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When high school librarian Tara Donnelly talks to her classes about how AI has changed online search, she always starts with one question: “What is Google’s main goal?”
Students generally reply, “give you information,” or “tell you the answers to things” — until someone hits the nail on the head and ventures, “Make money.”
Donnelly, a member of the AI working group in the Chicago Teachers Union, says Google is one of many tech companies that are centrally motivated by profit, despite purporting to serve other aims. As AI developers like Microsoft and OpenAI push to integrate their products into U.S. schools and pupils’ lives more broadly, Donnelly said she believes that students are entitled to a clear understanding of the forces shaping their education.
“The ed tech industry is profiting off of running a race with school districts to see who’s going to adopt their chatbot or whatever their tech piece is, and it’s forced on students,” Donelly told Truthout. “Students should have the opportunity to refuse to use AI if they want to. They deserve to have the whole picture and not just to be the money-maker for these ed tech pieces.”
Indeed, experts, education advocates, and students interviewed by Truthout portrayed a bleak reality in which desperation creates pressure for marginalized students to use AI, and for under-resourced schools to adopt it as a surface-level solution to structural problems like chronic underfunding and understaffing. Many education policy analysts say that in the absence of conclusive evidence that AI improves learning outcomes, companies’ pitch of AI tools as an educational cure-all distracts from more pressing needs: holistic, culturally responsive education that prioritizes human interaction and productive struggle.
Donnelly — an educator at Foreman College and Career Academy, a predominantly Latine school on Chicago’s Northwest Side — said she thinks about these concerns specifically in the context of racially equitable schooling.
“Whenever we’re talking about education, we’re talking about students of color. We always have to be very intentional about, how is this going to affect these students and what do we need to do differently?” Donnelly said.
Students and Schools Up Against the Wall
Yeisbel Peña, a Latino high school senior in Boston who is interested in computer science, said it’s possible for young students to use AI to advance their thinking. But “raw education — just one-on-one, [the] old type of education — is the most appropriate way a person can actually engage and learn,” he said.
“When you have AI, it just says ‘yes,’ constantly. Any question you ask, it’ll probably just tell you yes,” Peña told Truthout. “It won’t give you complexity. And I believe that that complexity that you get from being in a classroom with a teacher … without it, you’re kind of just limiting yourself.”
Still, he said that in the absence of well-staffed after-school homework help, students at his charter school, which mostly serves students of color, often turn to chatbots instead. Peña described classrooms with only one teacher to assist 10 or 20 students.
“All of them trying to get one-on-one help, it definitely gets very diluted,” Peña said. “So you definitely don’t get the best quality of help.”
In Raleigh, North Carolina, Sacdiya Rashid, 17, said she sometimes chooses to turn to chatbots, which have helped her understand difficult math problems. Though she said that students can harm their learning by becoming over-reliant on the technology, she believes there are commercial influences at play beyond any individual student’s choices.
“I think these AI companies are trying to benefit off of students, like, struggling students,” she told Truthout.
“I don’t think we should really blame students for these AI companies and [the] narratives they’re trying to push. Because I think it just hurts the students,” Rashid said.
Indeed, students at Donnelly’s school in Chicago nominally have access to after-school tutoring, but the primarily immigrant, first-generation and high-poverty student body was hit hard by “Operation Midway Blitz,” President Donald Trump’s anti-immigration raids in the city last year. Because of that, Donnelly said, “There’s not a lot of after-school life within the school.”
“So it’s tough to get extra help,” she said. “In my experience here, it’s more that they’re using [AI] to do the work for them, because they either don’t have time or maybe aren’t understanding it as well as they need to.”
Even as AI chatbots and other AI-enabled ed tech tools spread rapidly in U.S. schools — through both formal and informal avenues — there is extremely limited evidence supporting the conclusion that this technology supports student learning.
Stanford University’s AI Hub for Education within the SCALE Initiative seeks to find and disseminate equitable education practices through research. The organization earlier this year conducted a meta-analysis of K-12 education studies to evaluate the presence of causal evidence indicating AI’s impacts on students’ educations. Lily Fesler, a senior research associate at SCALE, told Truthout that although causal evidence is the only way to concretely judge the technology’s effects, “it’s really hard to conduct randomized control trials, quasi-experimental studies, so there just aren’t a lot of those studies right now.”
