Mike Petrilli is back on the mic solo this week to weigh the case for and against banning AI in schools. He considers growing concerns about cheating, an erosion of grading standards, and the broader effects of technology on student learning, as well as arguments that well-designed AI tools could still have a useful place in the classroom. Are blanket bans too extreme, or is it time for schools to press pause?
Then, on the Research Minute, Brian Fitzpatrick examines a new systematic review of state and locally funded pre-K programs and what it reveals about the strength of the evidence behind their short- and long-term effects.
Recommended content:
- Let’s debate the AI bans —Michael J. Petrilli, SCHOOLED
- High Tech, Low Standards: High School in the Age of Distraction —Brian R. Fitzpatrick, Thomas B. Fordham Institute
- Schools Are Urged to Embrace AI—and Ban Phones. Can We Resolve the Tension? —Rick Hess, Education Week
- Hot Takes on NYC AI Ban —Ben Wallerstein, Whiteboard Advisors
- A Systematic Review of Research Designs Used to Evaluate State and Locally Funded Pre-K Programs —Anamarie A. Whitaker, Cara L. Kelly, Tyler W. Watts, Mark Lipsey, Juan Camilo Cristancho, Jade M. Jenkins, Caroline M. Botvin, Drew H. Bailey, Greg J. Duncan, Tania Maria Cruz Cordero, Melissa Stoffers, and Mindy Rosengarten, EdWorkingPapers (August 2026)
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Transcript
This transcript was generated with the assistance of AI and lightly edited for clarity and readability.
Introduction
Mike Petrilli [00:00]
Welcome to The Education Gadfly Show.
I’m your host, Mike Petrilli of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.
This week, I go solo to talk about how schools should approach artificial intelligence and whether student-facing AI belongs in the classroom at all.
Then on the Research Minute, Brian Fitzpatrick reviews a new systematic review of state and locally funded pre-K programs and what it reveals about the strength of the evidence behind their short-term and long-term effects.
All that and more this week on The Education Gadfly Show.
Hello, this is your host, Mike Petrilli of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, here at The Education Gadfly Show and online at FordhamInstitute.org.
It is my monthly solo edition, and today we are going to talk about AI. Not so much whether it’s going to kill us all, which, in the last few days, sounds like it very much might. But whether, in the meantime, we should embrace AI bans for our schools.
Let’s do that on Ed Reform Update.
Ed Reform Update: Should schools ban AI?
Mike Petrilli [01:20]
So, first I should say this thing about the AIs killing us all. My younger son came home the other day really nervous about everything that has been going around in the news. And it is sobering, I’ve got to say, the wall-to-wall coverage of these people building the AI saying that there’s a greater than 10 percent chance of it killing all of us within ten years.
All I could say to him as a father was, look, when I was your age, we were all very worried about nuclear annihilation and thought that was very much a real possibility. This is in the 80s. We would do these silly things, as many of you can remember, where we would practice hiding under our desks, as if that would have helped us at all had World War III started somehow or another.
And maybe it was partly luck, and partly it was the skill of our leaders. So far, knock on wood, that has not happened. And so I guess we have to hope for the same when it comes to AI and hope and pray that people who know more about this stuff than I do, and who are in positions of responsibility, are able to figure out this problem.
And look, I’m an optimist. I’ve got to believe that we will, just like other big challenges that we humans have faced. We are a pretty clever species. But we understand why people are nervous.
But that’s not what we’re going to talk about, really.
We really are going to talk about this question of the AI bans. And it’s remarkable. It was only back in April that my good friend Rick Hess interviewed another good friend, Michael Horn, for his Ed Week blog. He gave the post a very provocative title. It said, “Schools are urged to embrace AI and ban phones. Can we resolve the tension?”
And it was a good question, right? Because that was happening not so long ago.
And yet we have resolved the tension. We’re resolving it by banning the AI also. At least that is what New York City has done for grades K–8 and Los Angeles for grades K–12.
