Transcript of The Battle Over A.I. in the Classroom New

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From The New York Times, I'm Rachel Abrams, and this is The Daily. With the school year ending, educators and parents all over the country are taking stock of the earthquake that is AI in the classroom. Today, my colleague Natasha Singer talks about the year that reshaped American classrooms and how one dedicated teacher a dedicated teacher helped his students chart their own path into an uncertain future. It's Wednesday, June 17th. Natasha Singer, welcome back to The Daily.

Thanks for having me, Rachel.

So the school year is done for most students across the country, and it's been a really contentious year when it comes to one topic in particular, which is AI in the classroom, something that you have been covering. Can you summarize for us what the fight is over specifically, and when did it really get started?

You know, Rachel, I've been covering tech in schools and tech industry influence in schools for The New York Times for more than a decade, and I've never seen the kind of parent backlash about school tech that we're seeing. And particularly, as you pointed out, AI is becoming the new flashpoint. And I think that it's partly because of the context. First of all, there are massive concerns about cheating. Students tell me they're sitting in the front row of class and the kids in the back row have got their Chromebooks open. And whenever a teacher asks a question, the kids in the back are looking up the answers on Gemini or ChatGPT. And if they get called on, they're just reading the AI answers.

Wow.

And so there are all these concerns that these AI tools could pose serious risk to kids' learning, to kids' critical thinking. And so that's part of what the fight is about. And at the same time, you're getting this massive push from tech companies like Google and Microsoft and OpenAI to get their ChatGPT chatbots into schools. And you're also seeing the White House pushing for AI education.

This next executive order relates to artificial intelligence education, sir.

The White House issued this executive order on AI education toward the end of the last school year, and it was called Advancing AI Education for American Youth.

That's a big deal because AI is where it seems to be at. We have literally trillions of dollars being invested— invested in AI.

The Trump White House was saying if America wants to remain on the cutting edge, then we need kids to learn how to use these AI tools.

AI is the way to the future. I don't know if that's right or not, but certainly very smart people are investing in it heavily.

It was a call to action, but it didn't have a lot of direction on what to do. And so that left a great opportunity for tech companies to come in and shape what was happening.

At Microsoft, we believe delivering— At Google, we see AI as the most profound way—

It's called the AWS Education— And so the next thing that happens is you have dozens of companies signing up.

Today we are making new commitments by providing K-12 students, teachers, and staff with broader access than ever before.

And those companies are like Anthropic and Amazon and NVIDIA and Meta and Microsoft and Oracle. And OpenAI, like all the companies who are invested in tech, step up and say, we have the technology and the expertise and the funds to drive AI education. And the goal really is to give away up to $100 million in technology.

$150 million will go towards grants to support AI education. There's nothing more important than education.

Focusing on education is the center of where we need to go because it is all of these young people. They literally have to embrace it. But AI education is so new, nobody really knows what it is, and everybody has different definitions.

Mm-hmm. So basically, in the absence of very specific guidance from the White House, that leaves a vacuum for all these other stakeholders, if you will, to come in and try to shape how AI is being used in the classroom.

100%.

Okay. So these big tech companies want to get their technology into schools, which we know they have done before. I am probably one of many people who remembers being a kid and suddenly seeing these big colorful iMacs that just appeared in classrooms. So on some level, this is not a totally new phenomenon.

This is a really important point because we see these tech hype cycles in school driven by companies who have products and they wanna get their products in front of kids because kids are the next generation of consumers. If you can train a second grader on your tool, you have them for life as a customer. And we should look at these because when schools got laptops in the beginning, there was a big push for what they called computer literacy, like learn how to use a computer. And then as social media was taking off, we got social media literacy in schools. And then there was this brief moment after Meta changed its name where there was a campaign for metaverse literacy. And now we have this huge push for AI literacy when we have sparse evidence that many of these past tech literacies educational benefits for kids.

Mm. Can you talk about what that rollout of AI in schools actually looks like? What are we actually seeing happening with students?

