Think back to the first day of school when you were a kid. You walked into the building feeling nervous and excited to be reunited with friends, meet your teachers, and crack open your brand new supplies. Now imagine that instead of doing get-to-know-you activities with your classmates, you spend the majority of your day answering questions on a computer, and instead of your teacher picking out a book that she knows will spark your curiosity, you read AI-generated text on a screen.
As students and teachers head back to school this fall, this is the bleak reality in more and more classrooms. Unless we fight back, the problem will only get worse.
Tech oligarchs are seeking to colonize every part of our society, including public education, using tools like generative AI. Not only are students turning to AI, but districts and even unions are pushing teachers to incorporate AI into instruction. Some educators embrace it, arguing that we have to stay competitive so that students can get jobs upon graduation. They parrot the same arguments as tech CEOs, like Tim Cook of Apple who has said that workers need to use AI or get “left behind.” Some educators worry that poor kids aren’t getting enough AI. Some claim that AI is here to stay, so we have the duty to teach students how to use it as a partner (The New York Times eagerly spotlighted a teacher who piloted an AI civics course). However, socialist teachers know better. We ardently believe that AI has no place in this human project of public education.
Generative AI and the Encroaching Threat of Charter Schools
Under capitalism, the profit motive is inescapable, even in public education. Education technology (edtech) is a $163 billion dollar industry, and an increasingly large share of that is dedicated to AI. Private interests like edtech companies and curriculum writers vie for multimillion-dollar contracts with public school districts. Districts themselves push to get more “value” out of each teacher by increasing class sizes and mandating scripted curriculums that de-professionalize educators and put money in the hands of corporations. An additional wrinkle with AI is data privacy. Districts need to ensure that teacher and student data is not being sold or used to train AI tools. These violations are not hypothetical; students and parents recently sued student surveillance software company Gaggle for violating constitutional rights. Miami-Dade schools paid $1.6 million to AI chatbot maker AllHere, which then filed for bankruptcy; its CEO was charged with fraud.
This profit motive also opens the door to attacks from an evergreen enemy: charter schools. Charter schools, especially the private variety, have long claimed to provide the same education as public schools with less funding. In reality this is only possible by cutting corners and underpaying staff. It is common for charter schools to replace certified teachers with untrained individuals with euphemistic titles such as “guide” or “mentor.” Last year, an Arizona school board voted to allow online charter schools. One such school is Unbound Academy, which follows a 2 Hour Learning model: two hours of AI-administered academics a day and four hours of personal projects. The job posting for Unbound Academy guides shows a pay range from $40,000 – $60,000 a year with no benefits. Some of these jobs don’t even require a teaching license, will accept an expired license, or don’t require teaching experience.
Such schools devalue the central importance of teachers’ expertise, acquired through years of training and experience. Listings boast that “associate guides” will be required to do zero content area teaching because it will all be done by AI. Instead, the guides’ role is to lead workshops on “life skills such as communication, creativity, problem-solving, and self-direction” and mentor students to “build confidence, ownership, and executive functioning.” Most of these articles are light on the details of what the actual day-to-day curriculum looks like. One state meets their requirement for its “English Learning” programming with Duolingo, an AI-powered app.
These charter schools are not held to the same financial standards as an average public school. A San-Diego-based charter school spent $500,000 on two AI-powered humanoid robots that make factual errors, and alternately speak too quickly or too slowly for students. Meanwhile, Unbound Academy has budgeted $1000 per student on marketing, up to $350,000 per year for their program. This is unsurprising, as according to the National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education, charter schools spend more on administration and less on instruction per student than public schools.
AI charter schools can also come with significant price tags. Charter school Arizona State University Preparatory Academy now offers Khan World School, a sixth to twelfth-grade online program where tuition can range from $8,250 to $13,700 annually, depending on where you live. Students are taught mostly asynchronously by “guides”. They have 24/7 access to Khanmigo, Khan Academy’s proprietary AI chatbot.
There is a growing trend of replacing highly qualified teachers with underqualified guides, AI apps, and glorified search engines. The shift toward cheaper alternatives to human teachers has a negative impact on students in charter schools but also undercuts the ability of public school teachers to advocate for fair treatment and healthy classroom environments. Increasingly, even veteran teachers are feeling the temptation to be more like robots.
