As schools gear up for the new academic year, buzz around artificial intelligence-powered educational tools is reaching new heights. There’s also a strong undercurrent of skepticism, as evidenced by debates about whether cell phones should be banned in classrooms altogether.
With schools grappling with tighter budgets, packed schedules, stubborn achievement gaps and critical youth mental health challenges, educators face a critical question: Which part of valuable instructional time should be dedicated to digital and AI learning?
To answer this question, schools need more ways to know if children’s technology is genuinely effective. They need guidance on which incentives, standards and policies are needed to ensure that harmful technologies are kept out of classrooms.
Since generative AI disrupted the growing mix of educational solutions, academic researchers and transparency experts have emphasized the urgent need for governments to fund systems that independently assess education technology tools for their safety, educational quality and potential to drive equitable student outcomes. Unfortunately, we’ve seen a plethora of low-quality, ineffective technology marketed to children and schools.
We believe there is a timely opportunity to raise awareness about the pervasive problems with the quality of ed tech and to offer long-term solutions. The absence of assessment systems recently gave rise to the AllHere debacle in Los Angeles. AllHere’s AI chatbot made waves in the second-largest school district in the U.S. in March, but the parent company collapsed just three months later after failing to deliver on its expensive promises.
Millions of taxpayers’ dollars were wasted, valuable instruction time squandered and students’ futures compromised. We cannot let this happen again. Every school leader can avoid the trap of powerful tech marketing firms delivering false promises and hype.