So that's a really important question. It's also difficult to answer because each school district is doing its own thing. The most prominent example is Miami-Dade County Public Schools, which is the third largest US school district, and they were very careful. They spent months having their own technology experts test tech tools to see what they thought had the best guardrails for students. And then they spent months training teachers how to use these tools. And I sat in on some of those trainings. And so you have a district that basically geared up for a year before they decided to introduce Gemini, Google's chatbot, for more than 100,000 high school students. So that was a very careful rollout. They started very, very slowly. And then I think in contrast, you you have the Los Angeles Unified District, which is the second largest school district. And they, in 2024, announced with huge fanfare— Los Angeles Unified will never waver from putting our students' needs first. —that they had signed a deal with a startup to make an AI chatbot for students. A new day is dawning in technology and public education as Los Angeles— LA had said, "We're gonna be a model for the nation in AI use." and was gonna be called Ed.

It was really friendly.

Hi everybody, I'm Ed.

Hola a todos, soy Ed.

That would talk to students, and students could ask for help if they were struggling with a math problem. It could give them emotional support. They could check their grades. They could check their test scores. Their parents would be able to use this AI tool.

We have one of the brightest entities in the universe, Ed.

And so it was billed as this magical thing, right? And the superintendent said it would democratize access to information. A panacea, it sounds like. Right. But very quickly, within a few months, federal prosecutors came in and charged the founder of this startup that was making the AI tool for Los Angeles schools with defrauding investors.

Defrauding investors.

Right. And then the startup went bankrupt. And so, you know, that's the end of this tool that LA had chosen as its kind of demonstration product.

Sure.

And so you have this contrast between Miami, which went methodically and tested many AI tools before settling on one, and LA that went with a a small startup that had never made anything of this scale.

So obviously this rollout of AI in schools has been chaotic. Los Angeles shows the risks of rushing into something quickly. This chaos though does seem a bit predictable, right? Because if we're talking about technology that we are only beginning to understand what it is, how to use it, what the risks are, how have parents reacted to all of this?

Well, I have to go back to Los Angeles because Soon after this whole fiasco with the chatbot, Los Angeles parents started a petition called "Get Big Tech Off Students' Desks." Big tech is the big tobacco of our time.

Is it safe? Is it legal? And is it effective?

I trusted the school and the district with my child and that you had his best interest at heart. And it wasn't long before he started to come home from kindergarten singing the first songs he learned. Grammarly ads.

Make cursive and typing educational standards and remove all generative AI and AI chatbots immediately.

And more than 1,000 people signed this petition. And one of the things that the parents were asking for in their petition is to get the school district to audit all its recent tech contracts. LAUSD must undertake a review of all existing technology products and policies to ensure they are safe, effective, and legal. So this concern over AI is part of this wave that we're seeing around the country of parents pushing back on school tech.

So, okay, the AI backlash kind of gets rolled into a broader backlash. With AI though, what is a specific complaint about AI?

So I think the concerns about these generative AI tools, right, which can produce texts and images, are multiple. You've used ChatGPT and other tools. They regularly make stuff up.

Right.

And so one of the things is, are they gonna misinform students and are students not gonna know? The second thing is that you're basically offloading human tasks to a bot. And if you are a child or a student who doesn't know how to think critically yet, or who doesn't know how to use research, or doesn't know how to analyze a text passage, then It's like both hindering the development of your own human skills and also creating this result that seems human-ish. It's human-esque. And we've seen a series of reports and studies cautioning against using AI in education and the problems it could cause. Mm-hmm. And one of the biggest was a report from Brookings earlier this year in which You know, they looked at hundreds of studies and they spoke with hundreds of students and teachers and researchers and parents and technologists across the world. And the Brookings report said that at least for now, the risk of using generative AI in kids' education far overshadows the benefits.

