NYC Chancellor Kamar Samuels pledges stronger AI guardrails: ‘We missed the mark’

“Sign up for Chalkbeat New York’s free daily newsletter to get essential news about NYC’s public schools delivered to your inbox. When New York City officials released draft guidance in March for how schools should use artificial intelligence, it unleashed a torrent of criticism from parents and educators accusing officials of doing too little to curb the technology’s threats to education. Now Schools Chancellor Kamar Samuels is acknowledging that the Education Department didn’t grasp the depth of opposition to AI in schools, and he’s pledging a more aggressive approach to curbing AI use for the youngest kids in the city’s final guidance. Officials originally said they were planning to release a final version of the AI guidance in June, but a spokesperson didn’t say whether that timeline is still in place. “We missed the mark, and we didn’t communicate in a way that really showed our community that we understood where we were … and that we were worthy of being trusted to protect young people,” Samuels said at an event Tuesday night at Bank Street College of Education in Manhattan, according to a partial recording shared with Chalkbeat. AI “is the most invasive technology that we’ve seen,” Samuels said. While city officials believe older students will need some exposure to AI, the Education Department is “looking very closely” at restricting its use in school for the youngest students, particularly those ages three to five, the chancellor said. Samuels’ comments mark a significant change in tone, and indicate that the nation’s largest school system is grappling with — and responding to — the fierce backlash brewing against AI and education technology in school communities in the city and beyond. Across the five boroughs, parents have flooded public forums to rail against the city’s draft AI guidance , which uses a traffic light framework to delineate the risk levels of different uses of AI in the classroom, mainly by educators. Student AI use — one of the thorniest and highest stakes questions city schools must regulate — got scant attention in the guidance and was listed as a “yellow light” behavior. Opposition to AI use in city schools has grown more organized in recent months, with several elected officials calling on the Education Department to pause implementation of its AI guidance . A petition for a two-year AI moratorium in city schools has garnered more than 3,000 signatures. Samuels’ evolving response to AI Samuels conceded that public sentiment about AI has shifted “rapidly” over he took over as chancellor in January. Initially, he said, the system’s posture was: “‘AI is here; we need to kind of figure it out.’” He thought that school communities were fearful of the technology, but over the course of developing the first draft of the AI guidance and hearing feedback from families, he came to realize the prevailing sentiment was anger, “a lack of trust in institutions, a lack of trust in our security mechanisms, and also a lack of trust in or deep skepticism of (education technology) companies.” Officials gave the public 45 days to submit feedback on the city’s draft AI guidance following its March 24 release. On May 8, the last day officials accepted feedback, the city had received more than 6,000 comments, 48% of which came from educators and 42% from parents, the Education Department’s Director of Digital Learning Initiatives Tara Carrozza told parents at a Manhattan forum. NYC’s approach to AI has swung back and forth Education leaders across the country have been grappling with similar tensions as they seek to develop AI policies. Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, the nation’s second-largest teachers union, called publicly on Wednesday for a ban on student-facing AI in elementary schools , despite being an early and ongoing booster of AI use for teachers . Those tensions have played out within the city school system at breathtaking speed, as the Education Department swung between initially banning ChatGPT on school devices and networks to pledging to become a national leader in embracing AI . In the absence of firm citywide policy, many New York City schools have crafted their own policies to regulate student and teacher use, while many others have steered clear of the topic. Dan Weisberg, the former first deputy chancellor, recently argued that AI can help teachers with the time and labor-intensive task of identifying which students are lagging far behind academically, diagnosing areas where they need support, and designing makeup instruction. But another former deputy chancellor, Shael Polakow-Suransky, who now serves as president of Bank Street College of Education and appeared at Tuesday’s event with Samuels, offered a cautionary tale about relying on AI to help students struggling with math. He recounted observing a Bronx classroom where students were working on the concept of translating fractions into decimals on a computerized AI tutor program. Many of the students eventually got to the right answer, he said, but few showed a conceptual understanding of what they were doing, and the teacher was too busy troubleshooting tech issues to spend much time with any of them. “This was something I fear is going to happen more and more schools in across the country, and in our city,” he said. “That in the interest of providing individualized feedback to students, we are going to take the intellectual work that we expect from teachers and pass it to the AI.” Michael Elsen-Rooney is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Michael at melsen-rooney@chalkbeat.org

Summary generated from the RSS feed of Chalkbeat. All article rights belong to the original publisher. Click through to read the full piece on www.chalkbeat.org.