AI in Education: It’s not what you think
Written by Reid Banerjee
Artificial Intelligence systems are predicted to change the world in many ways. Many of these changes will actually come further into the future—in 10 to 20 years. Education, however, is already seeing the impacts of AI on a large scale. For many, the first time they heard about ChatGPT or any other AI chatbots were in the context of students using AI to generate essays. There has been unprecedented media coverage on this type of cheating: students using AI to large parts of assignments, or even entire essays. Indeed, the technology is different from what has been previously used by students, but the effect is not. Students have been able to cheat on their assignments far before the introduction of AI to the classroom. At the same time as students have begun using AI, many schools around the nation have been implementing AI to ease the effort put into instruction. The largest changes in schools might not be due to the students cheating, but the ways in which teachers and school districts leverage the technology to improve learning.
On May 7th, 2025 the New York Magazine published an article titled “Everyone is Cheating Their Way Through College”. This article featured several anecdotes of students using AI to largely automate their college workload—from creating an outline to generating entire essays—only making small changes before submission to “humanize” the writing. These types of abuses of AI may have a negative effect on students’ ability to think critically. “University students offload critical thinking, other hard work to AI” from The Hechinger Report, cites studies from British Journal of Education Technology and Anthropic, to warn of the possible danger of students using AI to help them with their assignments. This report found that students are using AI to offload much of the important thinking process that is vital to writing, leading to what researchers call “metacognitive laziness”. Teachers fear that while students are generating what appear to be sound writing, they are not developing the critical thinking skills that are critical throughout their lives.
While many may argue that students have always used new technology to cheat, AI is seen as an entirely different threat than cheating before because of its ease of use. No longer do students have to spend their hard-earned cash to pay for a service like Chegg to help them with their assignments, they can do it all for free, instantly. The fear is that this is not just affecting students who already cheated, but now it has become so easy to cheat that students who do not use AI are at a disadvantage. It is difficult to say whether this is actually occurring, however. CSU’s AI survey, with a sample of 80 Charlotte Students, found that 39% of students never felt at a disadvantage due to AI, and another 39% of students only sometimes felt at a disadvantage due to AI. While many students have, at some point, felt to be at a disadvantage, for many it is not a huge part of their decision of whether or not to use AI.
In fact, it is debatable whether data actually backs up the claims of widespread cheating that have prevailed in recent years. Another finding of the CSU AI survey was that 24% of students reported never using AI to help them with assignments, and 47% of respondents reported that they do not often use AI to help them with assignments. Only 10% of students reported using AI “extremely often”. Data from Stanford University suggests that there has been little change in the amount of students engaged in cheating activities since AI has been introduced.
While students may not be using AI, teachers definitely are. In CSU’s AI survey, 45% of students reported that their teachers have either encouraged students to use AI, or directly used AI to create resources or grade assignments. Similarly, data from a CMS Survey found that 44% of staff members at CMS schools have used AI at work. Some teachers use AI to allow themselves more time to focus on the important parts of their job, and automate the repetitive work they deem unimportant. Teachers use AI to generate lesson plans, grade assignments, create additional resources, and more for the benefit of their students. The push for AI is not coming entirely from the teachers, however. In April of 2025, President Donald Trump signed an executive order titled “Advancing Artificial Intelligence Education for American Youth” . This executive order created a task force on artificial intelligence education, making AI education a priority moving forward. Following this, some announcements have been made as schools attempt to follow up on this idea. In June 2025 CMS announced that it will select 30 schools to be “AI Champions” and explore how AI can be used in the classroom, and published its AI vision report which details CMS’s current pro-AI approach to learning. Through this, CMS claims that it is “leading the way nationally in how public school systems approach artificial intelligence” .
The push for AI in education is not just coming from school districts or even the federal government, AI companies are also heavily invested in getting their products to be central to schools in the future. The American Federation of Teachers recently accepted $23 million in funding from OpenAI and other AI-focused tech companies in order to launch new AI trainings for teachers. Additionally, both OpenAI and Google have taken steps to insure that students use their AI tools by providing free student access to some of their advanced systems for free. But while top AI execs are claiming that “the four fundamental pillars of education should be reading and writing and arithmetic and learning how to use AI.”, others are not so certain. Popular Information called the introduction of AI into schools “A gigantic public experiment that no one has asked for” casting doubt on the motives of these AI companies given the uncertain effects of long-term AI use in schools.
Any doubts regarding the effectiveness of AI have not slowed some private schools, as many push to expand their ability to teach students with AI. A leader in a more unconventional approach to learning using AI is Alpha School, which provides “AI-driven learning”. Their model consists of two hours of learning using their AI system, without a teacher, followed by “lifeskills workshops” in which students learn through accomplishing tasks in real life. Alpha School claims that their students learn over two times faster using their AI systems, a claim which is backed up by disputed data from standardized testing. The Alpha School primarily offers programs at the Elementary and Middle school level, but also offers some programs through twelfth grade. These programs start at an annual tuition of $40,000. Despite the uncertain effectiveness of their schooling method and their high tuition, Alpha School is rapidly growing and is opening new locations around the United States, including a program in Charlotte in 2025.
While it seems AI technology is here to stay in education, it is still very unclear how it will affect students in the long-term. While some are concerned about AI assisted cheating, others are pushing for AI to be fully integrated into the classroom. Despite some claiming that AI is revolutionizing education, the data seems to show that the technology has not yet been fully adopted, or is simply not at the level needed to accomplish what it needs to. This is not slowing some schools, however, as both school districts and private schools race to implement the newest technologies, fueled by pushes from AI Companies and the Federal Government. With so much uncertainty regarding the future of AI, it is simply difficult to predict exactly where it will go next.
Sources
https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-offload-critical-thinking-ai/
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666920X24000560?via%3Dihub
https://www.cmsk12.org/cms/lib/NC50000755/Centricity/Domain/7952/CMS%20AI%20Vision%20Report.pptx.pdf
https://www.axios.com/local/charlotte/2025/06/23/cms-mecklenburg-schools-ai-artifical-intelligence
https://popular.info/p/a-gigantic-public-experiment-that
Special Thanks to Braden Ballard and Joseph Rukenbrod for helping with editing.