I wanna pause briefly here and talk a little bit more about some of those risks that you articulated, because what you are describing as the concern is fundamentally about critical thinking, right? If the assignment is to read Othello and explain what it means, or look at a piece of civil rights law and try to explain how it might apply in a different situation, theoretically what students are being offered is a machine that can do all of that for you. And just to use an imperfect metaphor, if you think of the brain as a muscle that you exercise by learning to think critically in schools, this is a tool that basically takes away that exercise.

Absolutely. It's completely different to read a play like Othello or study primary source documents on the history of the civil rights movement, or even listen to a podcast versus getting an AI to synthesize that for you, to summarize that for you, to explain it to you. And parents are saying they wanna see more research and more studies about the impact of these tools in schools. And so one of the things we saw right after the LA chatbot fiasco was the Los Angeles School Board just voted to put in restrictions on tech in schools, including like— Mm-hmm. No laptops or tablets for kids in kindergarten and first grade. But in New York, we've seen a groundswell of concerns specifically around AI and a huge push to get the school district to put a moratorium on using student-facing AI tools and asking for an immediate pause on AI in schools. And one of the things that's remarkable about this polarizing debate is that the folks that are actually In the middle of this, the teachers and the students are largely left out of the discussion. And so this year I spent a lot of time going to schools and asking teachers and students what they think.

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Okay, so Natasha, what have you learned from talking to the people that we have not been hearing from in all of this, teachers and students?

You know, I spent a lot of time in schools this year, and it's absolutely fascinating. I found that more and more teachers and students aren't buying the popular polarizing narratives that like AI's magically gonna transform education, or AI's gonna tragically doom education. You see some students who have deep concerns about AI, and you have teachers who are trying to stake out a middle ground and chart a new path for what AI education could look like for their students.

And what does that path mean? What does it look like?

Well, a great example is a teacher that I started talking with earlier this year.

Okay.

Can you just tell me a little bit about your class and the school? You're in Newark?

Yeah, I'm in Newark, New Jersey at North Star Academy, which is a charter school. I've been there for a long time, so I've—

His name is Scott Kern. He teaches Advanced Placement US History.

It's a— it's a passion for sure. It's hard for me to imagine doing anything else.

You just see he's the kind of dedicated, engaging teacher that you wish you had or that you would want for your kids.

Helping them become good writers, good thinkers, good people.

And, you know, like many of us, Scott started experimenting with AI chatbots.

My kids and I were using it to make silly stories, and—

And then he signed on and did this fellowship program for teachers where he learned to build his own customized AI tools tailored to the history courses that he was teaching.

And he's the head of the history department And I thought, wow, this could be so helpful for me as a curriculum planner.

And so he's using it for his own work to develop and update course materials, and he can see that that's really useful.

Lesson planning, lesson design.

But as he's using these AI bots more and more—

I thought, I think there's opportunity here.

It occurs to him that the AI might also be able to help engage his students in learning AP US History.

To hopefully deepen their thinking and to make for, like, a richer discussion.

But in very limited doses.

When teachers know when the moments of academic friction and critical thinking are happening, they can choose that AI will not enter the picture at those moments. And if we do that, then AI, I think, can augment learning in some really powerful ways. And—

So educators know that the thing that makes students learn is friction, right? The fancy term for it is productive struggle.

Mm.

If something is easy, you might not retain it. But if you think through something yourself and you ask questions and maybe you make mistakes or maybe you correct it or maybe, you know, you have this epiphany about how to synthesize information from different time periods or whatever, it's going to stick in your head. And so Scott decides to develop some AI tools to see if he can help that productive struggle, that friction with students. And one of the things he does, remember he's AP US history teacher is he creates a debate bot. And in the middle of class, students stop for 10 minutes and they start talking with the AI tool that Scott made. And it's saying to them, what do you think was the primary cause of the Chicago race riots? And students say, here's what I think the reason is. And you've got the bot saying, okay, what evidence do you have for that? What's the primary source for your argument? And what about what else is happening around the rest of the country? Maybe it's not isolated to Chicago. The bot is designed to try to push their thinking further and help them hone a deeper argument.

