This article is written by a student writer from the Her Campus at Pace chapter and does not reflect the views of Her Campus.<\/p>\n
My mother has been an NYC Department of Education (DOE) educator for my entire life, and for the last several years, she\u2019s taught elementary school kids. I help her grade their work sometimes \u2014 quizzes, take-home exams, the occasional essay \u2014 and over the past few years, we\u2019ve both quietly arrived at the same uncomfortable conclusion: these kids are not performing anywhere near where I was at the same age, or even kids just a few years older than me. It\u2019s not about one bad teacher or one hard year. We\u2019ve seen it across good instruction and mediocre instruction alike, which is what makes it so unsettling. It\u2019s less like students are struggling with the material and more like they\u2019re not actually retaining anything long enough to struggle with it in the first place. So, when Mayor Zohran Mamdani<\/a> announced a one-year ban<\/a> on generative AI for 2-K-8 NYC public school students, my first reaction wasn\u2019t outrage. It was relief, and honestly, a little bit of \u201cfinally.\u201d<\/p>\n The policy itself is genuinely the most sweeping of its kind in the country: no student-facing generative AI for roughly 600K kids in grades 2K through eighth, companion chatbots banned across every grade, and the screen time caps recommended on top of it (30 minutes a day for third through fifth graders and 45 minutes for sixth through eighth). Teachers can still use AI for lesson planning, but not for grading. High schoolers get more flexibility, including supervised pilot programs for career-focused pathways. Mamdani\u2019s own explanation for the policy echoed almost exactly what I\u2019ve been watching happen at my mother\u2019s computer desk for years: \u201cChildren need teachers and human connection in order to learn and grow. They need to be able to develop skills alongside their peers, build relationships with educators, and wrestle with tough problems on their own.\u201d<\/p>\n That word, \u201cwrestle,\u201d is doing a lot of work, because it\u2019s the exact thing I\u2019ve watched disappear from these kids\u2019 work. When I was in elementary school, technology was already in the classroom with Chromebooks, Google Classroom, and SMART Boards, but it was built around a specific kind of learning: use the tool to find what you need, then do the actual thinking yourself. You\u2019d hit a wall on a problem, look something up, and still have to sit with the confusion long enough to work through it. Generative AI collapses that entire process into one step. Ask a question, get a fully formed answer, move on. Watching my mother\u2019s students\u2019 work up close, I don\u2019t think that\u2019s a coincidence. There\u2019s no wall to hit anymore, and if there\u2019s no wall, there\u2019s nothing to actually learn from hitting it.\u00a0<\/p>\n I also can\u2019t separate this policy from what I already know about DOE schools more broadly because I\u2019ve watched it from two angles now, as a former student and as someone helping grade papers years later. Underfunded classrooms. Class sizes too large for any single teacher to catch every kid quietly falling behind. Kids coming in with wildly different levels of support at home. Introducing an unregulated, largely untested technology into that same thinly stretched system and calling it an upgrade always felt a little backwards to me, like handing out shortcuts for kids who haven\u2019t been given the chance to build the underlying skill yet. Mamdani\u2019s own policy language backs this up directly: every tool used in NYC public schools will now go through a review process, and if a company can\u2019t prove its AI product is actually safe, effective, and not just replacing real instruction, it gets pulled. That\u2019s not anti-technology. That\u2019s just the kind of scrutiny DOE schools, in my mother\u2019s and my experience, rarely apply to what gets handed to their classrooms.\u00a0<\/p>\n I don\u2019t think this ban needs to be permanent, and I don\u2019t think it\u2019s meant to be. It\u2019s a one-year pause specifically so the city can study what this technology is actually doing to kids before scaling it into classrooms that are already struggling to get the basics to stick. As someone who has watched this exact decline happen in real time, one graded worksheet at a time, at my mother\u2019s kitchen table, I don\u2019t see this policy as the city falling behind; I see it as the first one in a while that actually recognizes what these kids need most isn\u2019t a smarter tool. It\u2019s more time actually struggling with the material, and more people in the room to help them do it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This article is written by a student writer from the Her Campus at Pace chapter and does not…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":344737,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[3250,98,100,99,12031,54812,1445,9,24,63,10780,12033],"class_list":["post-344736","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-brooklyn","tag-ai","tag-brooklyn","tag-brooklyn-headlines","tag-brooklyn-news","tag-chapterchapter","tag-chapterpace","tag-mamdani","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc","tag-school","tag-sponsoredno"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/344736","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=344736"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/344736\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/344737"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=344736"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=344736"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=344736"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}