I am pretty close to this because my spouse is a school board member and I do a lot of AI work for my job, and the problems of AI in education are completely intractable for public schools. The educators lack the technical background to use AI effectively, and moreover, they are completely out of the loop in terms of technology decisions, and the technology staff lacks enough knowledge in both education and AI for them to make competent decisions about it.

It’s a recipe for disaster, and you are going to see school systems set money on fire for years trying to do something with AI systems that never get rolled out, or worse, rollout AI systems that tells kids to kill themselves or makes revenge porn of their classmates.

School boards default answer to everything AI related right now should be “no”.

I think a good question to ask, is if these schools would have paid for cliffnotes for all their kids. The answer is of course “no,” not only due to the presumed expense but also the fact cliffnotes are the easy way out of having to use your brain in English class. AI is no different. Kids are using it as an easy crutch to cram and avoid actually learning to study material, not as some research tool like it is pitched. It is like worse than wikipedia, and somehow everyone in education had such strong feelings about wikipedia but are rolling out the carpet for chatgpt school wide subscriptions.