Before the start of this academic year, the sixth-largest school system in the United States made a big bet.
Florida’s Broward County announced that it wanted “to bring the power of artificial intelligence to every corner of the district.” The district’s superintendent said that Microsoft’s Copilot would be deployed, trumpeting the move as the world’s biggest adoption of the A.I. chatbot in an educational setting.
Broward County was far from alone.
Just down the road, Miami rolled out Google Gemini for more than 100,000 high schoolers. Prince George’s County, in the Washington suburbs, is working with Colin Kaepernick to bring his A.I.-powered graphic design tool to Maryland classrooms. And elite universities from Duke to California State are offering unlimited ChatGPT access to students and faculty.
But one name is conspicuously absent from the ever-growing roster of large-scale adoptions of generative A.I. in K-12 and higher education: New York City, the biggest school system in the United States.
Since the early days when ChatGPT became a household name — and when New York briefly banned the chatbot on school laptops and Wi-Fi networks — school leaders in the city have mainly made promises, saying they would say more soon, rather than embarking on major partnerships.
But New York is very much in the sights of businesses pitching A.I. They are acutely aware that no U.S. education system comes anywhere close to the potential market offered by New York, home to more than one million students across upward of 1,700 district and charter schools.
Now, Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s administration will decide whether this influential school district will embrace — or eschew — artificial intelligence in education. That decision could shape the future of a generation of children.
“This should land right squarely in the center of Mamdani’s desk,” Alex Molnar, the director of the National Education Policy Center at the University of Colorado, said. “You have enormously well-funded vendors promoting platforms and promising all kinds of things.”
Without well-reasoned plans, safeguards and vetting, he said, “There’s a lot of money about to be wasted and a lot of damage about to be done.”
As a broader citywide debate reaches a fever pitch, Mr. Mamdani and the city’s new schools chief, Kamar Samuels, are deciding whether artificial intelligence apps, chatbots and companions belong in schools.
As recently as the middle of last year, there was little organized opposition to A.I. in schools. Today, though, many families want to hit the brakes, signing petitions to demand a two-year moratorium on generative A.I. in public education. At the State Capitol, one Democratic lawmaker has gone further, seeking comprehensive restrictions on the use of the technology in elementary and middle schools.
Despite the resistance from parents, some educators want to press ahead, convinced that keeping out A.I. comes with its own perils. Across a city with a booming tech industry that could eventually rival Silicon Valley, partisans of A.I. see the prospect of an education revolution. A Manhattan superintendent, for example, has been in talks to open an A.I.-focused high school.
“There’s a real urgency to this,” Tara Carrozza, the director of digital learning and innovation for New York City’s public schools, said in a podcast interview before Mr. Mamdani’s inauguration. “Because tech is not waiting for us.”
New York’s schools chancellor plans to release a road map for A.I. in the coming weeks. He said he expects to devote more attention to A.I. (“It’s a huge deal”), while acknowledging that there are valid concerns. (“We have to set up some real guardrails.”)
“What we cannot do, though, is be so worried about A.I. that we don’t utilize it,” Mr. Samuels said in a brief interview shortly after becoming chancellor.
Superintendents across the United States are grappling with fears that their graduates could be left unprepared to enter an economy transformed by A.I. It’s nothing new: New York spent a decade trying to prepare students for a world changed by technology by seeking to bring computer science classes to all children.
But Eli Dvorkin, the editorial and policy director at the Center for an Urban Future, a nonpartisan think tank in Manhattan, said that it was time to create a fresh plan to ensure that all students develop computing and digital literacy skills.
“When A.I. can now write code at the level of a senior software engineer, the divide isn’t who learns to code,” Mr. Dvorkin said. “It’s who understands how technology works and how to use it creatively.”
“Mayor Mamdani may ultimately be defined by how New York adapts to the A.I. era in education,” he said.
The Mamdani administration will contend with a growing wave of skepticism among families, whose concerns don’t break cleanly along traditional ideological lines.
Many are already disillusioned by the heavy reliance on screens and devices in the classroom. Others worry that A.I. products could pose risks to children’s development and well-being that are not fully understood.
Some school districts are already discovering just how risky it is to dive in headfirst.
Los Angeles paid a start-up to create an interactive chatbot named Ed to serve as an “educational friend” for students, promising to transform education. But the company collapsed after a few months, leading to the demise of Ed.
Federal investigators began investigating the start-up, charged its founder with fraud — and in a remarkable turn, raided the home of the Los Angeles schools superintendent last week as part of an apparently widening probe into the district’s dealings with the company.
Kelly Clancy, a public school parent in New York who founded an advocacy group pushing for a cautious approach to A.I. in education, said that across the United States, she has detected “an overwhelming amount of hype that is not supported by any kind of careful thinking.”
“If you move too fast — and get it wrong — in a school district like New York City, it’s really hard to put that genie back in the bottle,” Ms. Clancy said.
Others in New York were pushing for clearer rules even before Mayor Mamdani arrived. Chicago, the country’s fourth-largest district, issued a 53-page guidebook with examples of acceptable A.I. use, details on teacher training and options for families to opt out.
That was more than 18 months ago. There’s no similar playbook in New York yet.
It left “a vacuum of uncertainty for individual schools and districts on what’s permissible and what isn’t,” saidNaveed Hasan, a member of a city education oversight panel who has a background in technology policy.
Today, some schools are bracing for change. At least one prestigious Manhattan institution, Beacon High School, overhauled its admissions to require an in-person essay — ending its long-held practice of allowing students to complete the essay at home, where chatbots (or parents) might serve as undisclosed ghostwriters.
Others are leaning into the unknown. Some Bronx middle schools began using Mojo, an A.I.-powered teaching assistant in English class. Students enter their responses, and when teachers push a button, Mojo spits out the two most common mistakes students make in understanding a lesson for further discussion.
And in north Brooklyn, some elementary schools have been working with Amira, which features an animated avatar that listens to children read aloud and suggests corrections as they sound out words.
“Any teacher knows it’s almost an impossible task: To meet the needs of every student in a class at every moment,” David Cintron, the superintendent of the Brooklyn district, said at a public meeting this school year. “A tool like Amira brings us closer to that reality.”
Mr. Cintron added that “we have to go slow as a school system,” partly to ensure that “when we do get to a point that something like ChatGPT is used in the classrooms, kids can recognize hallucinations” — the times it cites made-up scientific studies or misattributes a quote from Bad Bunny to Benson Boone.
Others are focused on the problems A.I. could solve.
David Adams, the chief executive of the Urban Assembly, which runs career-themed high schools, said that the nonprofit built a tool to analyze recordings of teachers’ lessons and offer real-time feedback on moments when educators excel. It created a platform called Counselor GPT to help students gauge what career paths can help them climb the economic ladder.
But while Mr. Adams is optimistic about the future, he advised caution: “The idea that A.I. can replace teaching is misplaced.”
Troy Closson is a Times education reporter focusing on K-12 schools.
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