There's a far deeper and longer standing issue here and that's rent-seeking.

We know what works in education. It's phonics and direct insturction, basically. But nobody gets rich that way so you end up buying into a worse system through two steps:

1. Education PhDs need to justify their existence. They do by reineventing what works. This is basically how we came up with sight words to replace phonics, which is largely responsible for destroying literacy. Whoever comes up with these schemes gets to get academic cachet for being a thought leader. They get invited to all the cool conferences and parties; and

2. Rent-seeking edtech companies end up creating solutions for things that aren't really problems. This long predated AI. It suffers from all the normal issues of corruption in government procurement. Politicians and superintendents are enticed ("bribed") to buy solutions that teachers are then mandated to use, forcing students onto devices to work a program with dubious results.

You see this pattern play out in a ton of government R&D. For example, SMR reactors in nuclear power. There's no world that SMR makes sense. Nuclear plants benefit from scale. But behind all this you'll find a bunch of physics academics who pushed this idea to get status, some of whom then get hired by SMR startups and others get involved in government procurement. Everybody is grfiting.

So while I welcome schools not using AI early on, that's barelly scratching the surface. And that begins with teaching literacy and holding students back until they can read sufficiently for their grade level.

  > But nobody gets rich that way so you end up buying into a worse system