New York City bans generative AI for elementary and middle school students

[midian182]

What we know so far: New York City has introduced a way to prevent elementary and middle school students from relying on AI – they'll be banned from using it during the upcoming school year. Officials want to limit classroom dependence on generative tools and encourage children to develop their own critical-thinking and problem-solving skills.

New York City's policy is a one-year moratorium for the 2026-2027 school year, rather than being a permanent or statewide ban. Students in public schools from preschool through eighth grade cannot use student-facing generative AI.

High school students, meanwhile, can use only approved tools in supervised pilot or career-readiness programs, and all high schoolers will receive twice-yearly basic AI-literacy lessons. AI companion chatbots are banned across every grade.

The policy also limits individual screen time for younger students: 45 minutes in class for middle schoolers, and 30 minutes for elementary school students. There are exceptions for accessibility tools, assessments, remote learning, and approved activities such as coding and robotics.

Teachers are also affected by the new rules. They may use approved AI for planning but not for grading, behavior monitoring, or important decisions about students.

A coalition will review the policy and pilots and issue recommendations in April 2027, which will help determine what happens the following school year.

"We're putting guardrails in place to protect the critical human connection, curiosity, and creativity that helps children grow," Schools Chancellor Kamar Samuels said in a statement.

"Each day when our children come to school, we teach them to ask questions, to challenge assumptions, to interrogate the premise, to ask why. When it comes to AI in our schools, we hold an obligation to do the same," said Mayor Zohran Mamdani.

This isn't the first time that New York has banned AI from its public schools. At the start of 2023, ChatGPT was prohibited from use by students, but the restriction was later reversed after officials concluded that the initial response had focused too heavily on risks such as cheating, inaccurate information, and weakened critical-thinking skills.

The Los Angeles school district is also temporarily blocking access to generative AI tools on student devices across all grades.

Fears of the effect that overuse and overreliance on AI could have on young minds in education have been growing since the technology became prevalent. Studies have suggested that unsupervised or answer-giving AI can weaken independent learning and create emotional or trust-related risks.

Cheating by students is a major fear, especially among older kids; it was considered endemic even back in August 2024. There have been several attempts to try and tackle the problem, from handwritten work, oral tests, and even AI to come up with questions that would be difficult for students to complete by simply feeding them into a large language model. There was also one professor's invisible prompt trap, which proved very effective.

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New York City bans generative AI for elementary and middle school students

 

[Megalomaniac]

Google classroom has Gemini built right into it

Gemini allows a teacher to make a multiple choice test/quiz on the spot within seconds.

Google classroom allows that teacher to disseminate those quizzes digitally across laptop computers in the classroom and allows the students to submit answers while allowing the teacher to grade hundreds, if not thousands of quizzes in mere seconds.

While using AI to grade written responses is probably a bad idea, the simple fact is the teachers are not going to give up using systems like Gemini.

The New York City Department of Education added an AI system to its network, and most of the teachers don’t use it. The few teachers who do use it get singled out and showcased because the administration wants to see how they are making use of what the city is paying for.

As for these children: you really think that you can tell these kids not to use AI programs and that they’re going to actually do it?

Well, I have an empty sugar cookie jar. to show you. We told the kids not to eat out of it, but they did.

When I was a kid in the 80s, there was nothing else to do but read. That’s why we were such good readers. Many of us became good writers. Now the children don’t want to read or write.

I find it so amazing that these morons on the news keep asking if there are ways to teach children about historical events such as 911, whose anniversary is coming up. Guess what, morons: show them a movie about it!!!

But we are in a situation where the kids can’t even sit still for a movie.

Where they end up learning about these events is TikTok and shorts, which can capture their imagination and attention for 30 seconds at a time. The AI generated shorts are the worst.

 

[psycros]

"At the start of 2023, ChatGPT was prohibited from use by students, but the restriction was later reversed after officials concluded that the initial response had focused too heavily on risks such as cheating, inaccurate information, and weakened critical-thinking skills."

How is it possible to focus too MUCH on these pitfalls? AI is being positioned to think for society and become the ONLY authoritative source. Orwell couldn't have dreamed this up during his worst three-day bender.

 

[wiyosaya]

I agree with NYC.

IMO, students and teachers should learn how to think for themselves.

