Education Week spoke with district leaders, principals, and teachers to learn how AI policies are working or not working, and what educators say they still need.
Having an AI policy helps demystify AI, says Bree Dusseault, the principal and managing director at the Center on Reinventing Public Education at Arizona State University.
It’s important for policies to: 1) clarify for teachers and students when it’s appropriate to use AI in school; 2) communicate to parents about how their children are being exposed to the technology; and 3) help district leaders see how the technology connects to the larger goals of their school system.
Districts can craft an official, board-approved AI policy, or something less formal and more flexible, says Dusseault, such as a framework or guidance for how to use the technology responsibly. What matters is that leadership gives staff and students get some sort of direction.
But that’s not happening often enough. Many educators say they’re still lacking basic guidance. Nearly half of teachers, principals, and district leaders say their district or school does not have an AI policy, according to a survey conducted this summer by the EdWeek Research Center. Another 16% say the current policy does not establish meaningful guardrails about how to use the technology for instructional purposes.
Another issue: “I see a lot of policies that are just about students, but I think you have to also include your teachers, instructional staff, administrative staff, and your district staff,” says Tracey Metcalfe Rowley, the senior director of educational technology and online learning for the Tucson Unified School District in Arizona.
Whether it’s a policy, framework, or guidance, it’s important that districts solicit input from a broad range of people in their school community when developing them, says Rowley.
“AI is impacting everybody,” she says. “We had a lot of people who worked for the district who were also parents, so they brought that perspective in. We had teachers, we had community members. I just think by having a lot of voices at the table meant that what we’ve ultimately produced is really good.”
A formal, board-approved policy still needs to be flexible, says Rowley.
Her district’s policy must be updated and voted on by the school board annually. The district also issues guidelines separate from the policy that are more detailed and easily updated.
The policy is succinct and focused on responsible and ethical AI use for students, parents, and staff, she says. Guidelines focus on more details around teacher and student usage, discussing topics such as grading with AI and updating syllabi to include information on how, if at all, students can use AI.
Developing AI policies and purchasing AI-powered products is fruitless if students and the IT department staff and the teachers don’t know how to incorporate the technology into their work, says Rowley.
Combined with guidelines, training is important to ensure that teachers and staff members are not only leveraging the technology to improve their jobs, but also to make sure that they aren’t accidentally doing something wrong or even illegal, such as pasting identifiable student information into a generative AI chatbot, Rowley says.
An AI policy—or guidance—should define appropriate AI use for students, specifically what kind of use crosses into plagiarism or cheating. It should outline steps for protecting student data privacy, parameters for choosing AI-enabled tools for district and classroom use, and warning language around AI bias. A policy is also a good place to outline AI literacy standards for students.
Al Rabanera, a math teacher at La Vista High School in Fullerton, Calif., says he has had AI guidance from Fullerton Joint Union High School District since February 2024. A document addressed to staff defined responsible use and described what prohibited use of AI looks like. It also touched on special considerations for advancing academic integrity, safety, security, and privacy, he says.
Rabenera says his school is proactive in soliciting teacher input on AI use, and that’s something he said district AI policies should do.
He is also concerned that school district AI policies might reflect tech company priorities more than educators’ needs if teachers aren’t consulted.
Future AI policy should be more specific for each content area, such as how AI can be used in math versus English language arts class, he says.
Other factors that Rabanera hopes to see addressed in future AI policy: establishing consistency in terms of use across classrooms, equity for students who might not have access to AI outside of school, and what teacher training for the tool could look like.
Sonerka Mouton, a middle school principal at Kerrville Independent School District in Texas, says her school’s approach to adopting AI is just getting started.
There are no specific policies for AI use in the district or Mouton’s school, but teachers did get professional development for it and are encouraged to test it out.
“We’re just embarking on AI, we’re very, very late to it,” says Mouton. “AI is not new, but it’s still fairly new, especially to educators, and we want to use it the right way and then with fidelity as well.”
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