Source: The New Yorker
Schools are adopting AI tools at scale without evidence they improve learning outcomes, driven by vendor marketing and administrative convenience rather than pedagogical need. The core constraint is that educators lack institutional power to resist adoption decisions made by district IT departments and vendors positioning AI as inevitable infrastructure. Until schools develop gatekeeping capacity and demand proof of efficacy before deployment, AI integration will remain a technology-first phenomenon where teachers bear the burden of making tools designed for extraction and optimization serve learning.