Between Elon Musk’s xAI chatbot Grok spewing far-right rhetoric and referring to itself as “MechaHitler,” a scammer using AI to impersonate Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and a UCLA grad popping open his laptop during commencement to show how he used ChatGPT to complete his finals, artificial intelligence is having a summer full of drama.
That’s not good news for the nation’s educators.
AI tools are rapidly proliferating in schools without clear policies or training for anyone. A recent survey found that 97% of high school and college students say they’ve used AI to complete coursework. So many college-bound seniors use AI to write their admissions essays that colleges are considering eliminating them altogether.
Now, the American Federation of Teachers — the nation’s second-largest teachers union — has entered the AI chat. On July 8, AFT announced a partnership with tech giants Microsoft, OpenAI, and Anthropic to launch the National Academy for A.I. Instruction, a $23 million initiative that “will provide access to free A.I. training and curriculum for all 1.8 million members of the AFT, starting with K-12 educators,” according to a release.
The goal: “transform how artificial intelligence is taught and integrated into classrooms across the United States.” But the announcement poured gasoline on the fiery debate about AI, educational equity, and the fundamental nature of teaching and learning.
Critics on social media lashed out at AFT President Randi Weingarten, accusing her of ignoring the threat AI poses to education in general — and teaching in particular.
“Grok just advocated for the holocaust but now the AFT president wants educators to go forward with AI,” wrote one critic. Others pointed to a Massachusetts Institute of Technology study released in June that found students who use ChatGPT to write essays for them have weaker cognitive engagement. Still others noted Bill Gates envisions a future where AI can “be as good a tutor as any human ever could.”
Dr. José Vilson, a New America fellow focused on the intersection of AI and teacher work, who is executive director of EduColor and a professor at Teachers College, Columbia University, tells Word In Black that when AI evangelists just straight up “talk about how great this technology is,” and that it could replace real humans, “you should be highly skeptical.”
Does AI Serve Students?
Brad Smith, Microsoft’s president and vice chair, emphasized the partnership will give teachers opportunities to “tell tech companies how we can create AI that better serves kids.”
But Evan Gorelick, who writes for The New York Times, warned that Big Tech is taking advantage of stressed-out teachers and students.
He wrote that AI companies are promising to ease teachers’ workloads and prepare students for the workforce. Meanwhile, students get “discounted (chatbot) subscription rates around exam periods. It’s an old playbook: Get kids hooked, and you’ve got future customers.”
Can AI Help Black Kids Learn?
Advocates promote AI learning tools as a game-changer: with virtual teachers and tutors, we can kiss goodbye the problem of Black kids who can’t read on grade level. But Vilson, however, knows the real-world solutions that actually get results: the hard work of lifting kids out of poverty and integrating schools.
“We have a thing that worked, which is making sure that people had shared power in the form of integration,” Vilson says. “That was probably the closest we ever got to actually closing the so-called achievement gap.”
Decades of studies show Black students from underserved communities are more likely to be deprived of what white students in well-off schools benefit from: small class sizes, well-trained teachers, schools with resources, and access to rich educational experiences.
In other words, students at elite college preparatory schools like Boston Latin School or New York City’s Horace Mann School probably won’t be propped in front of an AI chatbot to learn. Nor are they likely to breathe air polluted by AI data centers and server farms in their neighborhood — a scenario, Vilson warns, could be replicated in other communities.
De-professionalization and De-skilling of Teachers
A recent joint Walton Family Foundation/Gallup survey found that 6 in 10 teachers have used AI to help them do their jobs. “If that’s true,” Vilson says, “then what does that say about the things that we’re pushing educators to do on a general basis that are unrelated to the actual core work of teaching and learning?”
Education activist Jesse Hagopian recently asked why, “in the wealthiest country in the history of the world, are class sizes so large — and resources so scarce — that teachers are forced to rely on AI instead of instructional assistants? Why aren’t we hiring more librarians to curate leveled texts or reducing class sizes so teachers can tailor learning themselves?”
AI, Racism, and False Information
Most large language model AI tools we use aren’t independently intelligent — they copy from books, websites, and Reddit threads fed into them without permission. Like Grok, they then mimic racism in the information they provide — or withhold.
Hagopian detailed how a World War II classroom module created by Khanmigo, Khan Academy’s AI chatbot, “doesn’t prompt students to wrestle with the fact that Hitler openly praised the United States for its Jim Crow segregation laws, eugenics programs, and its genocide against Native Americans.”
What Is Teaching and Learning Really?
To the AFT’s credit, Vilson says, being informed in the AI debate is “better than the alternative, which is that technologies keep running roughshod over what we call the teaching and learning process.”
In a statement on the National Academy of AI Instruction partnership with Big Tech, Weingarten said AI can’t replace the teacher-student connection. But “if we learn how to harness it, set commonsense guardrails and put teachers in the driver’s seat,” she says, “teaching and learning can be enhanced.” The American Federation of Teachers did not respond to Word In Black’s request for comment.
Vilson says teaching and learning are about things AI can’t replicate: trust, relationships, cultural competency, and community.
It is “soul work, that heart work,” he says. It’s why we need more teachers who reflect students’ identities, he says, who know learning is more than standardized test prep.
“If we leave some of these pieces to a technology that’s outside of our being, then are we actually teaching? Are we actually learning?” he asks. The answer is “something that we all need to struggle with a bit.”
