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America's two largest school districts impose AI moratoriums
- sejje 11d agoThe good news is, this won't do anything to stop the kids.
- whateveracct 11d agoyeah AI companies are pretty vehemently set on making kids dumb & dependent on their products for life. a school district doesn't have the power or bankroll to oppose them. what arrogance lol
- jesse_dot_id 11d agoImagine saying this about a graphing calculator, because that is essentially what the LLM is for knowledge work. You can either be dumb and spell 8008135 or you can get an education and make it sing. They definitely want us dependent on their products for life, because that's what capitalism is, but dumb kids won't be the profitable ones.
- adamddev1 11d ago[dead]
- debo_ 11d agoWe were not allowed to have graphing calculators in elementary or highschool (90s), either.
- qwerpy 11d agoI was in school around that time and I always had a graphing calculator in class and most of the time in standardized tests, AP tests, etc. It was basically just math competitions that wouldn't allow it. The graphing functionality was almost never used for anything. But the multi-line display could be used for notes, which is why they were banned for competitions.
- debo_ 11d agoYeah, not us. If our calculators had more than one line or a suspicious number of buttons, it was disallowed in class.
- alpinisme 11d agoA graphing calculator for all knowledge work is just a(n artificial) brain. It’s not hard to see how offloading brain work to another brain makes your brain less powerful. I’m not saying you can’t be intelligent in a world of LLMs but people who use the calculator analogy underscore the fact that the LLM isn’t just eliminating the drudgery of one subdomain of mechanical problem solving — every problem is one an LLM can provide and answer for, including what you should learn, what problems you should solve, what your next conversation with the LLM should be about. So they do pose at least a threat of people truly offloading indefinite amounts of their own critical thinking to models, and there’s also danger that such people will in general still be competent enough often enough (due to LLM competence) that they are hard to screen out of key decision making roles or even from highly profitable roles.
- jesse_dot_id 11d agoI truly don't understand why people think LLMs eliminate the need for mastery, or that they limit thinking. I have a lot more time to think when I use a good harness. It handles the pointless toil and I handle the thinking. I'm just thinking about different things. Instead of trying to coax the correct answers from a search engine, the LLM is doing that for me and parsing the correct output, so I'm not spending hours upon hours wading through detritus. While it's doing that, I'm using that time to think more about the problems I'm solving, the UX, etc. I'm not sure what to tell you if you think the LLM solves for novel thinking.
- whateveracct 11d agoThe issue is at scale. A tragedy of the commons in a way. I have seen a situation where engineers can't write code by hand if challenged to. Not one. At scale (like the juniors got quizzed as an AI sanity check and couldn't hack it.)
- alpinisme 10d agoI don’t think it solves for novel thinking. I don’t think it will make better decisions than an informed and engaged human. But I don’t think there are any decisions a human is forced to make (unlike with a calculator) so people can offload any decision in particular, which is encourages, in aggregate, atrophying. And on top of that, you may find it increasingly difficult without extended time working with someone to identify them as the kind of person who has offloaded all important decisions in this way and just maintained the minimal awareness needed to keep sounding plausibly able.
- ToucanLoucan 11d ago> Imagine saying this about a graphing calculator, because that is essentially what the LLM is for knowledge work. A frankly hilarious statement given several key facts: * You don't get and in fact are usually barred from using a graphing calculator outside of coursework designed around it * Even when you DO use one, it is very often after years upon years of drawing graphs yourself. Analogous to LLMs even moreso than your core example, because to make use of an LLM in a way that is actually productive, you DO need to know what you're talking about with it, to suss out when it's made some bullshit up.
- bluefirebrand 11d ago> Imagine saying this about a graphing calculator, because that is essentially what the LLM is for knowledge work. Can you plot a graph from an equation by hand? If you can't, but you can use a graphing calculator to plot the graph then it seems like it has led to you not learning that skill. And being able to look at an equation and plot a graph in your head is pretty valuable imo
- johnnyanmac 11d agoYet there were times where I was not allowed to use a graphing calculator in school tests (mid 00's). Honestly. if you are completely reliant on a graphing calc in an AP calculus course, you're definitely not getting a 5 in the exam. There is a signifigant time pressure that does not allow for that.