I understand from some folks like Erin Mote that New York’s ban is a little more nuanced. They left some room for some experimentation and some learning. And again, it’s only K–8. Los Angeles, it’s more really shutting it down pretty much absolutely, though again with some carve-outs in some cases, maybe tools for kids with disabilities, for example.
But Michael argued back then, he said, we should be very wary about promoting blanket bans. Not only is it out of tune with the reality that some parents are intentionally opting for schools that leverage AI, but it will also limit the use cases where ed tech makes sense in traditional schooling models.
He points, for example, to Coursemojo, now led by Dacia Toll, who was the founder of Achievement First out of New Haven, Connecticut, I believe. Some amazing no-excuses charter schools back in the day.
So, these are people that care a lot about learning, student achievement, high expectations. And Michael writes that Coursemojo is a curriculum-aligned teaching assistant for English language arts and that Dacia is doing this work with a clear instructional design, guardrails, clarity around the importance of knowledge and human teachers setting the rules around good instruction, good questions, and actual student misconceptions.
We’d be foolish to dismiss the opportunities that someone like Dacia sees in these tools.
And of course, others with close ties to the ed tech world, the AI world, like Ben Wallerstein at Whiteboard Advisors or Erin Mote herself, have been making the case that basically we shouldn’t throw out the baby with the bathwater.
I’ve been writing about this and getting some feedback.
Listen to, for example, Lindsay Dworkin, who is a senior vice president for public policy at the textbook giant HMH. She says a student asking a chatbot to write an essay for them and a teacher using an AI-enabled tool to understand where students are struggling and what support they need may both be technically using AI, but they’re doing fundamentally different things.
My concern, even with governing by broad categories, is that those rules can’t distinguish between technology that pulls students away from learning and technology that helps teachers deliver stronger instruction or help students engage more deeply. We should be differentiating. This is not a monolith.
James Cantonwine wrote in. He’s the director of research and assessment at a small school district in Washington State doing some cool stuff.
He and I have been going back and forth about basically an app he built where teachers can videotape themselves and then get feedback on their teaching aligned with some of the best teaching evaluation tools out there. Again, homegrown. Very cool.
He says he’s not necessarily defending AI, especially student-facing AI, but he does ask some good questions. We know that generative AI encompasses more than the chatbots that we’re used to, Claude and ChatGPT. Where do we draw the line?
Vendors of all types have been racing to integrate AI into their products, and they don’t necessarily let schools opt out of these new features that may be AI-embedded. What happens? Do schools have to cancel all of those contracts if a ban goes into place? What if this AI stuff is pretty tangential?
And then just the basic question of, look, we want to keep experimenting, right, to try to understand what works and what doesn’t and how to keep this stuff safe. And so who’s going to do that?
Even the American Psychological Association, which tends to be pretty small-c conservative on a lot of this tech stuff, says that AI bans are too extreme.
All right. So there’s an argument out there that says we really need to be wary of these blanket bans.
But I’ve got to say, I think it’s really hard right now for these groups to be out there saying, hey, we should trust the system. Right?
I mean, especially with all these concerns about runaway AI killing us all. Okay, but not just that.
We know that parents are leading this backlash. I think that is very much a grassroots thing. I think a lot of these parents are frustrated with the invasion of technology into their schools.
Some studies show the typical school district has literally thousands of ed tech products being used inside. Who knows what’s happening out there? A lot of it questionable and a lot of it doing some pretty dangerous stuff.
So, for example, Betsy Tao, who chairs the Technology Committee for the PTSA in my home district of Montgomery County, Maryland. She wrote in to say this.
She said AI moratoriums are a necessary step for all educational institutions for one simple reason: “must first do no harm.” Looking back at the last twenty years, at the unimaginable amount of damage that social media and smartphones have wrought, especially to our children, and the complete and utter failure of ed tech on educational outcomes, to take any other position is unconscionable. Naive.
