AI @ School - First Week Results

On Wednesday, New York City banned generative AI for students from pre-K through eighth grade. That covers about 600,000 kids, two thirds of the district. The city is switching off the AI features in 38 software programs its schools already use, though it has not said which ones. Mayor Mamdani called it the broadest such ban in the country.

I think it is off the mark, and I think the people who wrote it are going to be on the wrong side of history.

Caution about young children is fair. A seven-year-old and a chatbot built to act like a friend is a problem I would want limits on too. What bothers me is the posture. The same officials who announced this have said they have little hard data on how much AI is being used across their own 1,600 schools, and they would not release the survey they ran to find out. They did not spell out how a school following the rule will be told apart from one that is not. Mamdani said much of that falls to teachers, principals and superintendents.

The city says it will spend the year studying the effects of this technology. It is going to study them with the technology switched off.

School districts are not usually this cautious. Common Core went into more than forty states on thin evidence with no way to back out, and almost nobody called that an experiment on children. The bar got strict when the technology arrived.

I would rather spend the year finding out what actually happens. So here is what happened at my house.

One project per class

My son started his second year of college this week. Six classes, sixteen credits. Before the term began I wrote about what we built for it, and the short version is that we gave him an AI tutor and then gave that tutor a memory.

A separate project for each class, so his political theory tutor is not diluted by his biology class. Each project remembers across sessions - what was covered, what was tried, what worked - instead of starting cold every time the way a chatbot normally does.

Then we loaded it with everything a tutor would ask about on day one. What the class is. The syllabus. When it meets. What the tests and papers are. Where the readings live and where the grades post.

After that, the job is to feed it every single class. The transcript of what the professor said. The readings. The classwork, the homework, and anything graded that comes back.

He came home this weekend, so I got to look at one of these up close. Political theory. Ten thinkers, Confucius through Nietzsche, starting with the Analects.

Five days of political theory

The class met three times. Here is what was sitting in the project by Friday night.

• The official course record and the syllabus.
• A full-term reading schedule built from that syllabus. Every class meeting between now and December, what has to be read before each one, every due date, and what each assignment is worth.
• Seven reading PDFs pulled from the school's own websites. Three were for this week. The other four are next week's, grabbed the same day the professor posted them.
• Three class recordings, each written up into notes.
• Three sets of reading notes, one per assigned text.
• The instructions for his first graded assignment, copied out word for word from where the professor posted them.

He did not type any of that in by hand.

Four things the setup did for him

1. It built him a schedule. Every meeting of the class between now and December, the reading due before each one, every deadline, and what each assignment counts for. He knows where he stands in the term without going looking.

2. It wrote up his reading and his classes. Three sets of notes on the assigned texts, three more from the class recordings. He reads the text himself first, then goes over the notes on that same text. He says that combination is what locked it in.

3. It went and got the material. Seven reading PDFs, the syllabus, and the assignment instructions, all pulled off the school's own websites. Nobody built those sites with this in mind, and it worked anyway. It also pulled the recording of each class off his recorder and turned it into a transcript.

4. It gave him something to ask. Every class written down and sitting there, so a question about anything the professor said has somewhere to go, at eleven at night, as many times as it takes.

He barely used that fourth one. He likes this class, the material is landing for him, and he understands the assignment that is coming. So this week the setup ran as an organizer for him rather than a tutor, and he has not needed to go deeper or study harder.

I was the one who needed things explained.

Purpose versus reason

I have never read the Analects. I listened to part of one class recording, and most of it went past me.

The professor had spent an hour on a single distinction. The term is wu-wei, usually translated as acting without purpose. A purpose is a goal sitting outside what you are doing. A reason is when the point is inside the thing itself. A job you dislike is a purpose, because if you could keep the money without going in, you would. Kids playing is a reason. No child decides "I want fun, therefore I will play."

I could follow that much. I could not work out why an hour of a college course went to it.

So I asked, about that class on that Friday rather than about Confucius in general. It took a few rounds and I had to ask for it simpler more than once.

The answer is where the distinction goes. Make rules and people break them the second they can get away with it, because the punishment is a goal outside the act - take the punishment away and the behavior goes too. Ritual and shame put the reason inside the act, so it holds when nobody is watching. That is Confucius arguing that order built on law is the weaker kind, and purpose versus reason is the machinery underneath it.

A general chatbot would have explained wu-wei in general. It would not have reached for the job or the kids, because those are his professor's, from that room, on that day.

I asked two other things while I was in there. What help the college offers a student who falls behind, and what his first graded assignment actually asks of him. Both came back straight.

This time around my son needed no clarification and no extra help. He already had his head around the material. The tutor was for me, and after a few rounds of it I understood the thing too. Then he and my wife and I sat around for ten minutes talking about Confucius.

If the goal is knowledge he can actually use, or knowledge interesting enough that a family argues about it at the table, the week did its job.

I am missing the part where AI helps kids cheat and is bad for them.

The students this helps more than mine

Everything above is a student who is doing fine. He is seemingly bright, the class suits him, and he would have gotten through the week without any of it.

Now picture the same setup in front of a student who is not doing fine. A kid with a learning difference, who needs the same idea four different ways before one of them lands. A kid whose school has no tutoring center and one guidance counselor for four hundred students. A kid whose parents work nights and cannot sit at the table and go over Confucius with him.

Everything I just described - the lesson repeatable at his own speed, the material in whatever form finally works, the question he can ask nine times without using up the room's patience - is worth far more to that kid than it is to mine.

I have some idea how schools respond to that, because our other kid is in high school in our own district, and we are already in a fight with them over a version of this. I will spare you the details. He will probably be out of school before it gets worked out.

So I want to be careful about how I say the next part, because I do not think anyone involved is acting in bad faith. But a default of no, written by people who say they have not measured what is happening and who do not understand the technology, costs the students with the least the most. Fear is an understandable reaction to something new. It is a poor basis for deciding what a kid is allowed to learn with.

So look at what we built here and tell me where it breaks. I have been going over it for a week and as far as I can tell it is all upside - he read more, he understood more, and we ended up talking about Confucius on a Saturday. If you see the harm in it, I want to know where it is.