As a parent of a rising public school student, teacher, and climate organizer, I am horrified by how quickly AI is finding its way into our children’s classrooms: Parent and teacher friends have reported AI programs being used with students as young as five in New York City public school classrooms. The American Federation of Teachers announced that it is “partnering” with multiple AI companies in exchange for $23 million to fund an “AI institute.” Per the New York Times, “AI-driven learning” is spreading across the country.
Forcing AI into classrooms is the last thing city schools should be doing. Instead, we — parents, educators, kids — urgently need city leaders, including the next mayor, to step up and demand a moratorium on AI in schools.
AI is torching the planet, and with it, our kids’ futures. AI uses a lot of energy (and water). While we don’t know exactly how much carbon a particular usage generates — because tech companies are keeping it a secret — we do know that AI is massively driving up energy demand, giving the fossil fuel industry a new justification for building out fossil fuel infrastructure and delaying the green energy transition. (There is a reason Trump is pro-AI: AI is a lifeline for increasingly expensive, unpopular fossil fuels).
Global scientists have made clear we must cease new fossil fuel production and phase out existing fossil fuel use to prevent a truly catastrophic future marked by mass death, displacement, and famine. New fossil fuel infrastructure, or old infrastructure staying online or being repowered to meet increased demand, isn’t just locking in this hellish future for our kids, it’s also poisoning the air they breathe now, like xAI is doing to Memphis. This tech is driving us to our deaths, and it’s deeply immoral to foist it recklessly on our children.
Any education system that purports to care about children’s futures needs to not only electrify and green school buildings, but also categorically reject all contracts for energy-intensive AI products in schools. While of course, the industry on the whole is the problem and school contracts are just a small part of demand, the largest school system in the country taking a stance can make a difference, while also educating stakeholders on the ties between the climate crisis and AI.
There are other very compelling reasons for a moratorium on AI in NYC schools, particularly when it comes to students using AI products. For one thing, the point of school is learning. And the evidence suggests that AI is doing the opposite, eroding critical thinking skills as well as writing skills.
It’s still too early to know the long-term impacts of AI use on children’s brains, but it is common sense to think that it is profoundly irresponsible to introduce new corporate technology into classrooms without fully understanding the cognitive and pedagogical impacts on children. As a parent, I’m outraged by the idea of our school system giving tech companies free rein to experiment on our children in order to train their AI models or mine their personal data.
Bringing AI into schools is also a privacy disaster. Teachers and parents have reported “programs” being used where kindergarteners (including immigrant children) are video recorded by an AI program, without parental consent. In an era when companies like Palantir are using biometric data from AI to help ICE track down and detain immigrants, allowing this tech into our diverse, multicultural classrooms endangers our students, their families, and school workers. Our children’s personal, biometric data should only be shared with corporations with parental consent, if at all, not by default.
Colleagues and parents have shared with me that “free” AI products are being “piloted” in classrooms across the city, without parental notice, or any opportunity for feedback or community engagement. But tech companies aren’t pushing AI into schools out of a benevolent impulse; it’s because they want to profit off our children, as well as teachers’, data, creativity, and attention, without any concern for the consequences. We must stop this dangerous trend in its tracks.
A two-year moratorium on AI in NYC schools would allow the city to assess where and how AI has already been used in schools across the city, develop policies, vet potential contracts, gather community input, and fully consider the climate, pedagogical, and privacy impacts of adopting this technology in schools. Our kids deserve better than being the subjects of a surveillance experiment that will leave them a world on fire.
Olenick is a public school parent, climate organizer with Climate Families NYC, and teacher. She lives in Brooklyn with her family.
