Chris Mills Rodrigo / Aug 31, 2026Chris Mills Rodrigo is a fellow at Tech Policy Press.
As students and teachers return to elementary, middle, and high schools in the United States over the next month, they are unlikely to find consistent, clear rules about what kind of artificial intelligence-powered programs they can use to help complete or deliver their coursework.
The rapid rise of AI for generating text and images—paired with the natural desire of most kids to get homework done as fast as possible—has left teachers and school administrators scrambling to develop policies for how the technology should be integrated into education.
Ahead of the 2026-27 academic year, many school districts have adopted a cautionary approach to the technology, establishing guardrails and promoting AI education but shying away from specific, system-wide rules about which programs can be used, delegating in-classroom decisions to individual teachers and leaving at-home use largely untouched.
Others have failed to approve any guidelines at all.
The aversion to setting explicit rules on AI products is leaving teachers in the lurch. Sixty percent of educators said that their districts’ policies were unclear in one 2025 survey. Just 18 percent of teachers reported getting any kind of formal guidance from school administrators on how AI tools should be used in a Gallup poll from earlier this year.
Opaque direction appears to be trickling down to students. While seven in 10 teenagers use AI for their schoolwork according to a recent Common Sense Media survey, less than a third have discussed what AI is and how it works with a teacher in class. Just 44 percent reported receiving guidance on when it should or should not be used for coursework.
A focus on AI literacy
Chicago Public Schools, the nation’s third-largest district, released what it calls a guidebook on generative AI in 2024 that includes principles for integrating the technology into classrooms including transparency and accessibility.
The document, which has been updated several times since release, places a major emphasis on understanding what AI is and how it works, and the district has integrated AI literacy into its K-12 curriculum.
Students are encouraged to use approved AI tools as a “co-pilot” and to always double-check their output. CPS maintains a list of approved educational technologies that contains AI-powered tools, but notably does not include popular systems like ChatGPT and Claude. The guidebook does, however, include age restriction information provided by those platforms and others like Gemini and Perplexity.
CPS’s current AI policies have received some criticism for not being restrictive enough. One parent group dubbed Illinois Families for Public Schools has successfully secured commitments from half of the candidates on the ballot for Chicago School Board this fall to further limit AI use in the school district if elected. The pledge includes enacting a three-year moratorium on generative AI use, screen time restrictions, and the appointment of a chief privacy office.
The nation’s ninth largest school district, Houston Independent School District, also released a guidebook on AI in 2024.
Alongside outlining principles for interactions with AI like prioritizing learning and ensuring academic integrity, the guidebook says students under 14 years old can learn about generative AI and use pre-approved tools as part of classroom assignments while supervised by a staff member, while those above that age can access approved AI tools with parental consent and permission from their teacher.
The guidance emphasizes AI literacy, saying that the goal of the document is to help students “understand what Generative AI is and is not, its opportunities and limitations, and ways to apply the tools judiciously to augment their own knowledge, creativity, and problem-solving abilities in their studies.”
Houston ISD has partnered with OpenAI to give students and teachers access to an education-focused version of ChatGPT called ChatGPT Edu. The district also embraced AI by making nine campuses “Future 2” schools with new programming aimed at preparing students for an “AI-enabled world.” Up to 100 schools in the district are reportedly set to adopt that model by July 2031.
Chicago and Houston have something in common—both consulted with the New York-based company AI for Education while developing their guidebooks.
AI for Education has helped over 40 districts across the country develop generative AI guidelines, CEO Amanda Bickerstaff told Tech Policy Press.
The organization encourages districts to adopt guidelines that both include rules on the limits of acceptable use and stress student education about how generative AI actually works.
“Every day, it just becomes clearer to me that AI literacy cannot be done well without guardrails, and guardrails cannot be done well without AI literacy,” Bickerstaff said. “Literacy must go hand in hand because the technology is too new. It works too differently than how you think it does, and it is too disruptive to be able to just come out with one or the other.”
Another district where that model has been deployed in partnership with AI for Education is Charleston County, a South Carolina school district with nearly 50,000 students.
The school district developed and adopted an AI policy over the last two years based on what it calls a S.E.E. framework. Before using a tool, the district wants students to ask themselves: Is it safe? Is it ethical? And, is it effective?
This policy has then been used to make practical decisions over what technologies should be allowed in schools and who should have access to them.
Guidelines “empower the school system to then act towards a common goal, which for us is to integrate generative AI into the system appropriately,” deputy superintendent Luke Clamp told Tech Policy Press.
Going into this academic year, teachers in the district will have access to MagicSchool, an AI-powered tool designed to help with lesson planning and creating classroom activities. Students may get access to the program down the line as well.