And she says, look, we have to contend with the fact that it doesn’t matter whether school districts officially approve or don’t approve the product, right? Kids can access all of it. This is crazy.
She says, “I can still play the game Five Nights on Epstein’s Island with my fourth grader’s school account. And last week, I found a link easily on the first page of a search that worked.”
Okay, I don’t know much about this game, but Five Nights on Epstein’s Island does not sound like a game you want your kid playing. Right?
And this is after she’s been trying to get the school district to work on their firewalls and lock this stuff down. Common Sense Media just said that Google’s AI Overview has an unacceptable risk to children, and yet there it is. It’s in all of our schools.
She says a Baltimore dad I know has reams of data showing his son used his school Chromebook to do all of his math assignments over a period of months in between searching for entertainment and, of course, porn on a school device, and that he used AI for those assignments.
So she asked, what are we doing here?
I mean, this is the thing, right? We see this as parents. We see that the kids are using AI to cheat. They’re using it to get to all kinds of crazy materials. The Chromebooks are just basically big phones, distraction devices. Right?
And we talked about this last week on the podcast when my colleague Brian was here talking about his new report on a survey we did of high school students. Even the students themselves are admitting, screaming from the rooftop, saying, hey, all these screens, the AI, the erosion in grading standards, all of this has just cratered academic expectations in their schools.
The bullshitification of high schools, especially, is on full blast.
So I look at all this, and I think I start to say, I don’t know, maybe I’m a Luddite. Let’s just throw it all out. Throw out the baby, the bathwater, the tub, the whole shebang. Go back to paper and pencil, human thinking, human relationships. Make our schools tech-free zones. Right?
I don’t know. Maybe that’s too extreme.
Another great perspective in the last few weeks was from Helena Bennett, writing at the Slow Boring Substack. That’s Matt Yglesias’s Substack. She was reading a new MIT report that she thought was really thoughtful, trying to figure out, as it says, AI use in teaching, learning, and research training.
And it kind of walks through the various purposes that you might use AI. And then also, what is it that a given educational institution is trying to achieve that’s different for higher ed maybe than K–12? It’s different for, say, a career and technical training program working on career stuff than it might be on liberal arts.
She says that public K–12 systems are designed to produce in students the basic cognitive capacity to read, think, reason, and work through problems independently. That is the exact thing that unsupervised AI use is best at overriding in a young person’s development. It takes away the struggle necessary to grow both intelligence and confidence.
So New York’s response with this ban is an attempt to preserve the identified purpose of a child’s foundational education. Seems like it makes sense.
And of course, we’re talking about all of this on the heels of the PISA results coming out last week. Andreas Schleicher, for one, certainly raised the concern that AI could be depressing student achievement scores around the world.
When you dig into the OECD report, it says that students who never used AI scored 509 on the science test versus 481 for students who use it very frequently. That’s a big difference, though it did look like students who used AI once or twice a week outperformed those who used it less often.
So look, correlation is not causation, but this is yet another reason to be worried.
So this has been rather rambling. And I hope you can tell that I have mixed feelings about this. I’m not quite sure where I fall.
I like the basic notion that, hey, let’s just stay focused on student achievement. Let’s look for tools that boost student achievement. Let’s get rid of the ones that don’t. Let’s worry, of course, about distraction. Let’s worry about cheating because obviously kids aren’t going to learn anything if they don’t have to put in any effort.
Right?
But it does seem to me that the burden, which is growing heavier by the day, does belong to these ed tech companies, to the other people selling these products with AI embedded in them, and to the people who are the AI evangelists.
They need to show us those AI tools, especially when it comes to student-facing tools, that really are adding value to learning without replacing thinking and convince us that ordinary American schools, right? Not in some dream world, but in the real world, that they can enforce and notice and spot the difference between the good stuff and the bad stuff and have some mechanism of keeping the bad stuff out.
