What I Learned About AI in Education As A Journalist (And What Parents Need To Know)
Last month, I spent a rainy Tuesday shadowing an 11th grade journalism class at my local public high school for a series I’m working on about student media. I wandered between desks, sipping lukewarm school coffee, and stopped beside 16-year-old Mia, who was working on a story about the new vending machines installed near the gym. When I saw ChatGPT open on her laptop, my first instinct, honed by years of headlines about AI cheating, was that I’d caught her copying a story word for word.
She looked up, saw me staring, and shrugged. “I’m just using it to sort the public comments from last month’s school board meeting. There’s 14 pages of them, and I just need it to pull out everything people said about junk food and vending machine contracts. I’d be here until Friday doing this by hand.”
After class, I talked to the class teacher, Mr. Henderson, about what I’d seen. He told me he’d banned AI completely when it first went mainstream. He caught three kids turning in full AI-written essays within the first semester, gave them zeros, and thought that was that. Then he started talking to the kids who’d gotten in trouble, and realized none of them were lazy. Two had ADHD and struggled to get past the blank page, could talk through a whole story out loud but couldn’t organize words into paragraphs on their own. The third was a student who worked 20 hours a week bagging groceries to help his mom pay rent, and just didn’t have three extra hours to sort meeting minutes after his shift.
So Mr. Henderson rewrote his rules. Any AI use has to be disclosed. Students turn in their original prompts and the raw AI output alongside their final draft. Half their grade is based on how they edit, add to, and rework what AI generates. It’s not a system without flaws, he said, but it’s better than pretending none of the kids are using AI anyway.
A week later, I sat in on a middle school PTA meeting about AI in the classroom, and the room was split between panic and confusion. One mom said she’d found her 7th grader using AI to solve all his algebra homework, grounded him for a month, and locked his laptop in the family closet when he wasn’t in class. A dad asked if any teacher could actually catch AI cheating anymore, and said he was worried his kid would get to college and get expelled for something he didn’t know was wrong.
I sat there twisting my paper coffee cup that had “2024 Fall Bake Sale” printed on the side, and thought about how I use AI every single day for my job. No one calls what I do cheating. I use it to transcribe hour-long interviews, a task that used to take me three hours and now takes 10 minutes. I use it to pull together a basic timeline of a local story I’m new to, so I don’t waste half a day digging up basic facts I can then fact-check myself. It cuts out all the boring, repetitive busywork that keeps me from doing the actual reporting and writing that makes a story good. That’s exactly what Mia was doing with those school board comments.
After the meeting, I pulled that mom whose son got grounded aside, and told her what I’d seen in the high school class. I suggested she try a small shift instead of an all-out ban: tonight, unground the laptop for 10 minutes, and ask him to show you what he asked AI, and what he did with the answer. If he used AI to get the answer before he tried the problem himself, agree that next time he works the problem out on his own first, then uses AI to check his steps. That’s concrete, I said, it doesn’t have to turn into a big fight. For older kids writing essays, ask them to show you the raw AI output next to their final draft. You’ll see right away if they just copied and pasted, or if they used AI to get past a block and did the actual thinking themselves.
Most parents I talk to don’t realize that the skill kids need right now isn’t to never touch AI. It’s to learn how to use it without letting it do their thinking for them. That’s the same lesson we learned with calculators, and the internet, and every other new tool that scared parents when it first came out. Banning it doesn’t work, because kids will just use it in secret, and never learn to use it right.
Last week, Mia sent me the final version of her vending machine story, which ran on the front page of the student paper. She found that the new exclusive contract meant the school couldn’t add the fruit and granola bars students had petitioned for, because the vending company didn’t carry them. AI sorted those 14 pages of comments for her, but Mia was the one who connected the dots, who called the food service director to confirm the contract fine print, who wrote the opening line that made people care: “The new vending machines in the main hallway have twice the sugar of the old ones, and most students didn’t get a say before the contract was signed.” It was a good story. I don’t think it would have gotten done at all if she’d had to sort all those comments by hand after school and practice for her soccer game. She would have gotten bored, moved on to a simpler story, and that detail about the contract would have stayed buried.
I don’t have all the answers. I still worry about middle schoolers who use AI to do every homework assignment, never learning how to work through a hard problem or structure a paragraph on their own. I worry that underfunded schools won’t have the time or resources to train teachers to adjust their lessons, so only kids in wealthy districts will learn how to use AI well. It’s still new, and no one has a perfect rulebook that works for every kid and every class.
But what I’ve seen, from my desk reporting and from talking to teachers and kids across the district, is that the worst thing we can do is pretend AI doesn’t exist, or ban it outright and act like it’ll go away. Right now, the thing that’s working is the simple stuff: ask to see the prompts, talk through what AI is doing for the work, and make sure the kid is still the one doing the thinking. It’s not fancy, it’s not perfect, but it’s a start.
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