Still, senior technologist at the Center for Democracy & Technology’s Equity in Civic Technology Project, Hannah Quay-de la Vallee, told Truthout that poorer school districts may still be coaxed into spending their limited funds on unproven technology. In August, the Center for Democracy & Technology published a report examining how administrative AI use could potentially cause disparate impacts in schools, violating students’ civil rights — for example, AI content filtering on student devices could block material related to immigration or sexual orientation, or AI-enabled predictive analytics designed to identify “at-risk” students could mistakenly flag students of color.
“In a school with more resources, more unrestricted resources, they have more avenues for saying, ‘Well, we want to accomplish X goal, and we could do that with AI, or we could do it by hiring more staff, or we could do it with enrichment programs’ or whatever it may be,” said Quay-de la Vallee. “In other cases, you’re going to have schools that have funding that has to be spent on tech.”
Predatory Practices
At the start of September, New York City Public Schools banned classroom AI use for K-8 students. Shortly after this, the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) announced a policy limiting AI use for all of its roughly 370,000 students. In Chicago, advocates have pressured Board of Education candidates to pledge their support for an AI moratorium.
In interviews with Truthout, activists named ChatGPT, Gemini, and Amira Learning (an AI-enabled reading program) among the tools they’ve seen appear in their schools, both formally and informally.
Across the country, parents, teachers, and students have grown apprehensive of modern technology’s potential adverse effects on student learning and well-being, and suspicious of Big Tech’s motives.
Indeed, recent reporting has revealed tech companies’ decades-long concerted effort to embed themselves more deeply into U.S. schools.
Among many examples, journalist Natasha Singer cites Google’s push to “[hook] students early on services like Gmail and Chrome. The real revenue, made from amassing consumers’ data and showing ads based on their online activities, would come later.”
Google’s narrative that one-to-one tech programs would enhance student learning had considerable buy-in; schools have spent tens of billions of dollars on Chromebooks and other ed tech programs and devices since the tech wave began. Schools’ adoption of Google products only accelerated during the pandemic, when Chromebooks seemed essential to distance learning.
The Trump administration, for its part, has encouraged the wholesale adoption of AI throughout the economy, and particularly in U.S. schooling; in 2025, Trump signed an executive order designed to promote AI education and integration for youth and teachers across the country. A new opportunity to create lifelong customers has emerged, and tech companies are vying to become the dominant AI peddler.
Trump-era AI industry lobbyists continue to exert their influence over U.S. politicians, promoting anti-regulatory views and sidelining the counsel of academics and impartial researchers. The goal is to underplay AI’s potential risks and externalities in every aspect of contemporary life.
Silicon Valley, Singer writes, is exercising its power — and “the public education system, hungry for resources to improve opportunities for students, has become an avenue for multitrillion-dollar companies to enact their agendas.”
Parent and educator activists with the Los Angeles chapter of Schools Beyond Screens and New York City’s AI Moratorium Coalition told a similar story, in which cash-strapped public schools feel they have little choice but to invest in technology.
“Everyone is stretched so thin. Education is so deeply devalued and de-professionalized and defunded. We are all so desperate to the point where, when a sales pitch comes in, someone is willing to just shake hands and sign the contract,” Alisha Maynoush Mernick, an organizer with Schools Beyond Screens LAUSD, told Truthout. “It feels very predatory to be coming to the most under-resourced schools and communities and trying to sell these things, and trying to frame it as giving out of their own goodwill.”
AI Moratorium Coalition steering committee member Kaliris Salas-Ramirez described the bind in which schools and educators sometimes find themselves: “If we don’t have the opportunity to invest in that human capital — because it’s going to take too long, because we can’t find the teacher, because we can’t find the interventionist — then [people say], OK, well maybe this could be the next best thing.”
Mernick sees a bigger issue in AI and ed tech adoption.
“This is just one symptom of a much, much larger problem, which is that when we underfund public schools, we are creating an opportunity for companies to swoop in. That’s privatization in a nutshell,” Mernick said. “It really is just funneling public taxpayer money out of public institutions and into corporate pockets.”
For Rashid, the Raleigh senior, AI tools that don’t improve student learning have no place in the classroom.
“It doesn’t really help the student, and it’s only really so that AI companies can kind of line their pockets,” she said.
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