How about we reframe this from 'dramatic U-turn' to instead be: "school district piloting AI program finds that it has a negative effect and decides to exclude it from use."
this post was submitted on 09 Oct 2026
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I have an associate professor of English lit in my friends group and he says their whole department has gone back to blue book essay exams, so the problem is not limited to k-12.
said Gemini was chosen because it was the only tool the board evaluated
We chose Gemini because we couldn't be bothered with doing actual research. Educators of the year award.
I know Google/Gemini gets used because it provides a lot for free. Also, more important than many people likely realize, "Google for Education" claims to adhere to all of the many privacy concerns and requirements that come into play when looking for solutions in a public school district.
gsuite is almost a de-facto standard for K-12. A lot of institutions can get it for free or cheap which is really attractive to cash strapped districts with a minimal IT budget. Our school was a Microsoft campus and we'd have at least 50% of incoming freshmen who were clueless about using O365 because they were all google classroom K-12. If I were a guessing man (and having been in a similar situation), the board probably asked IT for suggestions, and they said, "just go with gemini, we already have it in our gsuite." Hell, that's why we went with Teams during the shift to remote schooling in COVID. We already had it in our O365 subscription, and implementing another solution in like no time would've been expensive and a pain in the ass.
the board probably asked IT for suggestions, and they said, "just go with gemini, we already have it in our gsuite."
I work in IT and your reasoning is solid but there’s a better chance that conversation went more like the board said “here’s every AI option but the one already in our platform” and then IT asked what the AI needed to be able to do and got a ¯\(ツ)/¯ back.
Then IT said “just go with gemini, we already have it in our gsuite."
I have this exact conversation once every few months, but about forms. "Can we get some kind of survey platform? Like surveymonkey?" "We already have office 365 forms, just use that"
I do the same, otherwise they'll go out and get the wrong service for $100-300k that'll take a year to implement and they either won't use or simply doesn't do what they want to do and expect us to support a service we've only known they purchased ~20 minutes ago.
Well, even if there are budget constraints, and they'll end up using Gemini because of these: They should have looked at alternatives at least, just to know what else exists, because knowledge is the basis for education... Alternatively, they could have been stated the true reason. I'm merely criticizing the poor wording.
Are there really any AI offerings that are specifically tailored to kids? It's all a crap shoot. I do agree they should at least consider others, but it wouldn't have made a difference.
I don't know and in my opinion letting children use LLMs unsupervised is a bad idea regardless of which provider is used. But as long as teachers don't understand the basics of how LLMs works and treat "AI" as a magical answer box there is not much hope left anyway. Sorry if I'm bitter here. Teachers are expected to know about the materials and technology they are using to teach children. The blatant lack of knowledge and ignorance of the teachers are what makes school AI usage dangerous for children.
Well it's a lose lose situation. They can't stop kids from using AI outside of school. And in reality, they don't have the skilled professionals or budget to even stop it in the schools. My son accidentally "hacked" his way to access other AI models than the one that was approved on the school devices. Their security is very weak. But if they could completely block AI, then the kids would be missing a part of their education that they are really going to need in the future. Given that, my opinion is that they should embrace AI in a sense. But teach the kids how to use it in a way that adds value. Just like making a math test that allows calculators, make assignments that allow AI. Then use a better AI to see if the kids managed to flush out the incorrect information. That will teach them to use AI, and since they will have to actually read what it did to fact check it, it will expose them to the intended subject matter. It ain't great, but it's something.
They picked the one that was entirely free.
And likely the school is already in the gsuite tech stack so they probably have student Google accounts and can manage it from their admin control panel.
unfortunately there are no shortcuts to developing the skill of critical thinking. in fact i would argue that trying to outsource the hard work of figuring out how to turn external information into internal knowledge (let alone the entirely separate skill of discerning credible from not-credible information) is not only a waste of time, but is pretty much self-sabotage. it's like self-teaching a musical instrument for years with dozens of bad habits that ultimately hold you back from your full potential. so it's not just practice that's needed, but also actual instruction from someone with actual expertise aka teachers, not some roll of the dice on output from some glorified autocorrect
btw, oligarchs hate critical thinkers. they have no use for a population of reasoning skeptical adults who are capable of being fully aware of how badly the ruling class is ripping them off at every turn. so it's no surprise they're all about replacing human educators with AI
actual instruction from someone with actual expertise aka teachers,
A lot of students just do not see the value or outright dismiss the expertise. Why have mommy and daddy pay 60k a year (if you're lucky) for some egghead to tell you about the Cold War when Gemini can just do it for me? Or: I'm here for a real degree (STEM), so I'll just make the AI do all my non-STEM, commie liberal homework. It's useless anyway. These attitudes are sadly not uncommon, and it's this exact line of thinking these AI-pushing scumbags want. Generative AI is, I would argue, deeply anti-intellectual, which should be a huge red flag for anyone even partially invested in this larger cultural conversation and moment.
edit: re: 60k a year -- this is a huge fucking problem that students feel like education is a waste of money, but that's another rabbit hole and topic. Education should be free and student debt should be forgiven, but nah keep making drones and bombs.
