{"id":86528,"date":"2026-06-01T00:01:00","date_gmt":"2026-06-01T06:01:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.opinionpublica.tv\/portada\/?p=86528"},"modified":"2026-05-31T19:02:05","modified_gmt":"2026-06-01T01:02:05","slug":"americas-first-a-i-high-school-is-great-but-not-because-of-a-i","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.opinionpublica.tv\/portada\/americas-first-a-i-high-school-is-great-but-not-because-of-a-i\/","title":{"rendered":"America\u2019s first A.I. high school is great. But not because of A.I."},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"America\u2019s<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

It was 9 a.m. on a Thursday at Harmony Elementary School in Buford, Ga., about 45 minutes outside Atlanta. A gaggle of first graders sat on a rug festooned with ladybugs in the school\u2019s bright, airy library. The children were surrounded by walls of books and tables that had been set up with Magna-Tiles and blocks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cHere is a little toy,\u201d a teacher named Shanaz Lakhani told the children, holding a plastic figurine. \u201cWe are going to think about our user, our little toy, and how we can build a sturdy home for her.\u201d She asked the 20 or so students, who were starting to wiggle with restlessness, what sturdy means. A few of them shot their tiny hands in the air. Ms. Lakhani called on one kid, who said, \u201cIt means that everything is fine and secure.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ms. Lakhani affirmed the answer, and described how a sturdy home could potentially stand up to an earthquake or a very windy day; part of the activity involved students shaking the table to see just how hardy their structure was. She told them to focus on the feelings of the figurine. \u201cShe\u2019s our user, right? We\u2019re using our \u2018user experience\u2019 where we\u2019re going to think, how can you build a strong home for her?\u201d Ms. Lakhani put the children into small groups, and they scampered off to build their structures.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Behind Ms. Lakhani was a digital whiteboard that explained the challenge, next to an analog whiteboard with six colorful triangles affixed to it. The triangles explained how this activity was part of Harmony\u2019s artificial intelligence learning framework. \u201cUser experience\u201d is one side of the light-blue \u201capplied experiences\u201d triangle, along with \u201cA.I. applications\u201d and \u201crobotics.\u201d The other triangles stand for \u201cprogramming,\u201d \u201cdata science,\u201d \u201cmathematical reasoning,\u201d \u201ccreative problem solving\u201d and \u201cethics.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The children did not seem to be paying much attention to either whiteboard once they began their activity. I saw two girls approach Ms. Lakhani to ask her for a specific doll for their building. I couldn\u2019t discern whether they received the message about \u201cuser experience,\u201d or its connection to artificial intelligence, because they are 7.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Harmony Elementary is part of Gwinnett County\u2019s Seckinger cluster of schools, along with Ivy Creek Elementary, Patrick Elementary, Jones Middle School and Seckinger High School. The high school markets itself as \u201cthe nation\u2019s first artificial intelligence (A.I.)-themed educational institution.\u201d The other four schools, which are older and more established, feed into Seckinger High. They all follow the same A.I. framework, though it is calibrated for different grade levels.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Gwinnett County, in contrast to many other public school districts, has gained thousands of students over the past decade (though it has lost some from its peak enrollment). The suburban county has grown by roughly 400,000 people since the year 2000. The district decided to make an A.I.-themed cluster after its leaders read reports in the late 2010s from the World Economic Forum and McKinsey Global Institute predicting that artificial intelligence would soon disrupt the work force. They wanted to make their students \u201cfuture ready.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The first class of students who have been at Seckinger High School since they were freshmen graduated this month. By now, districts from Boston to Miami have caught the same A.I. fever, vowing to integrate the new technology into their curriculum.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This sounds sensible in theory. Proponents of A.I. in education believe that if the technology is harnessed correctly, it can give children a more precise, dynamic and individualized learning experience, even in big public school classes. Conventional education too often operates on a one-size-fits-all model, they argue, and A.I. can change that. Schools are also trying to respond to the unpredictability of the labor market, and the fear that with A.I., entry-level white collar jobs will become scarcer, and some may disappear entirely.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But in practice, placing A.I. at the center of a school is far more complicated and uncertain. There isn\u2019t a standard definition of A.I. literacy, or a single widely accepted way to measure it. The adapt-or-perish rhetoric is the same kind of argument that tech boosters made about giving every child a laptop, and many years into that enterprise, it\u2019s tough to argue that it\u2019s been a success.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The latest push for schools to keep up with sweeping, societywide technological changes is coming at the same time that American students are struggling. Test scores have been declining for over a decade along with basic numeracy and literacy. There are lots of explanations for why that\u2019s happened, though the two most obvious culprits are the ubiquity of screens and the decline of accountability measures. Covid made it clear that a kind of magic happens in a physical classroom through human connection that cannot simply be replaced by apps. Presumably A.I., even when carefully introduced and overseen by trained educators, risks killing some of that magic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"America\u2019s<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

