Big School Districts Pause AI Access at School

Readers of this column know that I generally constrain topics to higher education, however, the practices of school districts impact colleges and universities. When school boards decide to take a step backward by removing effective educational and research tools that students and teachers may use, students are the ones who suffer.

In the first year after the November 2022 release of ChatGPT, many schools took steps to control the use of AI technology. Gradually, more and more K-12 districts found ways to integrate the technology into classes to enhance the delivery of the curriculum. Two and a half years ago, the Center on Reinventing Public Education reported: “early signs of faster uptake of AI in more advantaged settings. Suburban, majority-white, and low-poverty school districts are currently about twice as likely to provide AI-use training for their teachers than urban or rural or high-poverty districts.” Momentum has built with the emergence of many proven technologies such as Salman Khan’s Khanmigo that provides a wide array of highly regarded AI subject tutors and related services. More services are provided by textbook publishers and online learning platforms.

Yet, in recent weeks, the nation’s largest public school district, the School District of the City of New York, and the second largest public school district, the Los Angeles Unified School District, have announced plans to drastically suppress the use of AI in their classrooms. Earlier this month, CNN reporter Clare Duffy reported that New York City has banned AI from classrooms through eighth grade for the next year:

In Los Angeles, Mariana Dale of LAist reports:

Miami-Dade County Public Schools, the third largest school district, has signed a partnership with Google Gemini. However, in the city with the fourth largest school district, Finnegan Belleau of the Chicago Tribune reports that 24 of the 42 Chicago school board candidates on the ballot this fall, including the 15 endorsed by the local teachers’ union, are backing a temporary moratorium on AI as part of screen-time limits for kids. In both New York City and Los Angeles, a number of concerns were expressed regarding the impact of the amount of student screen time involved in schoolwork. Meanwhile the use of AI for school-related tasks has significantly increased at many of the districts across the country. The Stanford 2026 Annual AI Index Report reveals:

In my opinion, it is most regrettable that the larger school districts have been unable, in these four years, to develop effective practices and policies that enable their students to take full advantage of the highly effective apps and platforms that utilize AI to personalize and optimize learning to best meet individual student needs. To call a moratorium on the use of AI in schools for the next one to three years will result in significant losses during the years of absence of technologies such as AI-driven adaptive learning, tutoring such as Khanmigo and analogous platforms. The momentum that has been generated in using these technologies will also be lost, requiring relearning and context-building to reinstate such models.

The fallout in student knowledge and performance will be significant if AI does not continue to grow in the affected school districts. Of course, these policies cannot regulate home use of AI on personal computers. But, doing so will require additional personal funding, parental initiative and persistence to ensure that the best outcomes are reached.

I believe that the school districts are misinterpreting expert opinions regarding excessive screen time. These, I believe, are intended to address excessive time dedicated to video gaming, “social” media, and nonacademic uses of AI technology that dwarf the amount of time and the productive learning aspects of superior teaching technologies.

It is clear that higher education must take a leadership role in informing and educating educators of the benefits that AI can provide in earlier grade levels. Through continuing and professional education for school board members, administrators and K-12 teachers, we can raise the awareness of productive practices and policies. By offering ongoing efforts to keep up with the rapidly evolving applications, we can help K-12 leadership make wise choices for the students who are in their care. Who, at your institution, is prepared to reach out to help the school districts in your region?