AI is already coming for the classroom

Pick a country, almost any country, and you will find a school system experimenting with AI. Early research on the outcomes is not encouraging

Students interact with a robot in China. (Photo by Costfoto/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

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When a private school in San Francisco announced it had cracked the code on learning, with two hours of AI-assisted academics a day and students scoring in the top percentiles nationally, it got a lot of attention. 

The school costs more than any other private institution in the city. Its student body is drawn almost exclusively from elite tech families. And its AI, it turns out, is mostly used to track how quickly students are moving through material, a function that adaptive learning software has performed in public schools for years.

That gap between the headline and the reality is, in miniature, the story of AI in K-12 education right now.

American schools are under pressure from every direction. Test scores still haven't fully recovered from the pandemic. Teachers are leaving the profession. Budgets are tight and getting tighter. Into that context arrives a technology that promises to save time, personalize learning, and prepare students for an economy that will supposedly demand AI fluency. It's not hard to........

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