As a result of these deficits, fewer students appear to be ready for the rigor of college. According to a report from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the College Board, 80 percent of hiring managers believe that high school graduates are less prepared to enter the work force compared with previous generations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There are few high-quality studies on the impact of artificial intelligence on K-12 students and teachers, and the results of the studies that exist are mixed. Stanford\u2019s A.I. Hub for Education recently published a review of over 800 academic papers and found that \u201cA.I. tools may help students complete tasks more successfully in the moment, but those gains do not always persist when students are later asked to perform independently.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Even as the gains are limited, the pitfalls are mounting. Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have warned about the risks of \u201ccognitive surrender\u201d to artificial intelligence among the general population, which is when users of A.I. avoid \u201ceffortful thinking\u201d and offload a significant part of their decision-making to large language models. What\u2019s more, it is possible that whatever is being taught to schoolchildren today could be obsolete in six months.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When I asked leaders throughout the Seckinger cluster about how they were defining the success of their A.I. pilot, they were refreshingly honest about the rocky terrain beneath them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Seckinger doesn\u2019t have an ultimate goal it\u2019s trying to meet, or metric it\u2019s trying to measure, said Sallie Holloway, who is the director of artificial intelligence and computer science for Gwinnett County Public Schools and who helped develop the learning framework for the cluster. She started her career as a computer science teacher and instructional coach and stepped into her current role in 2021.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s more like a \u201csystem of metrics,\u201d she said, that include normal public school student achievement like grades and test scores and whether students are building technological skills and feel positively about the curriculum. The experimental nature of what is being attempted in Gwinnett County reminded me of an oft-repeated start-up maxim: Seckinger is building the plane while flying it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Before I came to see the Seckinger schools, I struggled to understand what embedding A.I. in every grade would actually look like. In my dark fantasies, I pictured kindergartners having conversations with chatbots instead of one another. I imagined older children plugged into laptops doing an A.I.-personalized set of math problems, while a human teacher sat off in the background, marginalized by bots.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s definitely not that. Educators were not sidelined. I was struck by the warmth of all the teachers I observed. I saw a first-grade teacher, Liza Earley, running a literacy activity that was in line with the green \u201cmathematical reasoning\u201d triangle in the A.I. framework. Ms. Earley was showing her students how to observe patterns in words that they hear, like \u201chigh,\u201d \u201ctie\u201d and \u201cfly.\u201d She noticed that a few kids were not picking up on the relationship among the words, so she crouched down to their eye level on the rug and gave them further guidance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In middle school, the activities started using technology I recognized as artificial intelligence. An eighth-grade social studies teacher at Jones Middle School, Kacie Holycross, joked with her kids while they posed as journalists interviewing chatbots Ms. Holycross built on MagicSchool, an A.I. platform for K-12 education.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The chatbots were supplied with biographical information about Richard Russell Jr. and Carl Vinson, two long-dead Georgia politicians who brought lots of military funding to the state during World War II. Ms. Holycross wrote the questions for the children to feed the chatbot. Then the Vinson bot spat out replies like \u201cGeorgia\u2019s got the workers, the shipyards and the know-how to build them.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ms. Holycross told me that interacting with primary sources using A.I. made the lesson more \u201cstudent friendly.\u201d But the kids I observed did not seem especially riveted. I asked one student if he planned to ask the bots any follow-up questions. \u201cI could do that,\u201d he said, but didn\u2019t.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ms. Holycross told me, \u201cTheir goal right now is just to kind of focus on the three questions and then summarize what they say.