Rising seniors are the last class of students who remember high school before ChatGPT. But only just barely: OpenAI’s chatbot was released months into their freshman year. Ever since then, writing essays hasn’t required, well, writing. By the time these students graduate next spring, they will have completed almost four full years of AI high school.
Gone already are the days when using AI to write an essay meant copying and pasting its response verbatim. To evade plagiarism detectors, kids now stitch together output from multiple AI models, or ask chatbots to introduce typos to make the writing appear more human. The original ChatGPT allowed only text prompts. Now students can upload images (“Please do these physics problems for me”) and entire documents (“How should I improve my essay based on this rubric?”). Not all of it is cheating. Kids are using AI for exam prep, generating personalized study guides and practice tests, and to get feedback before submitting assignments. Still, if you are a parent of a high schooler who thinks your child isn’t using a chatbot for homework assistance—be it sanctioned or illicit—think again.
The AI takeover of the classroom is just getting started. Plenty of educators are using AI in their own job, even if they may not love that chatbots give students new ways to cheat. On top of the time they spend on actual instruction, teachers are stuck with a lot of administrative work: They design assignments to align with curricular standards, grade worksheets against preset rubrics, and fill out paperwork to support students with extra needs. Nearly a third of K–12 teachers say they used the technology at least weekly last school year. Sally Hubbard, a sixth-grade math-and-science teacher in Sacramento, California, told me that AI saves her an average of five to 10 hours each week by helping her create assignments and supplement curricula. “If I spend all of that time creating, grading, researching,” she said, “then I don’t have as much energy to show up in person and make connections with kids.”
Beyond ChatGPT and other popular chatbots, educators are turning to AI tools that have been specifically designed for them. Using MagicSchool AI, instructors can upload course material and other relevant documents to generate rubrics, worksheets, and report-card comments. Roughly 2.5 million teachers in the United States currently use the platform: “We have reason to believe that there is a MagicSchool user in every school district in the country,” Adeel Khan, the company’s founder, told me. I tried out the platform for myself: One tool generated a sixth-grade algebra problem about tickets for Taylor Swift’s Eras tour: “If the price increased at a constant rate, what was the slope (rate of change) in dollars per day?” Another, “Teacher Jokes,” was underwhelming. I asked for a joke on the Cold War for 11th graders: “Why did the Cold War never get hot?” the bot wrote. “Because they couldn’t agree on a temperature!”
So far, much AI experimentation in the classroom has been small-scale, driven by tech-enthusiastic instructors such as Hubbard. This spring, she fed her course material into an AI tool to produce a short podcast on thermodynamics. Her students then listened as invented hosts discussed the laws of energy transfer. “The AI says something that doesn’t make sense,” she told her students. “See if you can listen for that.” But some school districts are going all in on AI. Miami’s public-school system, the third-largest in the country, initially banned the use of chatbots. Over the past year, the district reversed course, rolling out Google’s Gemini chatbot to high-school classrooms where teachers are now using it to role-play historical figures and provide students with tutoring and instant feedback on assignments. Although AI initiatives at the district level target mostly middle- and high-school students, adults are also bringing the technology to the classrooms of younger children. This past year, Iowa made an AI-powered reading tutor available to all state elementary schools; elsewhere, chatbots are filling in for school-counselor shortages.
Many schools still have bans on AI tools. A recent study on how kids are using AI in 20 states across the South and Midwest found that rural and lower-income students were least likely to say their schools permit AI use. The Houston Independent School District (HISD) offers one case study in what can go wrong when AI enters the classroom. This past school year, the district’s curricula were seemingly tainted with AI slop, according to parents. In February, eighth graders viewed a slideshow depicting AI-generated art mimicking the style of the Harlem Renaissance. According to an op-ed in the Houston Chronicle written by two HISD parents, students were also given error-laden worksheets (one, on transportation technology, depicted a mix between a car and a chariot that was pulled by a horse with three back legs) and inscrutable discussion questions (“What is the exclamation point(s) to something that surprised you,” one asked). An HISD spokesperson told me that the Harlem Renaissance images were indeed AI-generated using Canva, a graphic-design tool; he was unable to confirm whether AI was used in the other examples.
None of this is slowing AI’s rollout in schools. This spring, President Donald Trump signed an executive order promoting AI use in the classroom with the goal of training teachers to integrate “AI into all subject areas” so that kids gain an expertise in AI “from an early age.” The White House’s push to incorporate AI in K–12 education has repeatedly emphasized public-private partnerships, a call that tech companies already appear to be embracing. Last month, Microsoft pledged to give more than $4 billion toward advancing AI education across K–12 schools, community and technical colleges, and nonprofits. The same week as Microsoft’s announcement, the American Federation of Teachers, one of the country’s largest teachers unions, announced a $23 million partnership with Microsoft, OpenAI, and Anthropic. One of the partnership’s first efforts is a “National Academy for AI Instruction,” opening in New York City this fall, where instructors will learn how to use AI for generating lesson plans and other tasks. The program then plans to expand nationally to reach 10 percent of U.S. teachers over the next five years.
Schools are stuck in a really confusing place. Everyone seems to agree that education needs an upgrade for the AI era. “Our students right now are going to be put at a disadvantage internationally if we don’t evolve,” Miguel Cardona, Joe Biden’s education secretary, told me. But no one seems to agree on what those changes should look like. Since ChatGPT’s release, the in-class essay, the oral exam, blue-book exams, and even cursive have all made something of a comeback in certain classrooms, in an effort to prevent students from outsourcing all their writing and thinking to AI. At the same time, AI aims to make work more efficient—which is exactly what students are using it for. In that sense, whether kids using AI on their homework counts as cheating is “almost a semantic issue,” argues Alex Kotran, a co-founder of the AI Education Project, a nonprofit focused on AI literacy. Of course, try telling that to a concerned parent.
As Kotran points out, a middle ground exists between pretending students aren’t using AI and encouraging them to rely on it nonstop. “Even if you believe that everybody is going to be using AI in the future,” he told me, “it doesn’t necessarily follow that the top priority should be getting students hands-on right away.” Imagine if in 2007, schools had decided that the best way to prepare kids for the future was to force every student to spend all day in front of an iPhone. No matter what teachers’, students’, and parents’ attitudes about AI in the classroom are, though, it’s a reality they have to deal with. The path that schools take from here has direct implications for the future of AI more generally. The more reliant kids are on the technology now, the larger a role AI will play in their lives later. Once schools go all in, there’s no turning back.
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