Kudos to the City Council for listening to parents’ concerns and derailing the Department of Education’s brainless guidance on AI in schools. 

The DOE announced it’s halting distribution of its artificial intelligence guidance after a fiery joint hearing before the Education and Technology committees.

“The simple fact that these tools are being rolled out without a real plan is egregious,” thundered Education chair Eric Dinowitz.

For months, parents complained that the draft AI guidance is confusing and even contradictory as to how teachers and students should use the tech. 

Other parents want a two-year “moratorium” on using AI in public schools, righty fearing the tech’s impact on students’ creativity and critical thinking skills, not to mention all the high-profile allegations that chatbots convinced kids to kill others or themselves.

The Parent Coalition for Student Privacy also slammed the DOE’s failure to disclose when AI is used and which AI products can be used.

Dinowitz told The Post that he’s especially annoyed that AI products are “certainly being used by individual schools outside of the districts” that DOE officials testified [under oath] to.

DOE officials say they’ll still release the AI guidance this summer, but what’s the rush? 

Maybe some top educrat needs to earn a private payment from some vendor; maybe the DOE braintrust thinks they can somehow win national prestige for “doing AI right.”

Except that this is an agency that begins every school year failing to get its buses running on time and on the right routes, one that’s still addicted to Chromebooks when the kids need to work with pencil and paper to learn basic skills.

Sorry: The DOE should just wait for someone else to get it right, and copy that.

Chancellor Kamar Samuels should go for a two-year moratorium on any AI in the schools (with waivers possible for particular, careful experiments by top-notch teachers).

No one should trust the bureaucracy that can’t manage to deliver basic literacy and numeracy in city schools to figure out “future tech.”

The DOE needs to stop pretending it knows what it’s doing.