’s  middle and high school, opening in 2024 with ambitious plans to develop a seven-year program specializing in data science and coding.  

Before students can pursue careers in AI engineering and technology, Morice said, they have to learn the basics. 

On a recent Thursday morning, sixth graders at KĆ«lia were working together to examine graphs and input formulas in Google Sheets that could help them analyze a large dataset on the maximum speeds of roller coasters across the country.    

“What does every case represent?” Morice asked the class. “What are the attributes you see?”

The goal is to give students the expertise they need to understand how AI works so they can go on to develop new tools. 

Students still receive plenty of opportunities to work with new technology at KĆ«lia Academy, executive director Andy Gokce said. In English classes, Gokce said, students work with ChatGPT to receive feedback on their essays under the guidance of their teachers. Others have learned how to train AI models to distinguish between venomous and non-venomous snakes.

But Gokce doesn’t want his students to simply consume AI — he expects them to go on to lead the field and develop new technology as engineers or cybersecurity experts.Ìę

“We want them to know, inside and out, how it actually works,” Gokce said.  

Waiākea Intermediate School

Can students beat AI? 

It’s a challenge sixth graders were eager to tackle in Tyler Kojima’s world history class at Waiākea Intermediate School on the Big Island. 

On a recent Tuesday afternoon, Kojima tasked his students with defending a historical invention of their choice to an AI chatbot. He had programmed the chatbot to be skeptical of students’ inventions, which ranged from the Mesopotamian wheel to the woodblock printing technique. 

Kojima’s students could hold a conversation with the chatbot to convince it of the value of their invention, but they had to prove their point in eight messages or fewer. 

“You’re not trying to throw in the towel,” Kojima told his students. “You’re trying to beat it.”

For the next 30 minutes, students furiously typed on their laptops as they responded to detailed questions from the chatbots. 

“How do you know it’s more comfortable?” the chatbot challenged one student who was trying to sell it on the value of a new camel saddle. 

“Why should we trust ordinary citizens to make important decisions about our city?” it said in response to a pitch about Athenian democracy. 

It’s natural for people to be resistant to new innovations and change, Kojima told his sixth graders. When AI emerged a few years ago, he said, many adults were skeptical of the new technology — and so were his students.Ìę 

At the start of the year, Kojima said, many students believed AI was taboo. Most sixth graders don’t seem to use AI in their personal lives, Kojima said, and were wary about using it for the first time. 

Kojima is hoping to change students’ perceptions by introducing AI tools like chatbots and image generators that can make abstract topics in world history feel more concrete and exciting. He said he’s also careful to set clear limitations on how students can use the technology, instructing the chatbots not to give students immediate answers during class activities and occasionally rejecting the feedback kids receive on their essays from AI writing tools.  

“This tool is not going away,” Kojima recalled telling his students. “It’s up to you guys to know how to use it responsibly.”&ČÔČúČő±è;

Civil Beat’s education reporting is supported by a grant from Chamberlin Family Philanthropy.

“We’re in the middle of an industrial revolution that’s bigger than the dot.com revolution, and the world is not prepared for it,” Weingarten told Âé¶čŸ«Æ·. “And our country’s leaders have a laissez-faire attitude about it. So I feel a huge responsibility to try and get it right.” 

Weingarten has proposed reshaping how U.S. public schools navigate AI in particular and technology more broadly, saying our kids are experiencing a crisis of attention and well-being — and that teachers are getting precious little guidance on how to help young people navigate these challenges.

Her proposal: Trim tech use, especially for younger kids, and teach all students how to think critically, communicate, collaborate and persist.“One of the worst things we’ve done in education was to call collaboration and communication ‘soft skills,’” she said, “because applied learning, problem solving, communication, collaboration, persistence — all of these — are the skills that any young adult is going to need in an AI world. In fact, these are the skills that are going to be much more competitive in an AI world.”

In a May 27 at the National Press Club in Washington, she proposed a near-ban on computer screens for students through second grade, including for assessments. She proposed banning student-facing AI in elementary schools, arguing that young children need to build foundational skills without algorithmic shortcuts. 