 

[ScottSoapbox]

Good policy. Young kids need to learn critical thinking above all.

And teachers shouldn’t grade with AI. Generating new examples and quizzes for class is a good use of AI.

 

[Puiu]

Google classroom has Gemini built right into it

Gemini allows a teacher to make a multiple choice test/quiz on the spot within seconds.

Google classroom allows that teacher to disseminate those quizzes digitally across laptop computers in the classroom and allows the students to submit answers while allowing the teacher to grade hundreds, if not thousands of quizzes in mere seconds.

While using AI to grade written responses is probably a bad idea, the simple fact is the teachers are not going to give up using systems like Gemini.

The New York City Department of Education added an AI system to its network, and most of the teachers don’t use it. The few teachers who do use it get singled out and showcased because the administration wants to see how they are making use of what the city is paying for.

As for these children: you really think that you can tell these kids not to use AI programs and that they’re going to actually do it?

Well, I have an empty sugar cookie jar. to show you. We told the kids not to eat out of it, but they did.

When I was a kid in the 80s, there was nothing else to do but read. That’s why we were such good readers. Many of us became good writers. Now the children don’t want to read or write.

I find it so amazing that these morons on the news keep asking if there are ways to teach children about historical events such as 911, whose anniversary is coming up. Guess what, morons: show them a movie about it!!!

But we are in a situation where the kids can’t even sit still for a movie.

Where they end up learning about these events is TikTok and shorts, which can capture their imagination and attention for 30 seconds at a time. The AI generated shorts are the worst.

They aren't banning teaches from using AI altogether, just for the important parts like grading.

Banning AI in schools, especially middle and lower is the right thing to do. They should go further and take phones away from the children during school and let them use them only during a break or two.

This isn't about eating some cookies behind the backs of our parents, it's a personality and intelligence growth disaster that needs to be addressed. Kids are literally getting their brains fried and unfortunately parents aren't any better... Something has to be done.

 

[toooooot]

I think it is not enough. What I am talking about is homework and millions of parents who do not give a crap what they children do. Which means homework for many could become useless with a few minute search and right way to complete the tasks.

It calls for new ways to do homework too, or possibly changing to a different way schools work.

 

[acrossthestars]

We're putting guardrails in place to protect the critical human connection, curiosity, and creativity that helps children grow

Too little too late. Should have done that before all of this craziness occurred, but I suppose we can't expect sanity from people in a state that recently elected a Communist to the highest office in the NYC land.

Fears of the effect that overuse and overreliance on AI could have on young minds in education have been growing since the technology became prevalent. Studies have suggested that unsupervised or answer-giving AI can weaken independent learning and create emotional or trust-related risks.

This makes it sound like people are/were being irrationally paranoid about the very real and very obvious problem of offloading the bulk of your mental faculties and basic cognitive functions to a machine, built by a company with a for-profit incentive. It's not paranoia, it's just common sense. Hell, most adults can't even use this technology responsibly, because they haven't developed the mental faculties themselves; we just give them the benefit of the doubt, on the basis that "because they're older, they are somehow more learned in the ways and means by which one goes about something."

Which is to say, we have convinced ourselves that older people are somehow immune to the same "think on my behalf" reasoning as children, since they―in theory―had to go longer in life without someone doing it for them. But that's only true, insofar as the option isn't or wasn't available. As soon as it is, you best believe that most people will do the easy thing and let AI think for them. It's already happening.

The other half of the story is that our society, maybe civilization itself, is predominantly people-centric, which is to say, it is not built to accommodate a large majority of the population suddenly no longer working and instead having AI do everything. Furthermore, our economy has no control mechanism for this. It doesn't treat AI like a large quantity of unpaid labor that simply assists human workers; it treats AI like each agent is an individual, taxpaying worker and all of the unemployed people are tax burdens. Which has the effect of making people the financial liability, completely inverting the value proposition pyramid.

Whether or not Silicon Valley understands this or even cares, doesn't matter. What does matter is that our system doesn't make a distinction in the labor market between "meatbags which require sustenance and sleep" and "machines that don't". The only thing the spreadsheet tracks is "is the line going up?" and by extension, "which employee is making the line go up", not "is the employee making the line go up human?"