{"id":220150,"date":"2026-03-15T00:52:08","date_gmt":"2026-03-15T00:52:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/220150\/"},"modified":"2026-03-15T00:52:08","modified_gmt":"2026-03-15T00:52:08","slug":"schools-across-california-wrestle-with-how-or-whether-to-use-ai-in-classrooms","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/220150\/","title":{"rendered":"Schools across California wrestle with how \u2014 or whether \u2014 to use AI in classrooms"},"content":{"rendered":"

WHEN MIKE LAWRENCE JOINED ABC Unified School District as director of information and technology two years ago, he inherited a set of guidelines on the district\u2019s approach to artificial intelligence tools.<\/p>\n

The next step was opening up the conversation to the broader education community, said Lawrence, so the district posted the draft document online and invited comments. Many people responded and continue to engage. Each quarter, the district hosts community roundtable discussions on the topic.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s just been a long series of decisions that have to be made for the well-being of students, for the betterment of students, balancing out the danger that they might face while preparing them for the future,\u201d Lawrence said.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

It\u2019s a balance that Lawrence and the district look to strike\u00a0with AI tools<\/a>. ABC Unified, which has 18,000 students in the greater Los Angeles area, uses Gemini, Google\u2019s artificial intelligence for students 7th through 12th grade. It blocked ChatGPT for students. Other AI programs, like Brisk for teachers and Snorkl for students, are available. It has created guidelines about AI use in the classrooms but leaves it to teachers to implement as they see fit.<\/p>\n

Throughout California, school districts have struggled to determine how or whether to implement artificial intelligence tools as they have increasingly entered the education space. While some see AI as a way to enhance learning and reduce teachers\u2019 workloads, others warn it could undermine critical thinking and compromise student privacy.<\/p>\n

Amid the debate, some district leaders and education researchers urge caution. Rather than rushing to adopt artificial intelligence tools, they recommend that schools test vendors, establish strong contracts that protect student data and gather feedback from the school community.<\/p>\n

The district also created something called a \u201ctransparency badge\u201d system that labels whether AI was used in any document, such as emails sent to families from the district, teachers\u2019 communications to students and even students\u2019 work. One badge, \u201cAI Collab,\u201d short for collaboration, means the writer used AI for about 60% of the work created. The \u201cHI\u201d badge, short for human intelligence, means that AI was not used at all.<\/p>\n

\u201cTeaching and learning has always been, and will always be in terms of how humans learn, a social process that\u2019s embedded in relationships,\u201d said\u00a0Rebecca Winthrop<\/a>, director of Center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institution, the think tank.<\/p>\n

Yet, despite how widespread AI use has become, particularly as it\u2019s increasingly embedded in social media platforms, Winthrop has found that \u201cfamilies have not been brought to the table very much at all in this conversation.\u201d<\/p>\n

Winthrop\u2019s team recently found that the potential risks of AI use among children currently outweigh the benefits.\u00a0Their report<\/a>\u00a0makes multiple recommendations, including that teachers and others collaborate on the creation of AI tools for the classroom and have a say to ensure student safety.<\/p>\n

Understanding AI\u2019s limitations<\/p>\n

The approach resonates with many education researchers.<\/p>\n

\u201cI want folks, in a lot of ways, to stop being excited about AI and to just see it as something boring,\u201d said Stephen Aguilar, associate professor at the USC Rossier School of Education. Getting to that point would mean that educators and other school leaders shift toward \u201cunderstanding AI as a constellation of tools, a series of tools, and then they can decide what problems those tools are going to be used to address.\u201d<\/p>\n

This formed part of the thinking behind ABC Unified\u2019s \u201ctransparency badges,\u201d which Lawrence described as a \u201cuseful transitional tool.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe feel it\u2019s the way to move us forward,\u201d Lawrence said. Moving forward, however, has also meant knowing where to avoid the use of AI, he said.<\/p>\n

For example, ongoing discussions about AI use have led the district to pass on using AI cheating detection programs due to their tendency to create false positives and showing bias against students learning a second language.<\/p>\n

\u201cI want folks, in a lot of ways, to stop being excited about AI and to just see it as something boring, \u2026 understanding AI as a constellation of tools, a series of tools, and then they can decide what problems those tools are going to be used to address.\u201d<\/p>\n

Stephen Aguilar, associate professor at the USC Rossier School of Education<\/p>\n

\u201cIf pressed I say, \u2018The best AI detector is you. You\u2019re the teacher and you have the ability, even if it\u2019s new in the year, you can gauge whether this is student work or not,\u2019 \u201d said Lawrence, who is a former English teacher.<\/p>\n

Early discussions about the limitations of artificial intelligence tools is critical in mitigating risks, researchers say.<\/p>\n

Aguilar suggests that education leaders considering how to implement an AI tool should ask themselves, \u201cHow many mistakes and what types of mistakes are we willing to accept in service of this broader goal\u201d of personalizing learning or supporting teacher prep work?<\/p>\n

\u201cOftentimes, unfortunately, that conversation isn\u2019t how we start. It\u2019s how we end when something goes wrong,\u201d said Aguilar, who is also associate director of the USC Center for Generative AI and Society.<\/p>\n

\u2018This is a journey; not a one and done\u2019<\/p>\n

In 2024, Los Angeles Unified rolled out Ed, a chatbot designed to act as a \u201cpersonal assistant\u201d for students. But the rollout quickly unraveled. Within three months, the district shut down the tool after AllHere, the company that helped develop it, began to fall apart.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat tends not to (work) is, without throwing them under the bus again, sort of the approach that LAUSD had which was: let\u2019s get out there quickly, let\u2019s make it splashy, let\u2019s make sure that we scale immediately,\u201d Aguilar said. \u201cThis gold rush sort of mentality of: \u2018we have to be first, and we have to be most.\u2019 That tends to go poorly.\u201d<\/p>\n

At ABC Unified, the district continues to discuss evolving AI tools with the community at the quarterly roundtables.<\/p>\n

The district has a task force on AI that includes teachers but, as Lawrence noted, \u201cpeople that sign up for an AI task force are generally going to be AI positive.\u201d Lawrence is seeking feedback from teachers beyond the task force.<\/p>\n

\u201cI felt that we were creating our own echo chambers, and I wanted to get outside of the echo chamber, and I wanted to hear from the teachers that hate it,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Just last week, he heard from several history teachers who are cautious about AI. At least one of those teachers not only avoids using AI themselves but also wants students to turn off all their devices.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou get a range of perspectives but that feedback, hearing it first-person and restricting myself from speaking, and just listening and taking notes was a really helpful exercise,\u201d said Lawrence.<\/p>\n

This story originally appeared in EdSource.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"WHEN MIKE LAWRENCE JOINED ABC Unified School District as director of information and technology two years ago, he…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":220151,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[100747,2007,100748,2080,7,9,8,57656,2269,7024,15,22331,100749,93,4306,21829,13998,9295,16722,3183,3797,1970],"class_list":["post-220150","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-california","tag-abc-unified-school-district","tag-ai","tag-ai-in-education","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-california","tag-california-headlines","tag-california-news","tag-california-schools","tag-chatgpt","tag-edsource","tag-education","tag-education-policy","tag-education-technology","tag-featured","tag-featured-news","tag-gemini","tag-los-angeles-unified-school-district","tag-privacy","tag-school-districts","tag-students","tag-teachers","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/220150","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=220150"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/220150\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/220151"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=220150"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=220150"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=220150"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}