Sentiment about AI in schools remains polarized

Educators share varied sentiments following the issuance of a Trump administration executive order, “Advancing Artificial Intelligence Education for American Youth.” 

  • “Every single person preaching that AI will ‘revolutionize’ education needs to contemplate who they are aligning with right now. The Trump administration is gunning to destroy public education by using AI to hollow it out from within. Which side are you on?” —Educator in Texas
  • “[In response to a blog post criticizing the AI push] This is also why the phrase [AI] can save you time as a teacher’ has become my most-hated sentence as a teacher at this point…” —High School English Teacher in Oregon
  • “[In response to a repost of the EO summary] Between this and the wave of integration already happening in independent/private schools, no child and no educator is safe from the AI edtech grift. Gen Z and Gen Alpha are cooked.” —Educator in California
  • “Literacy rates are falling, students do not stay engaged with texts, and AI is a big culprit. We need to be a society that values reading and education as a whole. Tough to do with those who can’t think critically and believe propaganda.” —English Teacher 
  • “I’m working with my union to draft some ‘you can’t make me use AI’ language because that is definitely where it feels we are headed.” —Social Studies Teacher 
  • “I still remember having ‘how to Google search’ as part of my curriculum in a class I taught called ‘Internet Applications’. I hope to enquire about AI resources in our district soon.  (How long until I laugh at this [statement]?)” —Teacher in Kansas
  • “The other obvious problem is that AI will be used to increase class sizes and decrease the number of humans involved in education, when, in fact, our country’s greatest need is for more human beings to be involved. AI can’t wake a kid up and inspire them to learn. AI can’t and won’t tell a kid if AI is lying. AI can’t notice a kid getting high or getting beaten up … What I would like to use AI for is to streamline my planning and grading, and create additional high-quality content. Imagine if every class period, a teacher could show pictures, memes, and even video content with music, movies, etc., that helps enrich instruction? Make AI free for teachers and loosen restrictions on things like copyright protections (extend and broaden fair use), and teachers could really have a revolution of engaging content for kids. But will that happen? Probably not.” —Teacher in the United States
  • “AI isn’t going away, so I think it will become more and more important to teach kids to use AI in all subjects so they know which use cases are good and which aren’t. Unfortunately, I think a lot of teachers blanket ban it in a way that makes students feel the teachers are just out of touch. Voice is an essential part of writing and as of now, AI does a poor job using it for creative works. I think comparing and contrasting AI passages and passages by humans is a good way to demonstrate this. And wouldn’t you know it, the better we humans are at identifying the techniques expert writers use and plugging them into our AI prompt, the better AI does. But the human needs to be the driver who knows what to look for and what good writing is. You have to practice writing to get there. Luckily I teach middle school, so 99% obviously can’t write as well as AI and haven’t figured out that if your essay magically appears in your google doc version history, that’s very suspicious. I call it out and consider it cheating.” —Middle School Math Teacher