Education Week: Teacher AI Use Hasn’t Budged in a Year

Here’s why and why not.

In December 2023, Education Week found low uptake of AI tools among teachers. Just 2% of teachers said “I use them a lot” and 37% of teachers said “I have never used them and don’t plan to start.” If you wanted reasons for optimism, you might note that 33% of teachers in that survey said they were using AI tools a little, some, or a lot.

When I wrote about those findings, I heard from AI boosters that a) well, we just need better AI models, b) well, teachers just need more training, c) well, the technology is still new to most people.

Well, a year later, we have seen the release of new AI models from Meta, Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google, models which improve significantly on their predecessors. And according to Education Week’s newest poll, “43% of teachers said they have received at least one training session on AI,” an increase of nearly 50% from their previous survey.

Time, technology, and training. I was told these were the three major headwinds on AI adoption among teachers and we have made significant progress on each. So let me just take a big sip of coffee and check the latest Education Week poll and review what must be significant increases in AI usage:

Let’s put it plainly: the usage numbers haven’t budged in a year.

In spite of the release of more sophisticated AI models, in spite of increased training in AI, in spite of a summer to slow down, regroup, and take an undistracted look at this new technology, Education Week found that teachers are using AI at lower rates in October 2024 than in December 2023—from 33% to 32%.

What doesn’t explain this lack of usage?

Over on LinkedIn, the people who offer edtech training for schools and districts have attributed the low usage here to the need for … more edtech training for schools and districts, which by the way they offer.

But the share of teachers who said they weren’t using AI for lack of AI training decreased over the last year. 43% of America’s teachers have received training on AI in just two years, a massive and rapid rollout by the standard of schools and districts. America’s edtech consultants have received what can only be described as a Great Society-style welfare program. And yet AI usage has decreased.

What does explain the lack of usage?

There was only one reason for not using AI that increased from December 2023 to October 2024.

6% more teachers said they don’t think the technology is applicable to their subject matter or grade. 

Many more teachers have learned about AI over the last year and, among the ones who don’t use it, more of them are saying “because it ain’t for me.” I would devour an interview with every one of those teachers right now, and if you build tools for teachers, I hope you would as well.

The opportunity.

Edtech needs many more people to obsess over three questions.

• What do teachers and students need now?

• What can technology do to meet those needs now, not in some hypothetical future where multi-modal, empathetic, humanoid AI robots facilitate discussions among groups of students without any hallucinations?

• What can’t technology do to meet those needs?

We should use AI as a provocation to understand more deeply the complex, social, and cognitive work of teaching and learning. Right now, too many people are too dismissive of those questions and too settled on their answers. They are wasting this opportunity.

Featured Comment

SteveB, modeling democracy in his classroom :

I teach a Quantitative Reasoning class using Carnegie's Quantway College curriculum. Up on the screen I've got a google doc of the questions in the lesson, large font, one question per page. Students work in groups, I drop in and ask a student to tell me about their work, often I'll say "I like how you put that, could you please add that to the doc?" And then they go up to the front of the class and type in what they said. Or I might say, "I like how you included the units in your answer, be sure you do that when you put this into the doc" and they go up and do that.

And it's a small class, so I do my best to remember the name of each student who contributed, and to use their names when we get to whole-class discussion, "Now let's compare Jesse's graph with the equation that Gabrielle gave us." But I want to say each student's name to the class at least once, and be aware when I fall short of that.

Odds & Ends

¶ MagicSchool, I am begging you not to be sleazy. In a recent blog post, MagicSchool describes Aurora Public Schools and their “28% improvement in students meeting grade level expectations for literacy using MagicSchool,” strongly implying those results accrued to all 38,000 Aurora Public School students. If you watch the attached video, however, it becomes a little clearer that the results were only in one class taught by one teacher. Of course, there was zero attempt to control for the effect of MagicSchool in that one teacher’s class, but I’m unbothered by an n = 1 case study so long as it’s explicitly named as such, which it really isn’t here.

¶ "An AI tutor for every kid": Promise and reality. A good summary of the state of AI edtech from Axios.

Torney told Axios that there was a lot of enthusiasm in the mid-2010s, with people talking about "blended learning, hybrid learning, voice and choice in the curriculum, personalized pathways, and student-centered instruction."

Those promises haven't panned out, Torney says. "Some people have argued that the last technology that was adopted at scale in the American education system was the chalkboard."

¶ Here is a thread from Michael Pershan saying things about AI that I largely agree with.

¶ EdSurge interviews Spokane, WA, school staff about their smartphone ban. Key quote:

“We absolutely have lost some power of the opportunity that those devices provide, whether that's, ‘I can really quickly look something up,’ or ‘I can quickly participate in a class poll’ or ‘I can tune my music instrument,’” [Superintendent Adam Swinyard] told EdSurge. “But I think where we landed in our community, for our schools and for our kids, is what we gain in their level of engagement and ability to focus far outweighs what we're losing in a device being a powerful pedagogical tool inside of the classroom. But I think it's important to acknowledge.”

I’m very interested in coverage of local and statewide bans on cell phone usage. It feels like classroom technology needs to bring much more value to students and teachers now than it did pre-COVID.

¶ Noah Mackert in “What People Are For,” a thoughtful post about teaching and AI that’s old to the world but new to me:

I would much rather join the enthusiasm. It is a marvel that ChatGPT and other programs can even begin to answer the questions we ask. Every accurate or even nearly-accurate answer should thrill us. The visuals and films are astounding, too, though derivative, as a rule. And the new, more interactive programs are only going to become more sophisticated. 

But when it comes to the kind of tutoring that can change a student’s trajectory, the technology is not there. The theory of those boosting AI-based tutors is that what students need, above all, is easier access to knowledge. That is certainly a useful thing to have. But in my experience, when tutoring is really needed, it is because there are obstacles in the way of learning that current AI-driven programs still cannot perceive, much less alleviate.

¶ AI is Evolving, but Teacher Prep is Lagging: A First Look at Teacher Preparation Program Responses to AI. I resent the edtech industry for making me defend teacher preparation programs, which, yes, often focus on theoretical knowledge at the expense of the practical and, yes, often lag in their adoption of new technologies. But when I hear that teacher preparation programs are not spending their extremely limited syllabi teaching their preservice teachers about technology that is, as of now, unproven and not particularly desired by inservice teachers, I say: good.