California's AI in Education Working Group, convened by the state Department of Education, met June 8 to continue refining statewide AI guidance for K-12 schools, sharpening expectations on data privacy, academic integrity, and equitable access, building on the framework the state first issued in 2023. Separately, a pending bill, A.B. 1159, would bar companies from using student data to train AI models unless that training directly benefits the school the data came from, according to reporting from EdTech Innovation Hub and GovTech.

Most teachers will never read the working group's guidance directly, but the data-privacy standard it sets becomes the baseline your district's procurement office licenses tools against. The practical question for your classroom is not whether your state has adopted a similar framework. It is which AI tools your district has actually vetted against one, and when that list was last updated.

RAND Corporation's American Youth Panel survey, funded by the Gates Foundation and fielded in December 2025 among more than 1,000 students ages 12 to 29, found AI homework use climbed from 48% to 62% between May and December 2025, with high schoolers rising from 49% to 60%. The same survey found 67% of students said AI homework use harms their own critical thinking, up from 54% earlier in the year, with middle schoolers' concern climbing from 48% to 68%, according to RAND's published findings.

Students are not waiting for a teacher or a policy to tell them something is off. They are telling researchers themselves, while using the tool more anyway. That gap between concern and behavior is the room a teacher can work in: structured, accountable AI use that makes a student show their thinking, not a blanket ban that does not match how students say they already feel about the tool.

The Pennsylvania House passed House Bill 1814 on June 1 in a 126-75 vote, a bell-to-bell cellphone restriction sponsored by Rep. Mandy Steele, D-Allegheny, who has called unrestricted phone use in schools "a massive public health crisis." The bill now goes to the Senate, which passed its own version, Senate Bill 1014, 46-1, in February. A Pew Research Center survey fielded last fall and published January 13 found only 41% of teens support banning phones during class, and just about one in five support a ban covering the entire school day; 73% oppose an all-day restriction.

The gap between what legislators are passing and what students say they want does not mean the policy is wrong. It does mean the rollout in your building matters as much as the rule itself. A ban introduced as protection lands differently if students experience it as something done to them rather than with them.