New York City Public Schools Limits AI Use by Students
Los Angeles Unified School District Bans All AI Use by Student
These are two separate stories, but they are clearly interrelated. The two largest school districts in the nation have both taken steps to severely restrict use of AI tools by students. Over a million schoolchildren had no rules about AI use implemented this week. Also, as New York and LA go, many others will follow suit. These are big deals.
These are not the same policy, however. New York’s is an absolute ban moving forward for all students from kindergarten to 8th grade on any Artificial Intelligence tools. High schoolers can use AI, but only if certain conditions like digital literacy classes are met. Teachers can use AI tools to make lesson plans and assignments, but cannot use it for grading. This is also a new initiative from the city’s Department of Education, enthusiastically backed by Mayor Zohran Mamdani. Announcing it this week was a major pronouncement before New York City Public Schools return on September 10.
The Los Angeles Unified School District policy is both more all-encompassing and less sweeping. LAUSD now has a moratorium on generative AI tools for all students in the classroom. However, this was a quiet surprise, coming as the official recommendation from a committee on technology to the School Board. LAUSD started classes three weeks ago, so it’s also not a new school year, new policy situation. Even School Board members were surprised. Last year, LAUSD implemented a policy to limit screen time. This is largely an outgrowth of that policy. The new guidelines are also for “generative AI,” as certain tools labeled as “AI” but do not produce content or allow students to cheat are allowed. In particular, tools to create adaptive tests were explicitly allowed.
AI tools have flooded schools like everywhere else, with little understanding of what they will mean for schoolchildren. Generative AI has only been publicly available since 2021, and ChatGPT debuted in 2023. No students have gone through their entire schooling with generative AI yet, and they won’t for awhile. But students can access these tools and are using AI-driven ed-tech tools in huge numbers.
If Chicago Public Schools, Miami-Dade County Public Schools, or any other major school districts implement AI bans, this will be a trend. But even if hundreds of smaller districts make similar policies because of what New York and Los Angeles just did, it will have an impact. The next step will be AI providers showing they are safe for use by students in schools.
Trump Administration Will Seek to Remove Tax-Exempt Status from Private Schools
The Department of the Treasury and the Internal Revenue Service—not the Department of Education or Department of Justice!—has issued new guidelines about private educational institutions that could see schools lose tax-exempt status for favoring students based on race. The Treasury Department estimates this could impact 18,000 schools. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessant said in a public statement that this wasn’t even just for explicit carve outs for scholarships based on race and ethnicity. “Schools rebranding race-based preferences as equitable, inclusive, or diversity-enhancing does not change their discriminatory nature.”
The actual Treasury and IRS memo headline calls out “Discriminatory Practices in Private Schools.” While the actual practices are described, the details aren’t necessarily clear. The memo points out that previous guidance “permitted schools to favor certain racial preferences in admissions, facilities, programs, scholarships, and financial assistance,” and still retain tax-exempt status. Racial preferences are now not allowed, although religious distinctions for religious institutions, family income, first-generation status, and military status are all fine.
Or they will be when this rule is officially implemented in May 2027. Expect the next 20 months to provide more clarity through back-and-forth between schools and the Treasury Department. The last time a school’s tax-exempt status was pulled was when Bob Jones University was targeted for banning interracial dating in the 1970s. So no one has done this in half a century and it was a major outlier. This is another Trump Administration policy that will get battered back-and-forth before it’s official implementation date.
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