Right.

Right. It's not trying to think for them.

But also, after about 10 minutes, Scott's like, "Okay, close your computers and now we're gonna talk about this ourselves." He wants to make sure that his kids are still exercising their brain muscles, so to speak. Right. And it's working inside the classroom. Outside the classroom, Scott and one of his teacher colleagues, Mike Taubman, are getting worried because they're noticing that a lot of students are turning to AI tools more frequently. And I have been seeing this a lot in my reporting this year. Like, yeah, there are plenty of kids using AI to cheat or to take shortcuts, but I'm also talking to teens around the country who are using chatbots to, like, create fitness routines or look up recipes or envision their prom dresses or make animated selfie videos.

No, it's, it's every time you do a Google search, it is integrated into dating apps. It's everywhere.

Right. And at the same time, we're seeing kids, like adults, get into these very risky intimate relationships with AI chatbots, and sometimes there are really tragic outcomes. I recently spoke with a 12th grader in San Francisco, and he told me, like, he'd accidentally stabbed himself in the middle of the night with a samurai sword.

Wow.

And instead of waking up his mom in the middle of the night to tell her that he had this deep bleeding gash in his leg, instead he asked a chatbot about what to do about it.

He asked the chatbot what to do about a samurai sword injury to his leg.

Yes, he did. And eventually he woke up his mom and she took him to the emergency room.

That seems like the right call.

Right. But the first line for many teens is, "Chat, tell me what to do about this," right?

Right.

And so Scott and his teacher Mike were, like, just growing concerned about their students.

Who knows what's gonna be out there in 6 or 7 years? Imagine that they get there and we have done nothing to prepare them to think critically about AI. If we're helping kids to figure out the world and their futures, then we have to help them figure this out too.

So the teachers decide that generative AI is actually a crucial new subject that teens need to be fluent in. Mm-hmm.

And the way they're gonna deal with this is they're gonna create a new course, and they're gonna call it "Driver's Education for AI." So our goal in all of this, by the end of the class that we're having, is for you I want you all to think of yourselves as drivers of the technology.

So I actually went to the first class of the semester earlier this year in February. 16 students had signed up. It's an elective class, and most of them were seniors preparing to graduate.

Okay, so what do they talk about in the first class?

You control the wheel. You control where things are going. You are not a passenger who's just sitting there You're not letting AI happen to you. You're in control.

They focused on having students think about agency.

So to kind of think about this in your own lives, we're gonna do what we're calling a 24-hour audit.

To look at this, the teachers asked the kids to think about when were the times that they actively asked a chatbot to do something for them specific, and the cases in which you're, like, on Instagram and there's an algorithm and it's just feeding you content. And you're, like, just scrolling through.

They're being asked to think critically about whether they're thinking critically.

Right. Which may seem obvious, but of course, most of us just mindlessly are using these AI tools all day long.

Sure.

You know, and in addition to this exercise where they thought about whether they were AI passengers or AI drivers, the students had this fascinating conversation about creativity.

Pause. So right there, that clip of the building falling was an AI-generated clip. Now you would think, like, what's the big deal? It was less than a second, but it caused—

They looked at a scene from a movie where a director had used AI to generate an explosion, and they talked about, like, is that film director still the creative force behind this part of the movie, or should the AI also get a co-directing credit?

Mm-hmm.

And when we talked to students from the class, They weren't naive about the potential impacts of the technology, and you hear their really sophisticated thinking when we ask them about it.

Okay, so I'm Anna, by the way. I work on The Daily, which is, you know, like—

So our Daily producer Anna Foley spoke with a few students.

I'll start. My name is Brianna Perez, and I'm currently a senior. And I'm 18.

My name is Nicholas Wortham. I'm currently a senior and I'm 18.

My name is Adrian Farel. I'm a senior and I'm 18.

Okay. And Anna asked them broadly about what they had hoped to get out of the AI literacy class and how they thought about AI now.

