If schools make missteps implementing AI, the results could lock them into a future largely dictated by big tech instead of educators closest to kids, caution two new reports detailed in an article in The 74.
The reports share a common warning: AI in schools must serve human-centered learning that doesn’t simply push for more efficiency. Anything else risks creating a generation of young people ill-equipped for the future.
The first report treats the question of how schools should view AI as a literal “Choose-Your-Own-Adventure” story. Educators in an imaginary school district make radically different decisions about the technology in three possible scenarios.
- In the first scenario, the district retreats from AI altogether after a data breach and teachers return to traditional instruction and testing.
Restrictions soon backfire. Students continue using AI at home without guidance, take shortcuts on homework, developing a kind of survival mechanism they privately call “school brain.” Seeing how irrelevant most lessons are, they do just enough to get by, offloading thinking to AI tools. They show shallow understanding and poor foundational skills when tested.
Retreating from AI creates “the worst of both worlds” — students who can neither think independently nor use AI effectively, according to the report authors.
- In the second scenario, the district adopts a comprehensive AI platform for automated instruction. The platform promises greater efficiency via AI tutors, automated grading and behavioral monitoring. Teachers find that students are soon gaming the algorithms rather than learning. The auto-grader penalizes valid but unconventional answers, while multilingual learners are unfairly penalized for non-standard answers on tests.
Teachers must defend grades they didn’t assign and can’t fully explain, and families challenging grades are stopped by “proprietary algorithms” that administrators can’t review. AI delivers “a black box” that removes human judgment. “Students could feel the difference between being evaluated by an algorithm and being understood by a teacher,” according to the report.
Graduates struggle with collaboration, creativity and adaptability — skills employers and colleges increasingly value.
- The third scenario has the district redesigning its offerings to prepare students for an AI-driven future while keeping a focus on “human-centered” education. It develops a “graduate profile” that emphasizes critical thinking, ethical reasoning and human-AI collaboration, among other indicators.
Students learn to use AI as a tool that supports but doesn’t replace their thinking. The district continues to satisfy state accountability through testing, and it also pursues federal innovation grants to fund portfolio-based assessment systems based on the graduate profile.
The redesign is expensive and hard on teachers. But graduates soon demonstrate an ability to critically evaluate AI tools, adapt quickly to workplace changes and develop a “learn how to learn” mindset. Alumni report that their “robust” portfolios of work are a huge advantage in competitive job markets. Employers say they are the only new hires who critically evaluate AI’s recommendations, spotting hallucinations and biases.
The first two scenarios are what educators in the report said they were seeing most often in schools, says Amanda Bickerstaff, AI for Education’s co-founder and CEO.
There was a strong recognition that traditional methods have not worked … for decades, she says. “But it feels safer.”
Going “all in” on AI is likely in many cases due to aggressive marketing by tech giants pressuring schools by messaging directly to students.
“There’s this real pressure from both ed tech and AI itself, because it’s such a big market that’s never really been figured out,” she says.
The third path, in which the district redesigns its offerings, is “the most human” of the three, she says, and the most intentional. “The third path is the one that trusts humans and educators and students and families
Another paper by the Center on Reinventing Public Education calls for a new approach to schools’ decisions about AI. Technology “should be a catalyst for human-centered learning, not a replacement,” according to the report.
The CRPE report asserts schools are at a tipping point. Their AI policies could go one of two ways: They either entrench outdated educational models or bring about a fundamental transformation of schooling.
There is a strong feeling that AI is currently seen as a productivity tool for the education system that we have, rather than a tool to radically improve teaching and learning and outcomes, says Robin Lake, CRPE’s executive director.
An “efficiency paradox” could make schools faster and cheaper without addressing students’ actual needs, according to the report. What is needed is a more coherent, human-centered approach that is “explicitly ambidextrous” — improving current practices while intentionally building toward new learning models.
The report’s idea of an “ambidextrous” approach to AI came from an acknowledgement that “we have to attend to the kids who are in our schools right now — and the teachers,” Lake says. “We have to use whatever technologies are available to make things better, but we also have to make investments in big, really different whole-school designs.”
This includes ways to help teachers provide “rigorous personalization grounded in the science of learning.”
Districts could create classrooms with multiple adults working in teams based on their expertise. AI could enable schools to match students to internships and other experiences, handling administrative tasks so humans can focus on relationships.
There is one fundamental premise: Keeping an eye on both the future of school and the reality of the schools today. It is a vision that connects the here-and-now to what kids need to know and should be able to do in the future.
The 74