“We don't see this tool, [or] any other tool, to be a replacement for an in-person instructor in the classroom,” Clamp stressed.
Charleston has also focused on AI literacy for educators, which will then be passed on to students. Many of its teachers joined professional development sessions organized by AI for Education this summer, while others participated in an AI course at Clemson University. The district recently launched a resource hub on its website with more information for teachers, students, and parents.
The attention paid by the school district to AI comes from a belief that the technology will transform education and the workplace, and that if students are not taught about how to use it they will lag behind others.
“We did not want to be behind the eight ball, if you will, on how we integrate with it,” Clamp said.
Confusion dominates
Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), which serves over half a million students, released AI guidelines for educators and students in April of 2024 requiring that tools be screened by the district for data privacy issues and that educators get parental consent for specific apps.
Alongside those guidelines, LAUSD launched a proprietary chatbot named “Ed” before shutting it down three months later. In February, Superintendent Alberto Carvalho had his home raided by the FBI, reportedly in relation to his connection to the company behind the $3 million chatbot.
The district has seemingly made updates to its AI policies since the 2024 guidelines were released. As of a Los Angeles Times report in September of 2025, students under 13 were barred from using the technology in the classroom and those above that age were required to sign a responsible use policy, although those rules do not seem to be publicized on the district’s site.
And then in June of 2026, LAUSD banned screen time before second grade and instituted restrictions for older students that will gradually be rolled out this year and next. While not directly related to AI, this new policy will affect its use—and includes a review of the district’s contracts for classroom technology.
At Miami-Dade County Public schools, the third largest district in the country, the situation is even more hazy. The school board approved a measure directing the superintendent to develop guidance for AI in schools “including a tiered framework teachers can apply to classroom tasks and assignments,” in August of 2025. No such rules appear to have been released, at least publicly. In the interim, though, the district partnered with Google to offer Gemini to the district’s high school students and teachers.
North of Miami on the I-95 interstate highway, Orange County Public Schools—the eighth largest district in the nation, boasting over 200,000 students—released an AI policy this summer allowing students to use the technology for research but restricting them from submitting graded assignments produced by it. The district places responsibility for developing guidelines on how AI should be used in the classroom to teachers.
“It’s like building a plane while we’re flying,” admitted Orange County District 2 School Board Member Maria Salamanca at the school board meeting where the policy was approved. “It’s moving so quickly, and I think that this board, above all else, mostly cares about safety and guardrails.”
Could AI bans be coming?
As public opinion shifts against AI—typified by widespread opposition to data centers—there appears to be growing pushback to integration of generative AI into K-12 schools.
The New York City Department of Education released a draft policy on generative AI in March that hit on many of the same notes as the guidelines covered earlier in this piece—setting green, yellow, and red light designations for implementations of the technology but largely leaving student use up to individual teachers.
The proposal was almost immediately met with strong backlash: hundreds of parents testified against it, city councilors signed a letter saying it did not go far enough, and teachers organized for a moratorium.
The city’s education department said it was pressing on new guidance for the time being, and has yet to release updated rules with students set to return to classrooms imminently.
Momentum for moratoriums on AI in schools has been building. The organization FairPlay recently released a letter signed by over 200 organizations and experts calling for a five-year hold on AI citing risks to learning and mental health. The Brookings Institute also released a report concluding that “at this point in its trajectory, the risks of utilizing generative AI in children’s education overshadow its benefits.”
A handful of school districts have heeded that call, at least partially.
The Katy Independent School District outside of Houston announced in July that it was banning generative AI tools for K-6 students. The Haddonfield School District in New Jersey barred their use for K-2 earlier this month.
What about other regulators?
School districts aren’t the only bodies trying to set rules around generative AI in education.
Thirty-five states have adopted official guidance or policies on AI in classrooms. A smaller subset of those actually require schools to adopt specific policies.
The majority of these state rules look a lot like what districts have been developing independently: guardrails on AI use, a focus on technology literacy for students and teachers, and an emphasis on the role it will play in future workplaces. Some of these state frameworks have proven difficult for districts to adhere to.
The Center for Democracy and Technology has called for states to take on a greater role in the integration of AI into education, pushing them to focus on risks around data privacy and harmful use cases, restrictions on vendors, and greater transparency around technology that is allowed in class.
The federal government has also weighed in with the 2025 executive order on “Advancing Artificial Intelligence Education for American Youth,” which allocates resources for AI literacy training for teachers, creates a task force dedicated to AI in education, and directs the National Science Foundation to prioritize training initiatives that expand AI use.
A laundry list of technology firms—including Google, NVIDIA, and xAI—committed to providing resources for youth training on AI under the executive order.