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May 6, 2020

Artificial Intelligence in (AI) in K-12

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has the potential to influence practically every aspect of education and society as it rapidly expands both inside and outside of school. While it holds the potential to augment education to provide every student with personalized instruction at scale, it also brings a host of new challenges and considerations. Through this publication, we hope to support school and district leaders as they respond to the influx of AI in education and determine how it might impact their students, teachers, and families.
Though some narratives around AI leave teachers fearing for their jobs, both economists and education experts argue the opposite. The real potential for education lies in how AI augments what teachers and leaders do in schools, allowing them to be more adaptive to the needs of their students and less consumed by routine, repetitive tasks. If adopted with the idea of augmentation in mind, AI could help to solve administrative problems, automate certain tasks, afford teachers the time to construct more meaningful face-to-face learning opportunities, and realize that promise of personalization at scale through the implementation of adaptive assessments, intelligent tutoring systems, and platforms that support adaptive learning.
However, much of the current discussion around AI comes from futurists, business leaders, economists, and technologists. These conversations have celebrated the promise of AI with minimal conversation about critical questions and concerns. Before adopting new AI systems, school and district leaders need to not only consider some of the social and moral components but also three more immediate concerns: privacy, bias, and literacy.

Consortium for School Networking (CoSN)