If they can’t, then I have a hard time not saying that other districts should do what New York City and Los Angeles did and press pause on all of this until we figure it out.
That’s where I’m at. Let me know what you think. I’d love to hear your perspective.
All right, people. Now it’s time for everyone’s favorite, Amber’s Research Minute.
Research Minute: What does the evidence say about publicly funded pre-K?
Mike Petrilli [14:36]
Brian, welcome back to the show.
Brian Fitzpatrick
Thanks so much for having me, Mike.
Mike Petrilli
Brian Fitzpatrick, who is filling in for Amber. You, of course, were here last week, so people are used to you. But this time you get to do the Research Minute.
And joining us, as always, David Griffith, my co-host. Welcome, David.
David Griffith
Hey, thanks for having me.
Mike Petrilli
Yeah, you guys missed my solo podcast, which was me rambling on about AI in schools and whether we should ban AI.
I am really torn. I’ve got to say, though, we’re having a very interesting internal debate at Fordham where it just feels overwhelmingly like people are mad at the robots. And not just because they’re going to kill us, but because they’re messing up our schools already.
I mean, that seems to be the sense I’m getting, is people saying, what the heck are we doing with this AI? Get it out. Get it out of the schools.
David Griffith
I think with regard to education, that’s probably the vibe right now, Mike. I don’t know. I have to say I’m a little mystified more broadly by the backlash. I’ve yet to find a physical ailment that it doesn’t help me diagnose.
But people are really angry about it. So I guess we should take their concerns seriously.
Mike Petrilli
Yeah, it’s just hard because it’s not easy to actually get rid of it at this point because, as in our normal daily lives, it’s kind of wormed its way into everything.
It wouldn’t even be easy to go back to textbooks at this point. I mean, we’ve got this whole infrastructure we’ve built that is based on Chromebooks and iPads and learning management systems and these various digital tools, and they’ve embraced AI.
David Griffith
Yeah. Yes, it’s difficult. Certainly, it’s coupled with one-to-ones in practice.
Mike Petrilli
Yeah, yeah.
All right. Well, I don’t want to take more time away from Brian’s minute. Brian, you’re down to nineteen seconds at this point.
No, just kidding. It’s been a long time since anybody has actually hit the minute mark. I think in the early days, Amber made an effort until we decided it was ridiculous.
We’ll give you more time, Brian. What you got for us this week?
Brian Fitzpatrick [16:44]
Well, this week’s study is relatively straightforward, though from the looks of it, it took a monumental amount of effort.
So this is a twelve-author study that was just posted as a working paper, led by Anna Markowitz of the University of Delaware. And the twelve names are big names, including Greg Duncan.
The paper itself reviews essentially the work that exists now on publicly funded pre-K and attempts to do a synthesis of all the research methods being used. It is not really a classic review piece where it’s trying to come up with a single consolidated number for the average impact of pre-K, but it really goes through the history of research on pre-K.
And I’ve got to tell you, I found it very convincing.
It is, I think, making the case that on pre-K, like with many other topics, there is almost like a pyramid of research studies, where at the top you have a small number of extremely high-quality studies, so RCTs or something like them. And then kind of as you go down, you have studies of lower and lower quality, but they are more common.
You have dozens and dozens of studies doing regression models with some good controls and even more doing regression models with no adequate controls. And the lower the quality of the design, as is often the case for a number of different topics, the more of a purported benefit there is to the intervention being studied.
And I think I would summarize my kind of aha moment while reading this piece as: A week ago, I think I would have summarized the research on publicly funded pre-K as good but not great evidence for some sort of benefit for students. I think as of today, I would summarize it as the best evidence we have is mixed, and there’s not a clear case that the next one of these programs to open will benefit students.
And really, there are four gold-standard-style studies. Two of them found no results for students in the long run, or mid-tier run, I should say. Not long run, nothing like post-high school. One found positive benefits. That would be in Boston. And one found a profoundly negative impact on students. That would be in Tennessee.
