Visiting a classroom in Shanghai prompted Julia Rafal-Baer, CEO and co-founder of ILO Group, a women-owned national education policy and strategy firm, to conclude that the U.S. needs a strategy for how AI will impact workforce skills and economic competitiveness and also covering ethical principles and guardrails, according to a K-12 Dive article. In China, she says, this is being done top-down, on a national level. In the U.S., the decentralized educational system means states and local districts must be involved.
“They didn’t teach AI literacy in an abstract way,” she says. “The teacher had a whole discussion about, ‘What is the AI doing?’” One student answered by saying AI was the teacher; another said teaching assistant. “A third said, ‘We are now the teachers, and AI is the student.’ Kids are getting what it will mean to work alongside AI and recognize that we are the ones who will have to drive AI.”
Touring a robot factory the question came up: What are the most important skills the factory is seeking. “They didn’t even miss a beat: They said, ‘The ability to collaborate, alongside the technology,’” she says.
Rafal-Baer sees the Chinese being about a decade ahead in terms of AI implementation.
“The execution of large-scale national infrastructure around AI was quite staggering,” she says.
The U.S. could follow China’s template to set major goals to align its educational system with economic imperatives, use research to drive policy and practice, and develop technology that works in service of national needs, she believes.
“They’re very transparent about sharing what’s working and what’s not working. Their labs are staffed with half engineers and scientists, and half educators. They have that intersection to continuously develop their products,” she says.
In the classroom, every teacher has an AI assistant for lesson planning, grading and professional development — not to replace mentorship but to complement it, Rafal-Baer says. Every student has a portrait focused on proximal development — what a student can do without support and what they cannot do even with support — and every course has knowledge graphs.
“AI isn’t just delivering content but helping to build systemic understanding,” she says. “Every school is part of a smart campus where there’s coordination, with so much data around the operations of the school.”
The U.S. is unlikely to mimic this approach, Rafal-Baer says. In the states there are greater concerns about data, surveillance and privacy, and centralized control. “We need to get to a place where states are leading and protecting data while enabling strong structures,” she says. “So, everyone knows how these models are working, and whether … they are leading to the outputs we want to see.”
The importance placed on local control in the U.S. undercuts building the consensus for national coordination, but that diversity allows for more creativity, Rafal-Baer says.
“States play a really important role during this time to help set guardrails,” she says. States leading the way “to think about how to refine and design large-scale implementation feels like a much more appropriate way to think about this for our country.”
K-12 Dive
