Right now, we are asking the wrong questions about AI in education.
The conversation is dominated by asking what the technology can do — How fast can it generate content? Personalize practice? Analyze data? But far less attention is being paid to what students need from the K-12 academic experience to develop critical thinking and analysis skills, and the role human relationships play in that process.
I see that gap clearly as a parent. My daughter — a student in an excellent public charter school — has selective mutism, which means that in many school settings, she can’t reliably use her voice with adults. And yet, every day, I watch educators work to find (analog!) ways to reach her and help her develop skills — through patience, consistency, challenge and care. They create conditions for her to feel safe enough to try, to risk and to grow.
That experience has clarified something for me, both as a parent and as the leader of a K-12 organization: Learning is not just about access to information or efficiency. It is built through human interaction — through trust, responsiveness, risk-taking and the steady presence of adults who know how to meet students where they are.
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If we don’t anchor our decisions about AI and education technology adoption and integration in that reality, we are solving for the wrong problem.
In my role at a K-12 instructional provider that specializes in equipping educators with high-quality, standards-aligned math and literacy resources, I think often about which materials promote learning in ways that leverage the benefits of human interaction.
Because the complex work of educating our children is inherently human work. When done well, it’s the result of collectively creating and experiencing the world alongside each other.
That is why, as we increasingly adopt artificial intelligence and other technology in the coming years, we must be careful to select tools, programs and platforms that allow us to continue cultivating deep learning experiences that promote our capacity for understanding and community.
So much of the vital human core at the center of education stands to change with the rapid integration of AI in K-12 schools. But should it?
To be sure, many things stand to improve because of emerging digital advances in education. We can imagine tools that help teachers analyze student work more efficiently, platforms that provide multilingual support in real time and adaptive systems that offer targeted practice without requiring hours of manual planning. We can also envision environments where data is easier to understand, where time-consuming administrative tasks shrink and where students have more opportunities for personalized feedback.
But sometimes, already, in the rush to capitalize on the promise of personalized learning platforms, we have been losing sight of what can be most important about what they’re learning in the first place. A classroom full of students working independently with the support of AI chatbots, for example, can be devoid of opportunities to build critical skills like collaboration, debate and communication.
Academic development requires more than just finding the right answer. Yes, fact-finding and procedural fluency are vital for students’ long-term success. Equally important is conceptual understanding, which requires engaging with divergent opinions, wrong answers and productive cognitive struggle.
That is why I take an approach to ed tech that emphasizes what works — I call it “technopragmatic.” I do not want us to slow down — these advances herald much promise for better education outcomes and for closing long-standing equity gaps. But we do need to keep asking questions. We can’t introduce AI-powered “solutions” simply because we are able to generate them. We should be considering what we want to use new technology to do on behalf of our children and our own collective future.
We must ask: Does the technology align with our goals?
Related: Schools need more ways of knowing if AI and ed-tech tools are working
After years of being an educator and principal, I have many questions about what our ideal classrooms will look like five years from now. How will the components of great classrooms shift in this new technological era? And how will we ensure that the end-users who will be most impacted by these choices — teachers, students, families — have a voice and a hand in shaping the decisions we make?
In a K-12 system in which the fastest-growing student population is English language learners, research has already demonstrated the positive impact of digital tools that help with translation and comprehension while providing real-time feedback and interactive practice for speaking and writing that’s not only convenient but engaging.
Yet as helpful as AI can be in supporting multilingual learners, the technology can also introduce bias, particularly for students with disabilities — further evidence that emerging AI tools are most effective when paired with strong teacher guidance.
Moving forward, we must ensure that AI platforms and digital education tools remain enhancements as opposed to replacements for how we teach and learn.
Otherwise, we’ll end up creating spaces that do not center human thriving — not just for my child and other students with varying needs, but for all students.
Artificial intelligence and evolving technologies can absolutely advance our capacity to collaborate, problem-solve and think critically — if we make it so. But we cannot ever forget that it’s ultimately the human experiences we share that are the most important part of the learning that we do.
Joy Delizo-Osborne, president and CEO of Student Achievement Partners (SAP). SAP is a nonprofit that supports teachers and educational leaders of schools and systems with research- and evidence-based guidance on high-quality, standards-aligned math and literacy instruction.
Contact the opinion editor at opinion@hechingerreport.org.
This story about AI and education was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s weekly newsletter.
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