And she said that young people should not have access to “social companion” chatbots that simulate human relationships until age 16.

The speech makes Weingarten and AFT, the second-largest teachers union in the nation, new and potentially powerful supporters of a growing parent-powered movement to trim technology from U.S. classrooms, even as the union pushes to train thousands of teachers on how AI works. 

Weingarten proposed that schools redesign their offerings so that “active learning, including project-based, experiential and career-connected learning,” is the norm across all grade levels. She decried “drill-and-kill” rote instruction, saying that in an age when any fact is retrievable with a single prompt, the ability to apply knowledge, think critically, communicate and collaborate matters far more than memorization.

“To really prepare young people for complex challenges, our true goal is to have students who can work together and problem solve,” she said.

Weingarten noted that 31 states have now adopted some form of phone ban, and that several countries that were early adopters of education technology are pulling back. Sweden, she said, has returned to printed textbooks. Estonia, where research linked higher screen time in young children to weaker language skills, is calling for more human-to-human interaction. And Italy is re-emphasizing handwriting and traditional instruction.

Weingarten also called for establishing a rigorous new national safety and privacy standard for AI products sold to schools and creating an independently funded research consortium to study tech’s effects on children. And she proposed a new tax on Big Tech companies’ earnings to offset the environmental and societal costs of AI-driven disruption, including workers “being displaced by AI.”

In an interview Monday, Weingarten said AFT’s own $23 million AI academy, launched last year in New York City to help teachers understand and shape how AI enters their classrooms, exists in part to provide crucial guidance on how to understand the technology. Over the next five years, the National Academy for AI Instruction is expected to provide hands-on workshops for 400,000 educators, or one in 10 U.S. teachers, effectively reaching the more than 7.2 million students they teach. 

She said the institute’s mission and her new stance on tech aren’t incompatible.

“The AI Institute is really about teachers teaching teachers, and how the tech companies are not in control,” she said. “It is a people-first, safety-first focus.”

When she announced the academy in July, Weingarten said teachers face “huge challenges,” including navigating AI wisely, ethically and safely. “The question was whether we would be chasing it — or whether we would be trying to harness it.”

Nearly a year later, she said the institute now serves a crucial role in the absence of guidance from the Trump administration, which last week issued a U.S. Surgeon General’s urging families and schools to reduce children’s screen time. It suggested that schools limit school computers to computer labs, invest in physical textbooks and “prioritize pen-and-paper curricula, hands-on activities and social activities for all grade levels.”

In a media appearance last week, U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon said schools “need to embrace A.I., and to use it .”&ČÔČúČő±è;

Weingarten said it’s “crazy” that the U.S. Surgeon General’s office is offering more detailed recommendations than the Education Department. 

“When you actually have two-thirds of teachers in the United States having no idea how to use AI in schools, and when you have one-third saying there’s no formal guidance, and then you have the Education Secretary saying they should use it ‘appropriately,’ I mean, this is part of the problem,” she said. 

U.S. Education Department Press Secretary Savannah Newhouse said McMahon “has highlighted the many types of schools that are successfully and responsibly integrating AI in the classroom to help our nation’s students meet the challenges of today.”

Weingarten also took a swipe at Melania Trump’s recent tech-and-education event, in which the First Lady the White House alongside a humanoid robot to highlight the potential benefits of robots replacing teachers. The stunt, Weingarten said, “spoke volumes. So did the responses from teachers wondering how a robot was going to build trust with students or know when someone was having a bad day. There’s no algorithm for that. Students need their teachers — real human beings, not robots and not chatbots.”

Newhouse didn’t address Weingarten’s allegations about the administration’s leadership on AI, instead criticizing union priorities more broadly: “If there’s finally going to be an honest conversation about the damage done to American students, it should begin with the teachers unions’ enthusiastic support for a federal bureaucracy that has spent over $3 trillion only to watch student outcomes decline, along with their relentless push to keep schools shuttered during COVID,” Newhouse said. 

‘Kids are getting burned’

The effort to curb tech in schools comes on the heels of a similar one, led in large part by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, to limit cellphone use in schools.