I decided to sign up for this class because I actually did an internship last year and I saw how there was a lot of AI copilots that helped in like business databases. So I felt like AI isn't gonna go nowhere, so it's better for me to learn it now so I will be more like aware and know how to work AI AI in my future.

Mm-hmm. So I just wanted a better understanding of how AI can help me in my thinking. Like, going throughout this class, it kind of made me realize that I have to approach AI with a certain purpose in mind instead of just mindlessly asking a general question, because then AI will kind of drive me and I won't drive it. Yeah.

Yeah. What did you think about AI before you started this class?

To me, I think the misconception that I had AI kind of has the answers to everything. Because I had some very specific tasks that I was working on. And if I wasn't specific, giving the AI context or like being straightforward with what I needed it for, it wasn't as accurate or efficient as I hoped it was going to be. And it just showed me that I had to put a lot more effort into my own personal thinking and taking the initiative on my own versus solely relying on AI in places that I probably shouldn't have solely been relying on it for.

When you look back on this course, do you have favorite lessons, any memories that, you know, you had a light bulb moment or like were funny or silly?

Um, I would say probably the first class. We had an example chart of like, how are you a driver and how are you a passenger? And I was like, I really sat back and realized, I was like, Spotify has an AI like DJ and I'm always listening to the AI DJ. It plays all of my favorite music. And I was like, That's AI unconsciously driving me because I'm not picking the music. I'm just listening to whatever it generates. And I was, it was funny because I was just like, I feel like I have a good understanding of AI, but this idea of like being a driver wasn't really something I ever thought of.

Did you change how you listen to music? Like, do you still use AI DJ? Yes.

Okay.

I try to like be more specific. Like if I don't like the song, I'll skip it now.

Before I just let it used to go on and on and on, but you know, I'm trying to get Yeah, you're trying to say like, if it's gonna pick music for me, it should be straight hits.

Yes. Yes.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm kind of curious, like before this class, like I feel like I see a lot of people in my life using AI, including my parents. Have your parents used AI? And like, what is that like?

Uh, yes. So recently I went on vacation with my mom and our whole itinerary when we were in Puerto Rico was completely ChatGPT generated.

Mm-hmm.

But my mom was like, this saved her so much time. And most of the places we went to were actually pretty good. But I would say the issue with both of my parents is they cannot tell when something's AI-generated. And even it'll say at the bottom like, "May contain AI-generated media," and they're just like, "Well, how can you tell?" And I'm just like, yeah, this is gonna be a problem, I feel like, in the future.

Yeah, like, it's here to stay, so you might as well start learning it, kind of like what you were saying. You two, anything with your parents?

So my dad is mostly a call type of person, like he'll call me instead of text me, but recently he's been texting me and using ChatGPT.

How can you tell?

I can tell because that is not the way he talks at all. The times he does text me, it's only like one-word short answers, and now all of a sudden I'm getting this long paragraph of like advanced words. Not to say he doesn't know them, but that's not him.

He just doesn't typically write long posts.

Yeah, he does not write like that at all. And it really caught me off guard, and I asked him about it, and he said, yeah, ChatGPT. ChatGPT really helps me formulate my grammar. And I was telling him that I want to hear what you have to say, not ChatGPT. So we talked about it for a bit and he kind of understood where I was coming from.

That's a big task as your family ambassador for AI.

Well, they say it themselves, like, I'm growing up in this time of AI, so I feel like it's kind of up to me.

So the students have taken on the roles of teachers. They're teaching their parents about AI and how to use AI responsibly.

Well, thank you guys so much. I really appreciate it. And thank you for letting me, uh, sit in on class. I enjoyed it. Yeah. Yeah.

But Natasha, given just how fast all this AI technology is evolving— I mean, they're coming out with, like, new versions of ChatGPT, it feels like, every few weeks at this point— what are the chances that whatever these kids learn this semester would be outdated by the next school year?