And I think they make a solid case that, A, that’s the best way to summarize the work we have on pre-K as of right now.
And then they go into the short-term versus long-term stuff, which is really important when looking at pre-K. But let’s pause here and talk about their main point before we move on.
Mike Petrilli
Well, take that, David.
David Griffith
Why do I have a question coming my way, Mike?
Mike Petrilli
How can you live with yourself?
No, just kidding.
No, that’s really interesting, Brian. And kudos to these folks, including some people that have been pre-K advocates. Right? So this is very impressive.
I am curious, what about for low-income kids? Can we see any kind of particular impact on spending money on pre-K for them?
Brian Fitzpatrick
So this is hundreds of studies they’re kind of mashing together. They didn’t try to do any breakouts by type of students impacted.
They did kind of dig in a little bit to, like they say pretty explicitly, they think that the difference between the Boston wonderful outcomes for students and the Tennessee truly negative outcomes for students is not a measurement issue. It’s that there are differences in the programs. But they don’t really say why.
They just say that we think Boston just nailed it, and Tennessee dropped the ball.
Yeah, I couldn’t speak to an actual group of students targeted.
Mike Petrilli
Of course, that universal versus targeted question is a big one.
Look, and this is a tough one for us here at Fordham. To the extent that we have engaged on pre-K, Checker has done a lot of this. He has been making the case for a real school readiness, education-focused pre-K.
And yet it’s been many years now. I remember Russ Whitehurst, who is no slouch from a research perspective or high-expectations perspective, saying, look, the evidence is not great. And therefore, we should really focus on child care.
That there are benefits to the labor market, to parents being able to work and bring in income, to having child care. But we shouldn’t worry so much if that child care is all that educational or not, as long as the kids are being well taken care of. And it can be a lot less expensive if you just try to focus on child care.
And maybe that’s the takeaway here. I don’t know.
But David, get in here. Tell us why this group of twelve experts got it wrong.
David Griffith [21:42]
I don’t think this group of twelve experts did get it wrong, Mike.
I mean, for starters, I think it would be folly for me to take a direct run at them in the next thirty seconds.
Let me just make a couple of points.
My understanding is that the Tennessee pre-K program we’re evaluating that is sort of driving the headline negative effects, you know, we’re evaluating the program based on very early performance, like the first couple of years, the first couple of cohorts of kids who went through.
And if we had stopped there with charter schools, we would have essentially no charter schools. Right?
I mean, it is well established that it takes five years for a school to, you know, three to five years, approximately that long, for a school to really get up and running. And so I’m sure it was a mess when it first got up and running.
So it’s not to offer excuses, but it is a little bit to say I am skeptical of dismissing any program, even the Tennessee program, based on the first couple of years before people have had the chance to evaluate it, before there’s been a cycle of improvement feedback. Staff are still learning their jobs. I really think that is a little premature.
Is it true that RCTs are going to show us smaller effects? I think that’s almost certainly true.
And I think it’s probably the case that, in the long run, the early literature on this is overstating the effects. Parents are getting, I think, the counterfactual is getting better. Right?
But I will say, I don’t agree, as much respect as I have for Russ and my brief interactions with him, I don’t agree with the child care argument.
And so anyway, those are my thoughts. I don’t reject the study. We absolutely need more evidence.
Mike Petrilli
Yeah.
All right. And then you were going to get to the long-term stuff, Brian, right?
And here’s the point: The effects fade, but that’s the case for everything, right? I mean, don’t we think it’s not just pre-K? Any intervention, probably at least the achievement effects fade, and what we hope is that there is some residue.
What was it we talked about once on the show? Social science dark matter. That there’s some residue that remains that maybe has a positive long-term impact on graduation rates or some kind of, you know, what we call non-cognitive skills, or there’s some benefit, even if it gets sort of pulled back down to whatever they were going to be anyways based on the kid’s background, yada, yada, yada.
