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 a large majority of teachers (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.
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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 cellphone 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, according to market.us, 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?”
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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 about 1 in 5 districts 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.”
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.”
The article centers on state efforts to Do Something about AI in schools, so read the whole thing for some examples of legislation. I can say that as someone who has taken many mandated corporate AI trainings, the comparison to aviation in the 1900s is spot on – pretty much every module will say that whatever they’re saying now will soon be obsolete because the tech is moving so fast. That, and the lack of academic research on the effectiveness of AI in the classroom are good arguments for remaining old school, at least for now. Anyway, go read the rest.