Weingarten on Monday said she has steeped herself in research on educational technology and artificial intelligence. But it wasn’t until she spoke to Haidt last summer about young people’s worsening that she knew she had to draw a line. 

“What really drove me was the issues around attention,” she said. 

Haidt, author of the best-selling 2024 book The Anxious Generation, has said short-form videos and other social media tools have decimated our kids’ ability to pay attention in school, resulting in fewer books read, poorer basic skills and worsening mental health. A more recent book, The Digital Delusion, by the educational neuroscientist Jared Cooney Horvath, argues that basic classroom technology has had a similar effect on skills.

In her speech, much of Weingarten’s criticism centered around increasingly widespread fears that our society is losing its way when it comes to young people’s technology use. She noted that more than half of 11-year-olds already carry smartphones, a figure that climbs to 95% among teenagers. Four in 10 teens report being online almost constantly, she said. “The pace of this tech revolution has been blisteringly fast, and kids are getting burned.”

She pointed to Haidt’s research linking heavy smartphone and social media use to rising rates of social isolation, anxiety and depression among young people, with academic consequences as well from the rollout of classroom technology. Scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which had been climbing steadily, have in many cases worsened after widespread digital adoption. Weingarten acknowledged that correlation is not causation, but said the pattern, appearing consistently across states, grade levels and subjects, deserves serious attention.

She also pointed to research showing that 88% of teachers in a survey reported that their students’ attention spans were shrinking, which she attributed in part to the instant-rewards of online platforms such as TikTok and YouTube. Cognitive scientist work, she said, suggests students are not incapable of focusing, but are increasingly unwilling to do so when schoolwork feels dull by comparison to their online lives.

But she cautioned that she’s not anti-tech.

“I’m not calling for an AI ban or a Chromebook bonfire,” she said. “What I am calling for is getting the balance right to harness the benefits of technology while mitigating the harms. I’m wary of the dangers of AI, but it is here to stay. We need enforceable guardrails and help to cushion the disruption to people’s lives.” 

Alex Kotran, the founder and CEO of , said Weingarten is “right where it counts” about limiting AI for younger students but giving teachers access to the tools. “It’s about getting the balance right,” he said. “And I really don’t talk to anybody that believes that we shouldn’t have some sort of balance.”

Kotran said he’d recently spoken at an National Education Association meeting and saw that, like AFT, they’re focused on understanding AI. “There’s this almost-meme, ‘Oh, the unions are getting in the way of AI transformation, AI readiness,’ and I really disagree with that fundamentally. The unions have a very sophisticated understanding of what really matters here.”

Weingarten’s push to give teachers a better understanding of AI makes sense as well, he said. “When teachers feel like they are the main characters of the story of AI transformation, their willingness to really lean in and learn, it’s a lot more. You see a lot more buy-in.”

More broadly, Kotran said, supporting active learning, project-based and career-connected learning is “what all the smartest people in the field,” including CEOs and labor economists, are recommending. “What everybody’s basically saying is that the skills that matter now are people who can just get shit done, who can work independently and proactively on projects, who can create and build. And so it’s really, really important to hear a union actually naming that.”

On Monday, Weingarten said parents are leading the way on this issue — and that schools risk being caught between parents who opt their children out of classroom technology and those who want to keep it. “How does a teacher in kindergarten work in a classroom where half the kids opt out of screens and half the kids are on screens?”

The University of California at San Diego recently shook both higher education and K-12 when it a startling reality: Many incoming freshmen could not perform basic middle school math. 

The university was commendably specific about the causes: the COVID-19 pandemic and its educational disruptions, elimination of standardized testing, grade inflation and expanded admissions from under-resourced high schools. Together, these forces produced a class increasingly unprepared for quantitative rigor.

But here’s the paradox: These students looked highly successful on paper. Ninety-four percent had taken advanced math courses like calculus or statistics. They averaged a 3.7 grade-point average. One in four had a 4.0. 

So where did America’s K-12 school systems go wrong?

There isn’t a simple answer. But I would suggest a fundamental, largely unacknowledged problem driving these outcomes:

America’s schools are terrible at catching kids up.

