What I Learned About AI In Schools As A Journalist (And What Parents Should Know)
Last October, I sat in the back of a 10th grade English class at a public high school outside Portland, notebook in my lap, the faint smell of dry-erase marker and leftover microwave popcorn hanging in the fluorescent air. I was there reporting on AI in education, already mentally drafting a hot take about cheating or the end of critical thinking, when Ms. Henderson, the teacher, pulled a chair next to Javi, a 16-year-old with a faded soccer hoodie, working on a personal narrative about his grandma crossing the border from Mexico.
Javi slouched a little when she leaned over. “I got stuck,” he mumbled. “Ran my notes through ChatGPT to organize it. Sorry.”
I waited for the speech about academic integrity, the trip to the principal’s office, the zero on the assignment. None of that happened. Ms. Henderson just tapped the screen. “Show me what it gave you,” she said.
Two minutes later, she pointed to a line in the AI-generated outline. “You told me last week your grandma hid tamales in her suitcase to get across. Where’s that part?” Javi blinked, then nodded. “Oh. I forgot to add that. AI just put the generic stuff about being scared.” “Okay,” Ms. Henderson said, standing up. “So your job now is to put the part that only you can write back in. Sound good?” That was it.
After class, we walked to the gas station down the street for coffee. She got a medium with hazelnut creamer, her chipped ceramic mug with the school’s logo cracked down one side from a fall on ice the previous winter. She told me she’d panicked about AI at first, too. She failed a student for turning in a fully AI-generated essay the first year it went mainstream, but after she talked to him about it, she realized she was asking the wrong questions. When she was in high school, administrators banned calculators from math class, convinced kids would never learn basic addition if they used them. Now calculators are just a tool. AI, she said, is the same thing.
I sat in on a parent-teacher conference a month later that drove that point home. A mom named Lara told Ms. Henderson she was convinced her 10th grade son was letting AI do all his work. He uses it to outline every history paper, she said, how is he ever going to learn to write? Ms. Henderson turned to the boy, who was slouched against the wall scrolling his phone, and asked him what his current paper on the 1968 Memphis sanitation strike was about. He put his phone down, talked for five minutes straight about how national media at the time focused only on Martin Luther King Jr., not the sanitation workers who organized for better working conditions for a full year before King arrived. Then he shrugged. “I hate outlining. I get stuck staring at a blank page for hours. AI just does the boring part so I can write the part I care about.” Lara looked surprised. She’d never asked him that before.
After six months of talking to teachers, parents, and kids across three states for this story, the biggest shift I’ve seen is that most of the panic around AI comes from people who aren’t in classrooms every day. The first piece of advice I give other parents, which grew directly from that conference, is to stop asking “did your kid use AI?” and start asking “what did you use AI for?” That one small question changes the whole conversation. It’s not cheating if a kid uses it to fix messy grammar, organize scattered notes, or generate a list of topic ideas when they’re stuck staring at a blank screen. That’s no different than when we used a dictionary to check spelling, or asked an older sibling to help us sort out an outline for a college paper.
If you’re worried your kid is relying on AI too much and not actually learning, there’s a simple, low-effort check you can do at home: ask them to explain the work out loud. If my 13-year-old uses AI to check his algebra homework, I just point to a random problem and say, “Walk me through how you got that answer.” If he can explain the steps, he learned the skill. If he can’t, we work through it together, same as I would have if he copied the answer out of the back of the textbook when I was a kid.
Teachers I talked to who have the least stress around AI have another simple rule: they assign work AI can’t fake. Instead of asking for a generic summary of a book, they ask kids to write a letter to the main character explaining how they relate to a problem the character faced. Instead of a report on the Civil Rights Movement, they ask kids to interview a local activist or a relative who lived through the era and write about their specific story. AI can’t write that work, because it doesn’t have access to the kid’s unique experiences and relationships.
Of course it’s not all smooth. I talked to an elementary school teacher who spends extra time each week reminding her students that AI makes up facts all the time, and they can’t trust everything it spits out. I’ve talked to parents who found their middle schooler letting AI write entire book reports without opening the book. But that’s not a new problem. Kids have been cutting corners on homework since homework was invented. The solution isn’t to ban AI, it’s to teach kids how to use it responsibly, same as we teach them not to copy from an encyclopedia or their deskmate’s test.
Last week, I helped my own 13-year-old get ready for his school science fair. He used AI to generate a list of 10 testable project ideas after he got bored of all the generic volcano and battery options in his textbook. We sat at the kitchen table after dinner, crossed out all the boring suggestions, and landed on the one he got excited about: does leftover iced coffee from his soccer practices make bean plants grow faster? Right now, four bean plants sit on our kitchen windowsill, each getting a different mix of water and coffee, and he scribbles down their height every night in a beat-up spiral notebook. AI gave him a starting point, but the watering, the measuring, the sticky notes he’s plastered all over the window to track growth, that’s all him.
I still don’t know if AI will make education better or worse in the long run. Districts are still writing clunky policies, teachers are still learning new tools, and parents are still adjusting. It’s messy, and it’s not going anywhere. But the day I sat in that 10th grade English class, watching Javi type that story about tamales back into his essay, I realized it’s still just education. The most important part is still the part that only the kid can create.
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