It has been two weeks since the Secretary of Education took place in front of the country and called enthusiastic Ai “A1. “Two impertinent weeks since what should have been a serious conversation on the future of American education has turned into viral punchline.
And now, in the same surreal chronology, we have President Trump signature An executive decree to promote AI in schools from kindergarten to 12th year – Direct the Department of Education and the National Sciences Foundation To prioritize the financing of research and subsidies related to AI.
You really can't invent this thing and even if you could, you don't have to do it anymore.
To be clear: I am not anti-technology. AI has a role to play in education. Personalized learning, intelligent tutoring systems, data -based information – these are powerful tools when used in a thoughtful way. But let's not make ourselves. We live through a moment when the Trump 2 administration takes a DOGE chainsaw at the very foundations of public education. And instead of dealing with this, we are told to excite ourselves for class chatbots.
It is not leadership. It is a deviation.
Funding for future success
The truth is that AI is not the life buoy our education system needs. Certainly not for the moment. What we need – what we have needed for decades – is a serious investment in teachers, classrooms, infrastructure and support services. And we get the opposite.
The Trump administration offers deep cuts to the main education programs, avoiding federal support for public schools and by pushing policies that promote privatization and deregulation on students' success. In the midst of all this, we are supposed to believe that certain course plans fed by the AI will move the needle?
Please.
Let's start with the evidence: AI does not repair under-financial schools more than the A1 sauce. You cannot put an algorithm in a building without heat, internet and without functional toilets and expect a miracle. You cannot expect a teacher managing 35 children alone to suddenly have time and training to integrate AI into daily lessons (if they even have time to do a real lesson plan per week). And you cannot say to communities that already have trouble obtaining basic resources they really need is automatic learning software.
This decree assumes that what is missing in American education innovation. But we don't have an innovation problem – we have a priority problem. Our students are not late because teachers are not warned enough in technology. They are late because our country refuses to treat education as a public good.
What is broken
We have standardized schools with obsolete textbooks, overworked staff and dilapidated installations. We made acceptable for teachers to buy their own supplies, so that students jump meals and unanswered mental health crises.
And now, in the midst of that, this administration wants to convince us that the real problem is that we do not move quickly enough on AI.
Let us also be honest on what AI in schools usually mean. This does not mean that teachers get sophisticated tools that facilitate their work. This means more standardized tests, more data collection, more screen time and more surveillance, especially for children in low -income communities.
This means fueling students in systems built by private companies, often with little surveillance or transparency. This potentially means to outsource educational decisions to algorithms that do not understand the context, the nuance (lateral bar: we get more nuances?) Or humanity.
It is far from the brilliant field that the administration sells.
Expanding the digital fracture
And do not ignore the inequality intentionally cooked in all of this. Improved AI education requires a reliable internet, up -to -date devices, extinguished staff and digital infrastructure – things that the districts are more likely to have. For schools in poorly served areas, this thrust is likely to widen the digital divide under the cover of modernization.
What is supervised as progress is actually an elegant Trojan horse for deeper inequality. Schools that most need real support from humans are the least likely to benefit from this initiative.
It is particularly exasperating that all of this is deployed with a large dose of public relations rotation. The A1 comment could have been a blunder, but it was also revealing. This has shown how deeply this administration is inserted on reality on the field in American schools. It was supposed to look cool, avant-garde, perhaps even worthy of memes. Instead, it has become a symbol of Trump's named disconnection of what is really going on in classrooms across the country.
What schools really need
Teachers do not ask for AI. They ask for manageable classes, fair wages, mental health resources and the ability to teach without being completely buried by the bureaucracy. Students do not cry for automatic learning – they ask for support, stability and a system that considers them more than test scores or data points. And the parents do not beg the last Edtech. They want to know that their children are safe, challenged and taken care of at school.
AI is a tool. That's it. It is not a savior, it is not a substitute, and it is certainly not a replacement of public investment. If the Trump administration was seriously aimed at improving education, it would fight to extend school funding, not reduce it. The administration would make the college more affordable, without reverse the progress of students' debt. It would be strengthening teachers' pipelines, without weakening them. And it would be to protect public schools, not undermined them.
Instead, we get a photo shoot and a technological policy wrapped in fashionable words.
So yes, secretary A1, AI has its place. But until we are ready to finance schools as important, to deal with educators as well as professionals and to solve real and systemic problems at the heart of this crisis, all the artificial intelligence in the world will not save us.
And it's not artificial. It's just reality.
Aron Solomon is the strategy director for Amplify. He holds a law diploma and has taught entrepreneurship in McGill University and the University of PennsylvaniaAnd was elected for Fastcase 50, recognizing the 50 best legal innovators in the world. His writing was presented in Nowsweek,, The hill,, Fast business,, Fortune,, Forbes,, CBS News,, CNBC,, USA today and many other publications. He was nominated for a pulitzer price For its editorial in the independent exposing the “normalization” policies of the NFL.
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Illustration: Dom Guzman
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