AI has rapidly infiltrated schools since its beginning and has drastically changed the way students learn, how teachers teach and many other things within the school system. There are many positives and negatives to the introduction of AI into school. Some positives are that students can use it to help them with topics they did not fully understand in class and that teachers can save time using it to plan lectures and assignments.
However if a student gets carried away while using AI, this is where a problem appears. They could start using it for their assignments and projects. This transitions into a problem where instead of learning while using AI, they let AI do all the work for them. The result is that the student starts learning less and less as they rely on AI to do all of the work.
The same risk exists on the teacher’s side. If a teacher starts relying on AI too heavily because of the time it saves, they might use it to build an entire lesson from scratch. This can strip away the personal connection between a teacher and student, and a disengaged lecture often means a disengaged classroom.
The fact is that not all schools are the same so there is no possible one solution for this problem. Each school has their own policies on AI. Schools with different resources can use AI in different ways because one school might not have the same amount of technology as the other.
This creates a dilemma within the government if they completely take away or restrict AI, which can hinder schools who were using AI in a well-mannered fashion and were thriving with it. While restricting AI is good for schools that have a lot of students who use it to do their work, it may be too much work to do for every school in the United States.
A 2026 survey by Instructure tells us that 33% of educators and 30% of parents said they favor restricting AI use, while at the same time the respondents ranked teaching responsible AI use and developing AI literacy skills as the highest priorities in their expectations for schools. However, developing AI literacy skills could become a negative. Just because a student learns how to use AI without it being considered cheating doesn’t mean they will, they might start to use it more as they progressively learn more about it.
That raises a related question: who’s actually qualified to teach it? Many teachers are learning how to use AI at the same pace or even slower than their students. If one of these teachers uses it, the students could end up learning barely anything, making it a waste of their time. That gap is what makes AI literacy so hard to teach well.
Using AI can negatively impact students’ skills such as writing and critical thinking through something called cognitive offloading: the practice of delegating mental effort and decision-making to technology. While AI can help with retrieving information, many people use it to write everything they need. This over-reliance causes their ability to evaluate and find new information to decrease.
Another way AI can negatively impact students is by stripping away their creativity. If a student uses AI for a project — meaning the AI comes up with the idea and the presentation — and AI repeats the same patterns, it usually suggests the most common idea instead of an original one. If a student leans on it for ideation, it runs the risk of becoming flat. Since the student will see these repeating patterns, for any project, their brain will turn to almost an exact replica of what the AI gave them.
What all of this points to is that the effect of AI on schools isn’t fixed, it’s still growing larger every day and the effects of it are caused by many different things such as how it’s used, who’s teaching it and whether a school has the time and resources to be able to use it well. What makes AI so unpredictable is that it can help one student understand a concept while helping another student skip it entirely. Until schools figure out how to properly use AI, the forms of impact will keep multiplying.
