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Google has been expanding its AI tools into school classrooms, with students and educators reporting both benefits and drawbacks. Some students described AI assistance as slowing their own thinking, while reports point to falling test scores alongside concerns about cognitive and emotional dependence on the technology.
Natasha Singer's book 'Coding Kids' traces how Code.org and its founder Hadi Partovi convinced schools that coding was essential to economic survival, paving the way for tech companies to influence curricula. In an interview with The 74, Singer argues today's AI push by Microsoft, OpenAI, Anthropic and Google into classrooms mirrors that earlier coding campaign, despite growing public distrust of Big Tech.
Microsoft has signed an agreement with the American Federation of Teachers and its New York affiliate, the United Federation of Teachers, laying out ten enforceable privacy and safety commitments for AI use in schools. The rules bar Microsoft from training models on student or teacher data, limit data collection, ban AI companions, and require human oversight for high-stakes decisions. Districts can add these terms to contracts starting in November without renegotiating existing agreements.
A randomized controlled trial across 243 French high schools and 9,628 students tested giving teenagers a free one-year digital subscription to a major national newspaper and running media-literacy classes taught by teachers. Researchers tracked actual online reading behavior and found subscriptions sharply increased news consumption and even led some students to pay for subscriptions on their own nearly a year later. Students in poorer schools showed the biggest knowledge gains, and combining free access with media education produced the strongest literacy improvements, especially with experienced teachers.
New York City Public Schools banned student-facing AI tools for all K-8 classrooms this week, allowing only a limited set of approved programs for high schoolers, while Los Angeles Unified is enacting a similarly tighter policy for the 2026-27 school year. The move reverses the more permissive stance both districts adopted starting in 2023, after they initially banned ChatGPT outright when it launched in late 2022.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani has ordered a one-year moratorium blocking New York City public schools from using AI tools with students from age two through eighth grade. The policy forces schools to disable more than 38 AI features in existing programs, including the Amira reading assistant, and only allows AI use starting in high school through limited 'AI literacy' courses. Exceptions exist for students with learning disabilities or those learning English, and the rules also cap daily screen time for younger grades.
New York City's education department has imposed a one-year blanket ban on AI tools for students from pre-kindergarten through eighth grade. High school students will still have access to AI, but only in limited, approved ways.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced a one-year moratorium on generative AI tools for roughly 600,000 New York City public school students through eighth grade, beginning in the 2026-2027 school year. High schools are exempt and can run monitored AI pilot programs, while teachers may still use AI for lesson planning and administrative tasks. The policy also sets non-mandatory daily screen time guidelines of 30 minutes for elementary students and 45 minutes for middle schoolers.
A New York Times reporter who has tracked tech industry influence in education for over a decade argues in a new book, 'Coding Kids: Big Tech's Battle to Remake Public Schools,' that major technology companies help write learning standards, sit on curriculum committees, and push schools to adopt industry-aligned subjects like coding and AI. The reporter contends these efforts often function as marketing rather than neutral education, giving students and teachers a sanitized view of tech products and their risks.
Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier sent Catholic bishops a letter arguing there was no valid religious basis for refusing to grant vaccine exemptions in Catholic schools, and threatened to cut state scholarships and vouchers if they didn't comply. The bishops publicly rejected his theological reasoning and legal claims, stating that Catholic teaching supports vaccination and that they don't need to justify church doctrine to the state.