In October, Kelly Clancy’s son received an assignment in sixth grade at a middle school in Brooklyn, New York, to create a science experiment and then ask Google Gemini, an artificial intelligence chatbot, for feedback, she said.
Clancy, who has three children in New York City public schools, told the teacher that the bot “is something that just teaches kids that they can have machines do the thinking for them”, instead of suggesting: “Let’s talk to your partners. What about the science experiment could you improve?”
Clancy also founded Parents for AI Caution in Educational Spaces, a group pushing the city to institute a two-year moratorium on using AI in its public schools.
The New Yorkers are among a growing number of parents and child development experts across the country raising concerns about AI in schools.
In Bend, Oregon, more than 1,100 parents signed a petition in February urging the local school district to remove generative AI from students’ devices. In April, Fairplay, a national children’s advocacy group, released a statement calling for a five-year moratorium on “student-facing generative AI products” from preschool to 12th grade.
While big tech and the Trump administration have pushed teachers to use AI and claimed it helps students learn and gives them the skills needed to succeed in a world in which the technology is ubiquitous, some parents and child development experts argue that there is little evidence that AI helps children and may even harm their cognitive development.
“There is this overwhelming sense that ed tech companies are deciding what kids learn, and teachers are just being put into this position of tech support instead of driving the decisions about what is best for kids in terms of learning,” said Clancy, an academic editor.
In March, Melania Trump, the first lady, convened a White House summit on educational technology. She walked into a room alongside a robot and advocated for a world in which children could learn from a “humanoid educator named ‘Plato’”.
Meanwhile, Microsoft, OpenAI and Anthropic have provided millions of dollars for AI training to the American Federation of Teachers, the country’s second-largest teachers’ union, the Associated Press reported.
Forty per cent of K-12 teachers said their students use AI in the classroom at least once per week, according to a recent survey from National Public Radio and Ipsos.
MagicSchool, an AI platform for education, has contracts with districts across the country, including in Atlanta, Denver, New York City and Seattle, and offers a character chatbot that interacts with students and one that provides writing feedback, among other tools.
In New York City, “educators are using MagicSchool tools to strengthen engagement, differentiation and instructional efficiency while maintaining strong instructional practices and community trust,” the company stated.
“One of the interesting things about generative-AI systems is that you can…
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