You mean to tell me young people lack wisdom?
There are many brilliant, driven young people I have worked with who are thoughtful, curious, and moreover empathetic individuals. Most young people I'd argue possess varying degrees of the aforementioned qualities. Unfortunately the media ecosystem too many of them find themselves in -- especially young men -- push anti-intellectualism and offer conspiracy and reactionary nonsense in lieu of encouraging critical thinking. Deferring to AI, especially when men positioned as tech heroes, pioneers, success stories (billionaires) support and laud the technology becomes the obvious choice over the bookish professors in their ivory towers. I'm not saying academia has all the answers as it clearly does not, but it is scary and saddening to see the damage already being done with people taking medical advice (as one example) from TikTok or AI.
This is why we generally don't let children design the curriculum.
and they just loooove promoting sycophantic idiots who are addicted to koolaid to middle management positions. gotta have a small army of true believers to shit all over the free thinking producers of value so they dont start getting uppity against the real threat.
Proof of the difficulty and value is how much they ate spending to train ai to be able to do similar, but poorly.
Good, now make it EVERY school in America. Then every college. Then everywhere.
every college
Oh, I wish. You can't keep most of the higher ed students away from Gemini and Claude. It's especially bad with the students who mistake learning for rote memorization versus attempts to encourage critical thinking and use of methodology. I can't be too candid here, but my god the cheating is also extreme, to the point where many students should have never been admitted because their grasp of the English language is so subpar. And I don't just mean international students who are ESL, either. It's become so pathetic Harvard had to bring back the fucking bell curve.
To add insult to injury, had I turned in the shit these students get A's on at my R2, state undergrad school, my assignments would have been thrown in the trash. Not following directions, no formatting, zero care. But then the students riot when they earn a B and probably cry to Gemini. I blame the grade inflation during COVID for a lot of this, but students cheating with AI (because that is all it is) has absolutely exacerbated the issue to a very frustrating degree.
"Then every college."
I think you haven't seen how college classes are these days. I'm going back to find something new to do.
So you get a Microslop account for the school email--login from which you're greeted by chatgpt. The website is such a mess that the school search engine uses AI. The assignments are checked using AI to check if you used by AI. All while the syllabus states no use of AI is acceptable and everything must be written in your own words but forbid that you do that and don't parrot whatever outdated garbage is in whatever e-text you have to waste money on that at this point, looks like AI was used to regurgitate it to put out another revision. Then put all and all together, and you realize that the Microslop account likely isn't free. Then check the scripts that run the website; microslop, amazon, google, and they cross-reference data.
Personally, I yearn for the school website in 2017 compared to the cluster fuck it is today. Oh yeah and they regularly get hacked, I gave up trying to bring this up after being ignored for the last two years.
A lot of colleges now will FORCE you to use AI. Like for example language learning classes will assign you graded tasks where you have to talk to an AI voice out loud in the language they're teaching. I've used them. They suck. The AI doesn't know what it's meant to be doing and it misunderstands half of what you say.
Any idiot can learn to use AI, the real skill that's going to be in demand is critical thinking...
Which is what kids offload to chatbots and never learn if forced to use it in a classroom
Not just kids unfortunately. I work at a software company and I'm starting to get real sick of even people with a principal level title just regurgitating slop that has hallucinations in just the first few sentences.
AI is anathema to teaching and learning.
Easier isn’t better for learning, it’s actually worse. Until you have solid foundations in something, AI should not be used.
Arguably, unless you can use a more ethical AI, it should be discouraged.
This is frankly a lazy assessment. AI itself is no more anathema than any other convenience (or plagiarism) tool, it is purely how dissociatively one engages with it that matters.
I've used AI as a personal tutor in my chemistry degree and it is an absolute boon for those who cannot afford private tutoring. But one has to actually engage with the content of course, instead of having it do your assignments for you.
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I think this is the right approach they're taking:
- no AI for young kids so they can learn the underlying principals of things on their own
- AI for older kids that have learned those fundamentals and will have to grow up and interact in a world with AI as adults
This is the same logic used for decades where young kids weren't allowed to use calculators for simple addition/subtraction/multiplication/division, but calculators were a requirement for higher Algebra and above.
But that isn't the approach they're taking, that's the approach they're reversing course on. They're now banning AI for pre-K through 12th grade
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Your reading comprehension is ass. They piloted it for high school students for just a few weeks before realizing it was a bad idea for all ages. It doesn't make sense to use chatbots in any learning environment, where you have no way to verify output.
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Yeah. People are already seeing it having adults outsource their critical thinking, imagine what it is going to do to the minds of children?
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