- vlyan 11d agoyou people pretend to hold a rather romantic notion about what school education is. most kids are being educated by indifferent teachers, 40 kids at a time, with little to no opportunity to ask questions. LLMs are an incredible boon for self-education, second only to the Internet itself, being able to function as a tutor on every subject, and you're hand-wriggling about imaginary dangers of... what, exactly? I've seen the same moral panic during the commodification of Internet access in my country in mid 00's -- "students are going to cheat on their homework and become dumb!!1", blah-blah-blah-fart-blah. you only pretend to care about kids to push your politics.
- bluefirebrand 11d ago> most kids are being educated by indifferent teachers, 40 kids at a time, with little to no opportunity to ask question What absolute horseshit I have met a lot of teachers in my life and I don't think I have ever met one that was remotely indifferent to their students. Its not like they're getting into it for the money :/
- koof 11d ago> 40 kids at a time i wonder why that is. what kind of attitude towards the value of education would allow this. grok help me out here
- johnnyanmac 11d agoSo let's get this straight: we have many underpaid, overworked teachers who aren't given the resources needed for students to succeed. Our solution to this, in lieu of better educational budgets (and appropriations of said budget), is to rely on the rugged individualism of primary schoolers to be motivated to just learn content by themselves. This being driven by trillion dollar interests who have the budget but not the incentive nor drive to actually make sure students succeed. Meanwhile, private schools who have both budget and drive will teach kids who can afford it and teach them proper railguarding against such tools. Did I get your point of view correct?
- vlyan 11d agomy point of view is that "better educational budgets" is a fantasy and kids whose parents can't afford tutors -- the overwhelming majority of them -- are infinitely better off now, with LLMs being able to explain virtually anything much better than a textbook does. they are already better than most humans at it.
- sejje 11d agoJust saw this on Polymarket: JUST IN: El Salvador’s AI tutoring pilot in 171 public schools produced reading, math, & science results above the national average & comparable to Germany & Sweden.
- frizlab 11d ago“Good news” yeah…
- Aboutplants 11d agoThe job of the school is to teach and prepare the young children. If kids use things that could be dangerous outside of school, then that is the parents responsibility. Meanwhile, the school should do what they deem as most appropriate to ensure quality education.
- amelius 11d agoHow many kids below 16 do you know that smoke and drink alcohol? Clearly, laws have a not insignificant effect, even if you could easily ignore them.
- GPerson 11d agoIt is quite common outside of the US. Actually I think other places are generally better with binge drinking in the late teenage years, but one of the few ways America really did seem to have a lead over the rest of the world in personal health was that we were able to cut down on teen smoking for a while. Then vaping got invented and I’m sure it’s a huge problem again. But I agree laws have a huge effect.
- sejje 11d agoIt's their parents having significant effect, friend. Kids don't care about drinking laws.
- stein1946 11d agoDon't ban smoking, this won't do anything for those who want to smoke. Don't force seatbelts, those who don't want to wear are not going to Don't try to restrict $A, it's against personal freedom/liberty that us at $corporate love.
- toomuchtodo 11d agoAll rules have leakage, they don’t have to be perfect.
- Aboutplants 11d agoI’m sure there are really unique and great ways to utilize AI in the educational setting, however, young children should not be the Guinea pigs. Prove that certain things are beneficial, not just think they are, and then implement with oversight. People need to stop overthinking everything and just take one step at a time, evaluate and then take another step.
- alpinisme 11d ago> People need to stop overthinking everything If anything, it sounds like (you think that) they need to be more thoughtful and not just throw every new technology and technique at the kids and see if it works. I’m not trying to nitpick, but slow down, think, and measure before acting seems like clearer advice. Really what you are fighting is assuming that new technology is useful and just trying out various ad hoc ways to discover how to realize that usefulness.
- amelius 11d ago"overthinking" was the wrong word, clearly, yes.
- tcbawo 11d agoWho is the authoritative voice of reason for the effectiveness of any educational approach or tool? It takes years to sort things out and by then the approach of the day has moved on. Education is an area where everybody feels like they are an expert. In the US, we can't agree on the simplest things impacting our children.
