Back to School Report

**Kousha Navadar** (0:10)
It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. I'm Kousha Navadar, filling in for Brian today. Coming up on today's show, we will, of course, talk about the life and giant legacy of Gloria Steinem, who died yesterday at 92 years old. My guest for this conversation will be the former Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney, who worked very closely with Gloria Steinem, especially on passing the Equal Rights Amendment. We'll want to hear your reflections and tributes too. That'll be around 10.3 this morning, so get ready for that if you're interested. Plus, what's going on with the bond market right now? It's rattling some economists, so we'll talk about what's causing it and what this might mean for you, for your retirement accounts, mortgage rates and more. My guest will be former Planet Money co-host Mary Childs. We'll also talk about the real shift in youth sports into something that might seem unfamiliar to people who played a generation or two generations ago.
Travel and private leagues have been supercharged even in just the past decade. It's now way more expensive and consuming, with regular trips for tournaments costing families thousands of dollars. I know a lot of the parents listening are probably nodding your heads right now, so we'll get into this in the next hour. And we'll wrap today's show with a pre-Labor Day quiz with the historian Kenneth C. Davis. This one is not that easy. I'm going to be real. So here's a little hint. Maybe read an article on the history of Labor Day now if you want a shot at doing well on our quiz. That'll be near the end of today's show.
But first, we're just one week out from the first day of school and New York City Public Schools is turning in its biggest assignment right at the buzzer. Yesterday, eight days before students walk in, the city released its long-awaited rules on artificial intelligence in the classroom.
The city is putting a one-year pause on all student use of artificial intelligence through eighth grade. That's about 600,000 kids, two-thirds of the system. High schoolers will be allowed limited use for things like AI literacy and career readiness. There are screen time rules too. Most students from preschool through second grade won't use individual devices in class at all. And there are time limits on laptops from third through eighth grade. Teachers can still use AI for lesson planning and some communication, but they can't use it for grading or for decisions about whether a student moves up. We'll also check in on the rollout of the Mayor's free 2K program, where providers say they're still waiting to get paid. We'll check in on his legal fight with the teacher's union over paraprofessional bonuses, and of course how families are surviving in almost 11 weeks summer.
Here to talk to us about all of it is Jessica Gould, Education Reporter for WNYC and Gothamist. Jess, welcome back.

**Jessica Gould** (3:12)
Thank you.

**Kousha Navadar** (3:14)
Let's dive into AI. How was AI being used in classrooms through eighth grade before this policy?

**Jessica Gould** (3:19)
Well, one thing that we as education reporters have learned through this process of considering whether there should be AI and how much in schools, is that it's a bit of the wild west. The city, when ChatGPT came out, they under the Adams administration, first they banned all use of AI, then they allowed it.
Then it's been in this gray area for a long time where it wasn't banned, and different schools and different teachers had different practices and different ways of using it. In some cases, there were student-facing AI and teachers also used it on the back end, which as you said, will still be permitted. But there's been a huge groundswell in the past year among parents and some educators and policy makers to pause to have a moratorium to reconsider and think about all the potential downsides there are for children in their exposure to AI, on their learning, on the environment. And that groundswell against AI, which we've seen across the country, really hit New York hard. And when the school's chancellor first introduced this under Mamdani, first introduced an AI playbook in the spring, which allowed more use of AI and kind of left it up to teachers about how students should use AI.
There was so much pushback that he said, we're going to take it back, reconsider, and now we have the rules that you just mentioned.

**Kousha Navadar** (4:48)
OK, so it's kind of like going from the Wild West to reaching a fever pitch, and now they're responding to demand, kind of that movement there.

**Jessica Gould** (4:55)
Yeah, but there are, of course, still a lot of questions about how this is going to be rolled out. As you said, it's right against the buzzer this is, kind of cramming the night before. And so pulling all this technology back is going to be hard.