| Trump seeks to bring AI to classrooms with latest executive order |
 Source: Unsplash |
| President Donald Trump this week signed an executive order that aims to integrate artificial intelligence deeply into K-12 schools across the country. |
| There’s a lot to unpack here, so let’s start by breaking down the contents of the order itself. |
| The details: The order, titled “Advancing Artificial Intelligence Education for American Youth,” aims to “ensure the United States remains a global leader in this technological revolution” by, in short, giving both teachers and students plenty of access to the tech. |
| The focus is on early learning and early exposure with the goal of “preparing students to become active and responsible participants in the workforce of the future.” It’s a push that will involve, not just students using the tech, but teachers using it, as well, both in the classroom and for administrative work. To achieve these goals, the order established an AI education task force, which will be helmed by the director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy. Its members will include the director of the National Science Foundation and the secretaries of agriculture, labor, energy and education. |
| The task force’s work will center around building “public-private partnerships with leading AI industry organizations, academic institutions, nonprofit entities and other organizations with expertise in AI and computer science education.” |
| Together, they will develop online resources to teach students “foundational AI literacy and critical thinking skills.” |
| The order says that the task force will work to identify areas of federal funding that can be leveraged to enable these public-private partnerships. |
| The teacher training will include “professional development … so they can integrate the fundamentals of AI into all subject areas.” It will also include education in “foundational computer science and AI, preparing educators to effectively teach AI in stand-alone computer science and other relevant courses.” |
| As if they didn’t have enough to be getting on with already. |
| Details on this are all quite unclear. |
| It’s unclear which companies will be involved in this, what, exactly, they’re developing, what role the individual schools will be asked to play in this integration, how much of the program here will be paid for by federal funding and how much individual schools will have to chip in. |
| This integration comes amid a messy backdrop, one that, in the two short years since ChatGPT first went live, has featured steadily rising instances of AI-enabled harassment, bullying and cheating. Beyond that, the psychological impacts of interacting with these systems — especially among young people — remain largely unknown, though there are already too many known instances of young kids developing dangerous, destabilizing attachments with chatbots. |
| Early research, meanwhile, has found that generative AI degrades critical thinking skills. |
| Asked about this environment, Education Secretary Linda McMahon said that “you’re gonna always see things that are being taken advantage of.” |
| “We have to expect that,” she said, adding: “I have visited now a couple of schools and seen the positive impact that AI can have. If it’s one-on-one tutoring, students can learn much faster.” |
| She told a story of a classroom filled with 25 students. Each student was working with their own AI tutor. The teacher was simply overseeing it all. |
| “It’s imperative to keep the teacher in the classroom,” McMahon added. “It’s just an incredible tool to be able to have. We have to be competitive in the world and we have to utilize this incredible technology.” |
| What’s going on with schools: Schools across the U.S. have been dealing with teacher shortages for around 20 years, now. But the problem got a lot worse in the aftermath of the pandemic. Now, 86% of school districts struggle to fill open positions. 60% struggle to find substitute teachers. 57% of schools in impoverished neighborhoods are understaffed. |
| In aggregate, schools across the country are underfunded by about $150 billion each year, according to this report from the Century Foundation think tank. A separate report from 2024 found that “39 states devote a smaller share of their economies to their K-12 public schools than they did in 2006,” a reduction that has cost schools more than $360 billion between 2016 and 2021. |
| Bruce Baker, one of the report’s co-authors, called it a “permanent disinvestment” in public schooling, adding: “in the decade and a half since the height of the so-called ‘Great Recession,’ most states have increased their expectations for the performance of schools, teachers, and students, but they have refused to make their districts whole after the disastrous cuts during that recession.” |
| In short, schools have less money. Fewer resources mean fewer teachers, larger class sizes and more burnout, which means even fewer teachers. |
| The landscape: In addition to gutting the Department of Education, Trump — in partnership with OpenAI, Softbank, Microsoft and Nvidia, among others — somewhat recently unveiled Project Stargate, an effort that will purportedly drive a minimum of $500 billion worth of investment in AI infrastructure over the next four years. |
| In their proposals to the federal government, just about all of the Big Tech AI players have advocated for the sweeping adoption of their technology by the federal government. |
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