What Melania Trump’s AI in Education Project Means For Average Parents and Teachers
Last month, I sat across from Mia’s mom at a fall parent-teacher conference, a half-empty lukewarm coffee and a ring from my water bottle on the desk between us. Mia was slouched in the extra chair, drawing rainbows on the back of her progress report, crumbs of cheddar crackers sticking to her hoodie sleeve. Halfway through talking about Mia’s struggle with long division, her mom pulled out her phone and tilted the screen toward me. “Have you seen this?” she said. “Melania Trump’s new AI in education project. It says it’s bringing free tutoring to schools like ours. What do you actually think about it?”
I told her I’d gotten that question at least five times in the past month, in parent emails and PTA group chats, ever since the initiative was announced earlier this year. My school is a Title I elementary in central Florida, 72% of our kids qualify for free or reduced lunch, and most parents I know can’t afford private tutoring or the fancy learning apps that cost $15 a month. So the idea of free AI tools for kids who need extra help sounds really good on paper.
I thought of Javi, who’s in my 4th grade class this year. Javi moved here from Guatemala last spring, and when he started, he was reading two grade levels below benchmark. His mom cleans offices overnight and his dad does landscaping six days a week, so there’s no one at home to sit with him and practice reading for 20 minutes every night. We got a free trial of an AI reading tutor through a local university grant back in September, and I asked Javi if he wanted to try it for 15 minutes after school three days a week. By November, he’d moved up a full reading level. Last week he brought in a graphic novel about dinosaurs he checked out of the library, just to show me he could read the whole thing.
But I also told Mia’s mom it’s not all good. A month into using the AI, I sat down next to Javi when he was working on a comprehension quiz, and I saw the AI had just spat out the full answer to the question before he even had time to think through it. He wasn’t trying to cheat; he just didn’t know you could ask the AI for a hint instead of the answer. No one had told him that. No one had told me, either, for that matter. We got the login codes, a one-page sheet of instructions, and that was it.
From what I’ve read about Melania’s project, it puts most of its funding toward getting the AI tools into schools, and very little toward training teachers or creating clear guidelines for how kids use the tools. That’s not a new problem, either. Five years ago, we got a donation of 50 new tablets from a celebrity-backed literacy initiative, and half of them were out of service within a year because we didn’t have the tech staff to fix them, and no one from the initiative ever came back to check in. It’s great to get free stuff, but free stuff doesn’t help if you don’t know how to use it right. I also don’t think it matters much who’s backing the project when it comes to our kids. People get all worked up about the name attached, but at the end of the day, I just care if it helps my students learn.
I’ve had a lot of parents ask me what they should do, whether their kid’s school gets picked for this project or any other AI program that rolls through. The first thing I tell them is to set a 10-minute weekly check-in if your kid is using AI for school work. You don’t need to know anything about AI to do it. Just sit down next to them for 10 minutes once a week, and ask them to show you what happens when they get stuck on a problem. If the AI just gives them the answer, talk through changing the prompt to ask for a hint instead. That’s it. It takes 10 minutes, no fancy tech skills required.
For teachers, if you get handed new AI tools from a district or outside initiative, carve out 15 minutes on the first day of using it to go over two non-negotiable rules with kids: First, AI is for help, not for doing the work for you. Second, if the AI confuses you or gives you a wrong answer, you come talk to me, not just give up. That doesn’t take hours of training, and it sets a clear expectation for kids right off the bat.
And if you’re a parent who wants to know more before the AI rolls out at your school, just ask one question at your next PTA meeting: How much training have teachers gotten to use this tool with our kids? That’s a more important question than who launched the project, or what the press releases say it will do.
Last week, I was supervising recess after lunch, and Javi ran over to me, out of breath from playing tag, to show me a drawing he made of the dinosaur from his graphic novel. I’ve been doing the 10-minute check-in with my own 11-year-old son at home, too—he uses an AI tool to practice chess openings, and we go over it every Sunday after breakfast. He still tries to get the AI to play his whole matches for him sometimes, but we talk through it.
Our district finds out next month if we’ll get funding from Melania Trump’s project to bring AI math tutors to our local middle school. A lot of the middle school teachers I work with are already stretched thin, with 30 kids in a class and lesson plans to write and parent meetings to go to, and they’re worried they won’t have time to learn how to use another new tool. I’m not against the project. Any time someone wants to give extra help to kids who don’t have the resources other kids do, that’s a good thing. But I also know that the tool doesn’t matter half as much as the adult who checks in with the kid after they use it. We’ll see how it goes. We’re all just figuring it out one 10-minute check-in at a time.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » What Melania Trump’s AI in Education Project Means For Average Parents and Teachers