K-12 educators and students are increasingly already using artificial intelligence (AI) tools in schools to support teaching and learning. Yet the science is still out on how these tools impact students.
As the public grows increasingly skeptical of AI in schools, education systems and policies are trying to provide guardrails and guidance. The EDSAFE AI Alliance is a coalition of organizations, which includes KnowledgeWorks as a steering committee member, committed to achieving equitable outcomes for learners in this AI era.
The Alliance has created many tools that offer a starting point for thinking about AI literacy, practices and policy in schools, districts and states.
The Alliance builds much of its work around its SAFE benchmarks framework. This framework establishes a policy process and roadmap that addresses important issues when creating an AI ecosystem in the education space. The framework’s pillars are:
- Safety: Ensuring edtech users can be active in a digital environment that priorities protecting their data and privacy
- Accountability: Creating collaborative benchmarks that foster both accountability and integration of existing policies into its existing structures
- Fairness and Transparency: AI must achieve ethical, unbiased and equitable learning opportunities through transparency in how products, data and experiences are used
- Efficacy: Ensuring that AI is inclusive and equitable in how it is deployed and that it provides insightful feedback to educators and learners on user progress
AI in education requires a deliberate building of infrastructure to support its safe and appropriate use. The Case for Public Infrastructure considers how to use the SAFE framework to build a public infrastructure for AI in education around research and development, modern and sector-specific testing and evaluation infrastructure and scalable data and computing resources. AI has great potential to increase personalization in our schools, and this report’s recommendations can help anyone wondering how to systematically implement AI for education.
Students need to understand AI, what it is and how to use it. The Blueprint for Action: Comprehensive AI Literacy for All calls for treating AI literacy as a foundation for our collective future and provides guidance and practical considerations for adopting it across the education sector. In the context of personalized, competency-based learning that calls for all students to have the supports they need to find academic success, AI literacy will play a crucial role in making this a reality.
Rebuilding American Civics for a Digital Republic focuses broadly on leveraging AI through state policy mechanisms to enhance civics education. With the context of personalized, competency-based learning, it gets deep into the weeds of how AI can help students personalize their education to broadly strengthen their communities.
AI is reshaping the workforce today and seems destined to continue to do so as we move into the future. Powering Workforce Resilience in the Age of AI: The Case for Americorps, developed in partnership with AmeriCorps, focuses on the value of that organization in the context of a broader shift to AI in the workplace. While the report itself centers on Americorps, it also highlights the continued value of durable skills found in portraits of a graduate in an era of rapidly evolving AI capabilities.
AI companions, or chatbots, are becoming increasingly popular both as individual companions and education uses such as tutoring. These chatbots, often built around systems with consumers rather than students at the center, must be critically examined to ensure they are safe and appropriate for use in education contexts. SAFE by Design provides a deep dive into this issue and concludes with some recommendations for a future research agenda.