I don’t know. I mean, is that basically what they’re saying here? It’s a fade-out story?
Brian Fitzpatrick [24:54]
So they don’t really delve.
Because of this, the studies past the end of pre-K span the gamut from end of kindergarten as a time point to measure outcomes to, you know, 22 years old in some cases. And they have to kind of match them together for the sort of methods they’re doing.
They don’t really speak to the specifics of fade-out.
One specific point that they make, however, is the downside of using end-of-pre-K scores specifically. Because I think, and I agree with them here, that if you’re going to look at, like imagine a hypothetical scenario where Timmy and Tommy are twins. Timmy goes to pre-K for some reason, Tommy doesn’t.
If Timmy’s far ahead of Tommy at the end of pre-K, but at the end of kindergarten, they’re at the exact same place, I don’t think we should summarize that as, oh, the evidence is mixed. We should summarize that as there’s no evidence for an effect here.
If by the end of kindergarten you’ve seen that fade-out, I don’t think that’s really fade-out. I think that’s evidence of no effect.
And I don’t think that’s a controversial claim. But I would encourage anyone listening who’s going to do a study of pre-K, just make your short-term research outcomes end of kindergarten.
And then if it fades out by the end of third grade, I think that’s a different conversation. But I don’t think we should be using end-of-pre-K outcomes here because I don’t think they’re a reasonable outcome.
David Griffith
I guess I’ll also say, Mike, I think what you said is broadly speaking correct. That’s the right way to talk about it, right? Like the universe is just sucking people back toward their predetermined social outcomes, unfortunately.
But I will say, when you dig in, there are a couple of really mysterious movements in this incredibly small handful of studies that we’re actually talking about here.
You’ve got the Boston study where essentially there’s no effect on middle school test scores, I think, but then you have these long-term big effects on non-academic outcomes that appear out of nowhere.
In the Tennessee study, you see basically the opposite thing, where you have these negative effects. But I just think the authors are right. We need more evidence. We don’t really understand.
My reading of what they’re saying is that there is fairly consistent evidence for short-term effects on academics, but there is a very concerning mix of effects, or no effects, when it comes to longer-term outcomes. And it’s concerning.
So anyway, I think I agree with their call for more evidence.
Mike Petrilli
Yep. And look, again, the question is, well, what else could we be spending this money on if it’s not having an impact? Lots of things that you could put on that list.
But then I can also imagine, like I said at the top, there is this work issue. I mean, there are a lot of reasons, and people on the right will make this argument, that having families increase their market income, making money not from welfare programs but from work, seems to be a really good thing for those families and their kids, and ending the dependency and et cetera, et cetera.
And so if making it possible for especially mom to be able to leave the house and work and have Timmy and Tommy taken care of by caring adults, all of that has some benefit as well that we’re not looking at here based on the impact directly on Timmy and Tommy educationally.
It’s complicated.
David Griffith
Timmy and Tommy, they’re featuring prominently in this conversation.
I can only agree, Mike. I’m probably showing my D.C. bias here, right? I can barely conceive of the counterfactual to universal pre-K. It’s like, I don’t even know what that would mean for, you know, I guess it would mean we’d be paying for it ourselves, right?
Which, from the perspective of the public purse, there’s a case for that. But if your point is education in these years doesn’t matter, it’s not the same point. Right?
So, yeah, it seems like a lot of people are working in these years. And so that calls for something.
Mike Petrilli
All right, gang, good discussion.
Really interesting, Brian. Thanks for bringing us that review.
That is all the time we’ve got for this week. So until next week.
David Griffith
I’m David Griffith.
Mike Petrilli
And I’m Mike Petrilli of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, signing off.
The Education Gadfly Show is a production of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, located in Washington, D.C. For more information, visit us online at FordhamInstitute.org.