A 2023 of nearly 3 million students across seven states found that those who started out behind academically rarely caught up. Students in the 25th percentile in third grade tended to remain in the bottom third through eighth grade and into high school. Low-income students, and Black and Hispanic kids,  barely moved at all. When the national ed nonprofit TNTP 28,000 schools nationwide, only 5% helped the average student catch up to grade level.

Kids who are behind stay behind. Kids who are far behind stay far behind. Call it the Catch-up Crisis.  

Why are schools so bad at catching kids up?

Because teachers are being asked to do the impossible.

In a classroom of 25 to 30 students, teachers must determine who is on grade level, who is behind (and why), how to modify instruction for each struggling child and how to extend learning for advanced students — all while delivering grade-level content.

Diagnostic exams, designed to give educators information on how students are progressing, are infrequent and often test different subject matter than what is used in the classroom. Intervention programs designed to catch kids up are purchased but poorly implemented. Students needing intensive help are sometimes segregated into programs with low expectations and weak outcomes.

In short, teachers rarely have the effective tools they need.

And in the absence of solutions, another practice creeps in: grade inflation (as evidenced by the incoming class at UC San Diego).

It’s hard to tell parents their child is behind. It’s harder still when the school cannot explain how it will help them catch up. So .

But when teachers have a roadmap for acceleration, honesty becomes possible. Poor grades become temporary markers on a path to growth, not permanent labels to be hidden.

There is reason for hope. TNTP’s study 1,400 schools where students consistently learned more than a year’s worth of material annually, enabling those who started behind to reach grade level. 

In other words, the Catch-up Crisis is reversible. But first. we need a bold, shared goal: that students who fall behind grade level will catch up to — or exceed — grade-level standards within two school years, and without fail by high school graduation.

Call it “On Track in 2.”

Governors and state education commissioners should adopt this goal publicly and report each year on how many students are behind, how many are catching up and how many are on track to do so.

Of course, setting the goal is easier than achieving it.  Doing that will mean tackling three big gaps for teachers: limited real-time insight into student learning, little evidence-based guidance on how to address specific learning gaps and minimal job-embedded coaching.

Before artificial intelligence, solving these at scale was nearly impossible. Students generate enormous amounts of work daily — assignments, quizzes, writing, projects. No human can analyze all of it for 25 students every day. But AI can surface patterns quickly and provide teachers with usable, digestible insights.

More profoundly, AI can help generate evidence-informed strategies for specific challenges.

Imagine a fifth grader who is struggling with fractions. His teacher knows he earned a C- on the last test but doesn’t know why or what to do to help. AI can analyze the student’s work in real time and discovers he tends to invert numerators and denominators; it draws on data from thousands of similar children to see what worked best to help those with the same misconceptions and recommends content for a 15-minute tutoring block for the teacher to review and revise.  

Of course, the teacher should always make the final call. But now she has a playbook to use as a starting point.

The same applies to feedback for teachers. High-quality coaching is rare because it is time-intensive and expensive, and the quality can vary without intensive oversight and training of coaches by the district. AI-supported , used responsibly, could provide timely, standards-aligned feedback on recorded lessons, supplementing human coaching rather than replacing it.

This is not science fiction. In the Bronx, Superintendents Cristine Vaughan and Harry Sherman have launched pilots designed to catch kids up in math using AI. They are partnering with organizations such as , and that provide smart and safe AI tools for teachers that assess students in real time,  identify what’s holding them back and recommend instruction that helps them get over the hump where they’re struggling. The pilots also include high-quality professional coaching for the teaching staff. Schools using these types of programs are seeing and increased student engagement.

These efforts are not yet the answer. And no technology should enter classrooms without strict vetting to ensure data privacy and security and to avoid adding to the problem with excessive screen time for students.  But they show the potential of smart and safe technology to give teachers new tools to catch kids up.

The evidence that the Catch-up Crisis is solvable is all around. It’s up to the adults who make and implement education policy to remove the barriers that are preventing America’s students from excelling.

Correction: The essay mischaracterized how many incoming freshmen at UC San Diego could not do middle school math. The correct number is 12.5%. Also, the name of one of the Bronx superintendents was misspelled. It’s Cristine Vaughan.