That's a really good question. But I think what's fascinating about these teachers is They're trying to get students to think deeply about its implications for society, not just how to use it. And the questioning skills that they're learning can be applied to any technology, whether it's social media or like upcoming quantum technology. And so I think of this not so much as AI literacy as AI civics. Mm-hmm. It's a civics class. And so as a final project, the students got up and they presented a kind of declaration of independence about this technology.

Oh, wow. I hold these truths to be self-evident. That artificial intelligence is a tool created to expand human potential.

That AI is meant to be a tool to help people instead of replacing human thinking.

To foster personal harmony, we seek a personal connection with technology that serves to enhance the human experience without replacing it.

That creativity is lost whenever convenience becomes more important than growth, and that true learning still demands struggle, reflection, and creativity. AI should be viewed as an extension for humanity designed to unlock solutions for critical challenges. Whenever AI begins to diminish honesty or human connection, we have the responsibility to limit its use and to question its influence because—

Educational institutions may authorize the usage of artificial intelligence provided it remains a tool of support and never a surrogate for the educator. In conclusion, we stand firm against the surrender of our autonomy, we assert our role as the architects of the future. Thank you for a great semester. We had never taught this class before. It never existed before at the school. And thanks to you, I think it's become a part of the future here and elsewhere, maybe. Thank you.

Thank you. When you think of what parents are concerned about, that there's so much tech in schools that it is rotting kids' brains and bamboozling them and they won't be able to think critically, like, Here you have 12th graders who arrived at a place where they're excited about AI. They want to use the tools in ways that will benefit them. They have specific ideas about what uses that might be, but they also know that they are dealing with a product and they don't want to have a product-driven future. They want to have a human-driven future.

Mm-hmm.

And I think that that's, like, an amazing outcome for parents who are concerned about the overuse of tech in schools.

Well, to your point, Natasha, what people are worried about with technology is so existential, right? Like, it's really important how we educate kids, but what is the world that we are educating them for? Because what this one teacher is doing, even if it does work and it gets students to think critically and use these tools better, that feels very out of scale with the advances this technology is making in basically every other sector of our lives. Like, this feels a little bit like a David and Goliath story.

So I think you're picking up something that's really important. We all know there's a massive, massive power imbalance between trillion-dollar tech giants pushing schools to train kids on their AI tools and the durable critical thinking skills that teachers like Scott and Mike believe are in the best interests of kids. But I think it's part of a much bigger thing that's happening where we're questioning what we want the world to look like I'm visiting schools all the time, and I think this grassroots teacher movement for AI civics is much bigger than the one classroom and the one school we visited. The fact that teachers around the country want to help students learn to ask deep questions about whether they want a technology-driven future, how they want AI tools to fit into their lives, or maybe they don't want to use AI at all, is a reflection of this broader questioning of the role of big tech power in society. Students are not buying the idea that an AI-driven future is inevitable.

Natasha Singer, thank you so much.

Rachel, thank you for having me.

We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. The Trump administration announced plans to move two major functions of the Education Department to other parts of the government. The White House's most aggressive moves yet to dismantle an agency that it has pledged to dissolve. The changes move programs for disabled students into the Department of Health and Human Services, and the enforcement of civil rights laws in schools to the Justice Department. The moves are expected to be immediately challenged in court. And federal prosecutors on Tuesday unsealed conspiracy, assault, and other charges against 15 people accused of violently impeding immigration enforcement officers in Minneapolis during an immigration crackdown this year. Minnesota's top federal prosecutor, Daniel Rosen, said the defendants The defendants were members of two Minneapolis-based groups connected with the far-left movement Antifa. Since the immigration crackdown began late last year, prosecutors have struggled to sustain similar criminal charges against ICE protesters, with judges often questioning the government's underlying evidence. Today's episode was produced by Diana Wynn, Alexi Dio, Adrian Hurst, and Anna Foley. It was edited by Michael Benoit with help from Liz O'Balen and contains music by Marian Lozano, Dan Powell, and Chelsea Daniel.

Our theme music is by Wonderly. Special thanks to Juan Arredondo.

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