Photo illustration by Justin Vaughan
Artificial intelligence is taking over the classroom.
Everyday devices and online tools that can write essays, develop lesson plans and solve complex math problems in a matter of seconds are now widely available. As public debates swirl over academic integrity, ethical implications and the amount of natural resources needed for data centers that power AI, the groundbreaking technology is disrupting education at all levels.
“AI is already in schools,” says David Naff, a Virginia Commonwealth University education professor and the director of a regional research consortium that works with several local school districts. “It’s not really a question about whether schools are going to respond, but how they’re going to respond.”
Even as a coalition of more than a dozen parents spoke during a Henrico School Board meeting in June to call for more restrictions on digital screen time and the use of laptops and iPads for learning, some school leaders say young people should learn how artificial intelligence works.
Last October, The Steward School published an open letter describing how it is adapting to AI by balancing concerns over potential misuse and the need to prepare young people for future careers. The private day school offers pre-K through 12th grade education.
“With a chance now to learn from history, we have a deep ethical obligation to make sure kids learn to use AI well,” Head of School Dan Frank wrote on the Steward School’s blog. “No matter what, they will be using it outside of school, and universities and workplaces will require facility with it.”
Critical Mass
William Willis, the executive director of AI Ready RVA, defines AI as software that can create something — perhaps a bedtime story, a video essay about Abraham Lincoln or coding for a mobile phone app — almost instantaneously in response to a user query.
Generally, the programs are trained on massive online archives of publicly available information. Their mimicry is based on a system of proverbial weights and scales that guides the program word to word to answer the prompt.
“It has the ability to digest large pieces of data and synthesize outputs from them in a close-to-human way of thinking,” Willis says.
Formed as a nonprofit two years ago, AI Ready RVA organizes corporations, entrepreneurs, political leaders and scholars to advocate for “AI literacy” in hope that local institutions will adapt to the technology and reap its rewards. So far, it has partnered with VCU, Meta, McGuireWoods Consulting, the Richmond Institute of Technology and Science, and the Mark Cuban Foundation to host workshops, events and hackathons.
Professionals may be wondering how to harness AI at scale, but young people have been quick to adapt and incorporate publicly available and free-to-use AI programs like ChatGPT and Claude. Their use in schools has nearly reached a critical mass, according to the national surveys cited in VCU’s Metropolitan Educational Research Consortium study.
The share of middle school students using AI increased from 48% to 62% between May and December 2025, the RAND Survey Research Group reported last year. In a survey from Pew Research Center published in February, 54% of adolescents said they used AI chatbots for schoolwork. Meanwhile, a national EdWeek survey found that the percentage of teachers who report using AI nearly doubled from 34% in 2023 to 61% in 2025.
Research also shows, however, that students have increasingly complex and conflicted views about AI. A majority of students think cheating has increased, according to several surveys reviewed in the VCU report. The RAND survey found that two-thirds of students across grade levels believe that using AI for schoolwork could harm their critical thinking skills. Similarly, a 2026 Gallup and Walton Family Foundation poll reported that 74% of Gen Z students think using AI would make learning harder in the future.
“There’s concerns about plagiarism, bias and things that teachers also tend to have some concerns about, understandably, but it’s still being used at the same time,” Naff says. “It’s a tool that could potentially have really considerable benefits, but there’s also some inherent risks to using AI, so we are really trying to balance that in the way that we’re presenting it.”
Schools, he says, are trying to do the same.
Justin Vaughan
Teaching Tools
A couple years ago, The Steward School launched a pilot program called Steward AI Leaders so faculty members can volunteer to test AI programs and develop recommendations for appropriate use.
“We are creating the playbook when it comes to AI in schools,” says Shahwar Qureshi, director of technology at Steward. “There’s no established best practices or things like that.”
Before launching SAIL, the school administration had blocked the use of AI as it was starting to become broadly available in late 2022. “There was a very strong knee-jerk reaction,” Qureshi says. “It was one of the hardest things, as director of technology, to block a tool that I knew was so powerful and valuable.”
