At a recent event in San Antonio, about 50 educators received a three-hour crash course in AI, organized by the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and largely funded by Big Tech. An Associated Press report from Monday about the seminar sheds some light on what it’s like when AI companies fund an effort to help more teachers AI-generate their lesson plans.
“We all know, when we talk about AI, teachers say, ‘Nah, I’m not doing that,’” Kathleen Torregrossa, a person described as a “trainer” said to the group as part of her introduction, according to the AP. “But we are preparing kids for the future. That is our primary job. And AI, like it or not, is part of our world,” Torregrossa added.
According to a September Gallup poll, 60% of K-12 teachers have already used AI in their work.
Increasingly, parents appear to not want this. One poll over the summer found that support among parents for AI-generated lesson plans has fallen from 62% in 2024 to 49% this year. Another recent study looked at some of the lesson plans themselves and found them academically substandard according to the two benchmarks the researchers used.
The San Antonio seminar is part of a program launched back in July by the AFT in conjunction with a bunch of tech companies. The funding for the program includes $8 million in cash and $2 million in resources from OpenAI, $12.5 million over five years from Microsoft, and $500,000 from Anthropic, according to the AP.
All that money and gear is supposed to go toward a dedicated campus in New York City where AI training for teachers will be conducted online and in person, with the five-year goal of providing AI lessons to 400,000 teachers. That’s almost a quarter of the membership of the AFT, according to its website.
The familiar ChatGPT, Gemini, and Microsoft CoPilot were all used at the recent event to generate lesson plans, along with Khan Academy’s Khanmingo and something called “Colorín Colorado.”
One first grade teacher apparently kept using the words “amazing,” and remarked, “It can save you so much time,” according to AP’s Jocelyn Gecker. The teacher said she plans to use AI to make illustrated flashcards, and told Gecker “you have to compete against, the kids are always saying, ‘I’m bored.’ Everything is boring.”
Another teacher said she plans to prompt the AI tools to create storybooks with the names of her students as the characters, and that she wants to have a chatbot create new versions of difficult class texts, ostensibly optimized for different reading levels.
Gizmodo reached out to the AFT to ask for a statement in response to parental concerns and the possibility of degraded lesson plan quality. A spokesman, James Hill, pointed us to statements of caution and concern in three past publications by the AFT: one press release about the start of the program back in July of this year, and one from last year about the release of an AFT document called “Commonsense Guardrails for Using Advanced Technology in Schools.” The third appears to be a proposed newspaper column along similar lines.
Hill also mentioned in his email that “students’ privacy and security are the #1 priority.”
All three documents he provided drive at a similar point encapsulated by the following quote from AFT president Randi Weingarten included in the July press release: “The direct connection between a teacher and their kids can never be replaced by new technologies, but if we learn how to harness it, set commonsense guardrails and put teachers in the driver’s seat, teaching and learning can be enhanced.”
But even if AI is “harnessed,” guardrails are put in place, and teachers are in control, learning may still not be enhanced—and could be hindered for all anyone knows.
Gizmodo posed this possibility to the AFT and will update if we hear back.