AI as a “Time Saver”
Many of our colleagues have used AI at work in varying ways to save time, and it’s hard to blame them: the average American teacher works 12 unpaid hours every week. But research shows that using AI at the workplace does not reduce workloads: it intensifies it through task expansion and increased multitasking. In an industry as scrutinized as public education, it is not hard to imagine what this might look like. Districts and school leaders already expect lengthy lesson plans and improvement directives. Excessive paperwork to justify our pedagogical decisions and improve meaningless test scores will only increase as AI adoption expands, further alienating teachers from our labor.
Teachers should be skeptical when districts and tech companies claim to want to make our jobs easier and give us more control. From the assembly line replacing craftsmanship with mass production to surveillance software monitoring workers’ every move and click, the cost of technology-enabled increases in productivity is always borne by workers who are expected to produce more under increasingly alienated conditions. Similarly, we predict that not too far in the future, teachers will be required to do even more work during our precious few planning hours with the explicit mandate to use AI to supposedly manage the workload.
We need to think carefully about our demands when it comes to AI in the workplace. The National Education Union, the largest education union in the United Kingdom, lays out clearly what they do not want as a result of their AI policies. They reject “the intensification of work for teachers” especially an increase of makework or busywork, “the loss of agency and autonomy,” the imposition of “pedagogical or curriculum approaches,” or a bandaid for “wider funding issues within our education system.” US teachers’ unions should adopt similar guardrails as we have conversations with our administrators around AI, set school-based and district-based policies, and fight for our union contracts. Unfortunately, we have not seen such vision coming from the leadership of our unions.
The Need for Political Education and Action
Rather than defending educators and students from this encroaching colonization, many of our own unions are welcoming the intruders. In 2025, the national AFT and the United Federation of Teachers in New York entered into a $23 million contract with Microsoft, Open AI and Anthropic. UFT President Michael Mulgrew claimed, “This initiative allows us to take control of AI in the education sphere and develop it for and by educators.” The initiative’s National Academy for AI Instruction tried to entice teachers by advertising less work and more efficiency. This message is Orwellian: “You’re not being controlled! You’re in control!” One year later, after pressure from rank-and-file, AFT President Randi Weingarten spoke with slightly more caution, admitting that “[r]esearch has established that less tech can produce better outcomes.” However, she maintained that AI “is here to stay,” so the best we can do is create a “balance” so that we can “harness the benefits of technology while mitigating the harms.”
Against this current, some teachers are already successfully organizing against the imposition of AI on their work. Led by a caucus of rank-and-file educators, a coalition of parents and educators are calling for a two-year moratorium on the use of AI in NYC public schools. The coalition packed a panel in May, extending the meeting to seven hours while 100 parents and educators spoke against the city’s spending on student-facing AI. In September NYCPS announced a one-year moratorium on student-facing AI in 2-K through 8 classrooms. Similarly, the teachers’ reform caucus in Portland, Red Caucus, organized with parents over the last year to resist AI in schools.Their efforts successfully resulted in the school board unanimously voting to not renew any generative AI contracts.
Our Role as Socialist Teachers
We all remember a teacher who took the time to walk us through a lesson when we struggled, or performed a demonstration of a scientific principle that left us agog. As socialist teachers, we must call for public schools that create gardens which allow young people to grow in knowledge, wisdom, and creativity. A diploma from a public institution ought not be reduced to a declaration that you can “compete in the marketplace” but a celebration of your intellectual perseverance and wonder. Skilled human teachers, not robots, are unequivocally vital to creating such a garden.
We can organize in our unions and alongside the families of our students to protect the classroom experience. Fighting for AI and data center moratoriums, protecting student and teacher data and privacy, and defending the integrity of our profession and communities are steps we can take in the immediate term as we organize for the long haul against the capitalist system that views schools as glorified jobs programs. To do so will take work, but it’s the kind of work that we have practiced day in and day out in the classroom: educating people and supporting them in taking on challenges. If we lead with our vision of human flourishing in public education, we can beat back the forces that seek to deskill our coworkers, our students and our society.