Steward leaders eventually decided to allow AI usage, Qureshi says, but the school is not forcing teachers or students to use it. “It’s also important for teachers to help students develop their moral compass on AI usage,” she adds, “because it’s really easy to just let AI do the work for you.”
Like other private and public schools in recent years, Steward licenses AI-enabled software from vendors such as Google, Adobe and Microsoft. Other AI tools, like Khan Academy’s tutor chatbot, Khanmigo, and programs that help teachers design classroom materials, have also been permitted, while some are restricted due to student data privacy concerns, Qureshi says.
Steward, however, is only one example of how much the adaptation of and enthusiasm for AI varies among private schools.
Texas-based Alpha Schools opened its first AI-driven private school in Northern Virginia last year. Designed for K-8 students, the school offers AI-designed personalized lessons for individual students and limits educational instruction to just two hours per day.
In its unconventional arrangement, Alpha employs experienced educators as “guides” to support students and focus on “emotional growth, life skills and fostering a passion for learning,” according to the private school’s website.
In March, the Richmond Waldorf School published an open letter about “future-proofing for an AI World.” Rooted in the tradition of Waldorf education, which emphasizes hands-on projects, creativity and interpersonal relationships, the local school did not ban AI but said it will not rush children “toward more screens or outsourcing their thinking to technology.”
Andrew Ross, the school’s director, says there haven’t been many issues around AI in his school community because students, parents and teachers are aligned on the school’s values and norms.
‘Cognitive Atrophy’
At a more philosophical level, Ross says, his biggest concern is that the push for more efficiency could result in greater demand for output from workers instead of freeing them from routine tasks that can be automated.
“There’s also the elimination of thought processes,” he adds. “I think that we’re just at a point where, if we do see that these tools are overly used in schools, thought process and memory are going to be completely obliterated.”
Experts have warned that the new technology could erode critical thinking and learning skills. At a January congressional hearing on the impact of screen time on students, neuroscientist Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath said Gen Z students have underperformed on nearly all cognitive measures compared to previous generations. “We are redefining education to suit the tool,” he said. “That’s not progress. It’s surrender.”
Other education leaders say it’s vital to teach students how to use AI tools appropriately, and that doing so could create room to stretch creativity and critical thinking to use them more effectively.
Phyl Demetriou, an AI specialist at Brightpoint Community College and the chairman of AI Ready RVA’s education committee, says that’s why he thinks AI should be introduced to students at the secondary level.
“There’s a risk of cognitive atrophy, where you’re basically outsourcing all your thinking to the AI. That is the worst-case scenario that a lot of schools are trying to avoid right now,” he says. “In my opinion, if you’re going to teach AI, you might want to only teach it in high school and college.”
Other questions about AI in education swirl around the role of teachers and whether AI should be used to replace or enhance them.
Guiding Principles
Under an executive order by former Gov. Glen Younkin, the Virginia Department of Education last year adopted guidelines that recognize the risks and rewards of using AI in education. The five-page document outlines roles for local and state officials, strategies for implementation, and guiding principles, such as “do no harm” and “augment, not replace humans.”
Local school districts — including Richmond, Henrico, Chesterfield and Hanover — have adopted their own guidelines or clarified existing policies.
It won’t end there, however.
Several bills signed by Gov. Abigail Spanberger this spring require the VDOE to review those local guidelines and develop more comprehensive guidance for the “safe, ethical and equitable use” of AI.
Calypso Gilstrap, executive director of the Office of Innovation in the Virginia Department of Education, says she’s cautiously optimistic about the technology. Continuing to focus on it will be important as state leaders lean on tech as “a core part of our economy,” she says. “There’s always pros and cons when we have an emerging technology, but I do think Virginia is poised to integrate it into our schools and do what’s best for the commonwealth.”
Demetriou with AI Ready RVA says familiarity with artificial intelligence will be important for career prospects, but that safeguards and further study of its impacts are needed to determine how it should be used in education.
“By the time you go to college, hopefully you’re already familiar with how to read, write and think critically on some basis, such that using AI doesn’t derail your thinking,” he says. “For K to 12, I think there’s a lot more precautions that will need to be in place. I think we’re kind of emerging to figure out exactly what that looks like in the future.”
