AI is an essential tool to help turn around America’s public schools -- which are a mess. With poor test scores and rising preoccupation with non-academic issues, substantial change is needed.
The growth of school choice programs, through low-income scholarships and public charter schools, is providing immediate and substantial help to students. So too can AI.
One school that has seen the transformative benefits of AI is Our Lady of Perpetual Help in Glendale, Arizona, a K-8 parochial school. When a former semiconductor engineer, now the church’s pastor, introduced two robots and AI into the teaching curriculum, the school’s performance improved dramatically, and it now has a waiting list for students.
As one enthusiastic student said, “AI has changed the way I learn. It’s helped me to understand concepts I don’t know, and it’s helped me to, you know, brainstorm stuff.”
AI can be used to tutor students individually and obtain quicker assessments of student performance. It can drive faster and better lesson planning.
Additionally, it can bring history and culture lessons to life. Visuals and video-generated content can show what it was like to live in ancient Greece or during colonial America, making history more relatable and relevant. This also sparks curiosity and a thirst for further learning.
The Trump Administration understands this and is working to implement AI programs in K-12 public schools through its AI Education Task Force. It has secured four-year, public commitments from more than 135 companies and organizations to establish programs in public schools.
This is an undertaking that everyone should embrace: it provides resources, financial and personal, and offers flexibility and creativity to the schools.
It is important to be aware of how teachers’ unions become engaged on AI. While their rhetoric is positive (no one can credibly deny that AI has the potential to improve education), they are masquerading as wolves in sheep’s clothing.
AI is inherently terrifying to teachers’ union bosses. It creates more efficient ways to do things while empowering children and parents. Eliminating tedious and repetitive tasks will reduce the need for many administrative positions in schools.
The stated positions of the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers on AI are rife with discussion about the need for teachers to be in charge of AI, while placing a heavy emphasis on environmentally friendly power generation for AI. They also contend that AI should be fully diverse, that is, all students get it in equal measure.
Discussions about improving test scores, utilizing AI to increase students’ enthusiasm about learning, and customizing AI for individual advancement are notoriously absent from the union’s central communications.
The unions are not only relying on being embedded with schools to try to control the process. AFT President Randi Weingarten in August said her union will make a push for AI laws that favor its agenda in state legislatures.
For conservatives and all concerned with the state of the public schools, this should be a wake-up call. First, a proposal for a state moratorium on AI laws should be adopted by the U.S. Congress, as it was almost adopted as part of the One Big Beautiful bill in July. Conservatives should also become more involved in using and applying technology in education rather than being averse to it or waiting for it to reach a certain point.
AI holds vast promises and opportunities for all children. The American people, parents, and all concerned about children, should drive these efforts, as the White House AI Education Task Force helps to do.
Or we can wait for our kids and grandkids to be led by the teachers’ unions. God help us if we do.
Paul Steidler is Senior Fellow with the Lexington Institute, a public policy think tank in Arlington, VA.
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