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A planned AI-focused high school is being put on ice after widespread backlash, The New York Times reports.
Originally set to open in Manhattan at the start of the next academic year, the New York City schools chancellor Kamar Samuels said he was withdrawing the proposal for the Next Generation Technology High School, which was scheduled for a vote on Wednesday, along with proposals for several other schools that were also met with criticism.
Parents have railed against the Next Gen school, fearing that it would be forcing unproven tech onto students. The long-term cognitive effects of AI, not to mention its efficacy as a teaching tool, are still largely unknown, but research into the tech’s short term impact is grim: various studies have linked it to short term memory loss, and found it atrophies critical thinking. Teachers and professors tend to agree.
Samuels responded to the uproar by directing the city’s education department to draft guidelines on AI use in the classroom. But the resulting AI “playbook” was criticized for dodging key issues, and did little to appease concerned parties.
A crowd of parents, teachers, and high schoolers gathered outside City Hall earlier this month to implore Mayor Mamdani to go over his schools chancellor Samuels and impose a two-year moratorium on using AI in the classroom. Mamdani hasn’t indicated interest in the idea, but the anti-AI sentiment is clear.
“The intense outrage among parents in New York City is as great as I’ve seen it on any education issue that I’ve been working on for 25 years,” Leonie Haimson, an education advocate in New York City and member of the Coalition for an AI Moratorium, told the NYT.
Gregory Faulkner, charmain of the panel that was set to vote on the school proposal, said that the vast majority of the emails he received from parents were critical of the AI school. Had it gone to a vote, he believed that no one would have voted in favor of it.
“If there’s anything that even has a hint of AI, there’s strong opposition to it,” Faulkner told the NYT. “People are very nervous about the technology and how it is going to be used.”
The Next Gen school, which would’ve opened in Manhattan’s financial district, also drew concerns over equity. As a selective school, it would admit students based on their grades, a process that’s been accused of exacerbating segregation. “Poor kids and kids of color wind up in one school system, and wealthy and privileged wind up in another,” Faulner told the NYT.
That, paired with the fact that it was located in a wealthy part of the city, seemingly clashed with the school’s ostensible mission of preparing children for an AI-dominated world. “If they’re talking about this technology really being something that is going to become more global… why would we be exclusive in who can have access?” Faulkner added, as quoted by Chalkbeat.
The AI-focused high school isn’t completely dead yet. In the future, Samuels intends to revisit the proposals, which also involve closing and relocating several school locations on the Upper West Side.