- estearum 11d ago> It takes years to sort things out and by then the approach of the day has moved on. What? Good approaches, definitionally, have quite a lot of staying power. This is true in most fields but especially in education where, it turns out, we don't really figure out net new approaches that are much better than the last ones very frequently.
- nstents 11d ago[flagged]
- add-sub-mul-div 11d agoNobody who isn't already falling for the "promises" of AI is going to fall for word games like this.
- nstents 11d agoNow that's interesting. One reason I fear AI is exactly because of the relationship you call a word game.
- koof 11d agoone in five children in the united states lives in a food insecure household. that has more relevancy to the “need” here than whatever you’re suggesting
- nstents 11d agoI'm suggesting that AI fundamentally meets a tenet of Marxist dogma, and I'm surprised a Socialist mayor hasn't taken advantage of that fact.
- koof 11d agoi am suggesting that your interpretation of what a "need" is is wildly inaccurate
- nstents 11d agoI'd "need" to know what you see my interpretation of needs as being before I could answer better. But I'll give it a try without a dictionary. In its most fundamental sense, a need is a requirement for life to continue and reproduce. These requirements typically involve the abilities to compete, to obtain food, to have shelter, to mate and protect the young, etc. Isn't AI to serve needs? For example, the need to find bugs in software so somebody can compete economically and employees can meet their needs as described above? To buy food, shelter, raise children? Quite seriously, I think this is an important underpinning of why AI is advancing, and where it's taking us. The fact that it overlaps with Marx, at least to me, is a fascinating and incredible irony, because its success is an application of the very seductive message behind Marxism. I appreciate everyone's time in challenging this.
- amazingamazing 11d agoSpeaking of moratoriums, they also banned phone use. I am curious how that is going. No AI seems like it could be reasonable.
- spamizbad 11d agoNo quantitative improvements in test scores, but it seems to make kids socialize more: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/04/us/did-school-cellphone-bans-study.html https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/04/us/did-school-cellphone-b...
- toofy 11d agoi don’t mind this at all. tbh im fatigued of the general public being beta testers for companies.
- somewhereoutth 11d agoand I suppose the rest of us will have to wait until the grim laws of finance do their work before our own sweet release.
- whatsThisBtn4 11d agoBan calculators moment. In my master's they gave me anything I wanted, laptop, internet, whatever. Gave 2 stupid hard problems. That's the future.
- beej71 11d agoDon't need school for that. Just ask the LLM for two stupid hard problems and get the equivalent skills of anyone with an MS. Or maybe there was more to it?
- api 11d agoI use AI a lot and find it fascinating and probably the most exciting thing since discovering the web. I’m not sure I disagree with this. Schools need to figure out how to integrate it well in a way that both helps kids learn and teaches them how to use this new tool productively. I don’t think that’s been done yet. It’s not a bad idea to just keep it out until we figure it out, or there’s a risk of just slathering AI all over everything mindlessly. At the very least it could be a giant waste of money. Schools don’t need to be spending their often limited funds thrashing around or chasing fads. The ban should be lifted once educators figure out what to do with this stuff.
- beej71 11d agoIt's a very powerful learning tool that, when misused, lobotomizes students. Students who use it correctly > students who don't use it > students who use it incorrectly
- api 10d agoMuch better than my response, and why schools should keep it at a distance until they figure out how to teach the first thing.
- ChrisArchitect 11d agoRelated: New York City Bans A.I. in Elementary and Middle Schools https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49542443 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49542443
- theodpHN 11d agoLos Angeles Public School System Bans Most AI for Students https://slashdot.org/submission/17350511/los-angeles-public-school-system-bans-most-ai-for-students https://slashdot.org/submission/17350511/los-angeles-public-... The Los Angeles public school system will vastly restrict the use of AI at all grade levels, reported the NY Times and others. The news of the ban — which oddly had to be coaxed out of LAUSD employees (YouTube) at a meeting of the LAUSD School Board Generative AI Ad Hoc Committee — stunningly came as a complete surprise to both the LAUSD Board and K-12 AI usage protestors...
- fidla 10d agoit's fine, really. Kids need to be able to read, write and do arithmetic on their own without assistance from ai. But it's still available at home, obviously.