Jen Roberts opens every period of her 12th-grade English class at Point Loma High School in San Diego the same way: ten minutes of silent, self-selected reading before laptops open. KPBS reported on May 29 that her current unit on food politics has students reading "Fast Food Nation" by Eric Schlosser and "The Omnivore's Dilemma" by Michael Pollan, then moving into a tool called Brisk Boost, which scrolls assigned text on one side of the screen while a chatbot asks comprehension questions tied to Roberts's learning objectives on the other. Student Taylor Ashton told KPBS the tool changes how she reads: "I could go through the text multiple times and just, like, read it and be done with it. This forces me to process it by keeping me interacting with it."
Roberts is explicit about what the tool replaces and what it does not. "I could come around and have an individual conversation with every one of my 36 kids to see if they all understand the article. I could give them a quiz that would be, like, five static questions and give them the results two days later," she told KPBS. "But it's so much better when they can, in real time, find out what they do and don't understand." She uses MagicSchool's idea-generator the same way, to break writer's block rather than write for students. The approach runs against a current in her own district: a San Diego Unified parents' group has gathered nearly 1,200 signatures on a petition asking the board to prohibit generative AI and limit screen time, a proposal Roberts takes seriously without agreeing with its target. "With screen time, it's more about how you're using the screen, not just the fact that the screen is on," she said.
New York City's Education Department will not finalize AI guidance for schools by its original June target, Chalkbeat reported Wednesday evening, June 24. First Deputy Chancellor Danielle Giunta told the City Council the delay reflects "the shifting national conversation, which has really escalated over just the last couple of weeks alone," along with nearly 6,500 public comments the department received on its March draft, responses it has promised to release but has not yet published. More than half of the Council's members signed a letter urging Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Schools Chancellor Kamar Samuels to pause AI use in schools over learning and mental health concerns, and a separate public petition for a two-year moratorium has drawn thousands of signatures. The March draft used a traffic-light framework that barred AI from grading and assessment while clearing it for lesson-plan brainstorming, but left student AI use, the top concern raised in public comment, largely unaddressed.
Chancellor Samuels, who did not attend Wednesday's hearing, has said the draft "missed the mark" and called AI "the most invasive technology that we've seen," signaling the final version will likely impose stricter limits on younger students than the draft proposed. Giunta confirmed the department is weighing different rules by grade level and is trying to prepare older students "for a world in which AI is already present without allowing AI to replace their own thinking." If your district's current AI policy was written before this spring's public pressure, treat it as provisional. The country's largest school system is rewriting its rules in public, and other districts tend to follow New York's lead within a year, not lead it.
Code.org, one of the largest providers of K-12 computer science curriculum, rebranded to CodeAI this month, Education Week reported June 17, expanding its mission from coding instruction into AI and data literacy. The organization had already renamed its annual Hour of Code event to Hour of AI last December. CEO Karim Meghji told EdWeek the shift reflects where digital education is heading: "Shifting from this computer science domain to a broader surface area of digital sciences, where AI science and data science increasingly are important in rounding out these areas of digital technology that every student should have access to, is the impetus for this." The expanded curriculum will cover how models are built and trained, not only how to prompt them. "Increasingly, our curriculum will include AI science. How do models work under the hood? Demystify the machine," Meghji said.
Meghji's case against restriction-first AI policy is a car analogy worth borrowing for a staff meeting: "We dropped a car in the middle of the classroom, gave a bunch of students keys, didn't teach about how the car worked or what the rules of the road were, and said 'drive the car.' What do we expect to happen? We're going to have accidents. My take is: let's teach drivers. Let's show them how a car works. You'll have a better set of drivers out there." On the critical-thinking question every English and history teacher is fielding from skeptical colleagues, Meghji takes the opposite position from the popular one: "There's a lot of discussion about how AI is going to erode critical thinking. I actually think it's the opposite. With good pedagogy, you can enhance critical thinking in a world of AI, not simply go to cognitive offloading."
Gallup's "Voices of Gen Z" survey, conducted with the Walton Family Foundation and GSV Ventures and released April 9, found emotional sentiment toward AI souring among 14- to 29-year-olds. Anger climbed nine points year over year to 31 percent, while excitement fell 14 points to 22 percent. Hopefulness dropped nine points to 18 percent, anxiety held steady at 42 percent, and curiosity, a newly added category this year, registered at 49 percent. The survey, fielded February 24 through March 4 among 1,572 respondents on Gallup's probability-based panel, also found 74 percent of K-12 students say it is very or somewhat likely that AI will make learning more difficult in the future, even as daily AI users reported far higher excitement, 44 percent, than non-users.
This data is six weeks older than this brief's usual freshness window, and we are flagging that directly: no comparably specific, dedup-clean youth-culture finding from the past two days surfaced in today's search. It remains the most current nationally representative measure of how teenagers feel about AI, and the direction matters more than the exact week it published. Students who expect AI to make learning harder and who report rising anger toward it are not approaching your classroom AI tools as neutral observers. The gap between daily users' excitement and everyone else's anxiety suggests the deciding factor is not exposure alone but whether that exposure feels chosen or imposed.