\u201d Some of the students need structured guidance with the chatbots, she explained to me later.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My last stop was Seckinger High School, which is the fanciest public school building I have ever set foot in. I toured state-of-the-art mechanical engineering classrooms and glass-walled student \u201ccollaboration rooms.\u201d I spoke to four teachers, three students and Seckinger\u2019s principal about their experiences teaching and using A.I. at Seckinger.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Scott Gaffney, who is head of the social studies department, talked about how students in his A.P. human geography class used a large language model to gather data about a 2014 \u201csnowmageddon\u201d that paralyzed Atlanta. Mr. Gaffney and one of his students described looking up road density data and the number of students who needed to be bused home from school. The kids were instructed to come up with public policy solutions that might have made the storm less debilitating.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mr. Gaffney said that this year the activity was more efficient than when he first taught it. Now, \u201ckids can look at this data and they\u2019re like, oh, 500,000 without power, 25 people dead, two inches of ice, Atlanta paralyzed, like kids stuck at school,\u201d he explained. The students move more \u201cobviously to a faster conclusion.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These are remarks similar to the ones Mr. Gaffney made in an interview with CBS News in 2023. Before A.I., he could have had students look up years of traffic data, but it would have taken four to five days for the students to complete the lesson. Few people I talked to when I visited this year seemed to think that there had been any value in that slower kind of research or that there might be cognitive or emotional muscles involved in more painstaking, frustrating work that would atrophy from disuse.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As the day wore on, I kept hearing about how the students used algebraic reasoning to think more deeply about literature, or rebranded simple patterns in words as \u201calgorithms.\u201d They kept circling back to those colorful triangles \u2014 ethics, creative problem solving \u2014 that didn\u2019t necessarily have anything to do with artificial intelligence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A visual art teacher, Megan Fowler, described encouraging her students to use ChatGPT to help them free-associate words to get past artists\u2019 block. But wouldn\u2019t they be just as well served by thumbing through a book of paintings, going outside and looking around, or daydreaming?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I thought about Mr. Gaffney\u2019s description of his students moving rapidly through their research assignments, and about introducing the term \u201cuser experience\u201d to first graders. Gwinnett County often seemed to be transposing the language and goals of tech corporations onto its schools. In one sense, these goals are not new. The promise of tidy, industrialized efficiency has been central to the argument for bringing tech into schools for at least a hundred years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 1913, Thomas Edison predicted that books would quickly become obsolete: \u201cScholars will soon be instructed through the eye. It is possible to touch every branch of human knowledge with the motion picture.\u201d This is just one example of utopian educational technology boosterism that Larry Cuban, who is a professor emeritus at Stanford, includes in his 1986 book \u201cTeachers and Machines.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dr. Cuban describes an \u201cunrelenting cycle\u201d that occurs with every new technology, whether radio, film, television or computers. First, reformers, who tended to be either executives or administrators, would promise to \u201crevolutionize\u201d the classroom with a new device. Money may be included; Seckinger received a grant for over $100,000 from Google.org, the tech company\u2019s philanthropic arm, for A.I. research in 2024. That promise would be followed by breathless press around how any given technology would improve student learning, make the classroom more cost-effective and enhance teacher skills.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These guarantees always ignored all of the other pressures faced by teachers, who still had all the old responsibilities to balance while integrating new devices into their instruction. The next part of the cycle \u2014 after the glowing publicity and often uncritical imposition of the technology \u2014 is disappointment. Uptake by classroom teachers is inconsistent, often because the tech doesn\u2019t work well. During my visit to Georgia, I observed a music teacher looking anxious as her eager fifth graders could not perform their block-coded melodies for me on their glitchy Padlet app.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Even if the devices work as advertised, they don\u2019t instantly offer the productivity or test-score gains that were initially assured. The last part of the cycle that Dr. Cuban outlines is teacher bashing. Educators tend to be the ones blamed when the unrealistic expectations of administrators don\u2019t materialize.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With A.I., we\u2019re somewhere between Parts 2 and 3 of Dr. Cuban\u2019s cycle, the point he describes as the \u201cfickle romance\u201d between technological innovation and the American classroom. We\u2019re in the middle of a backlash against smartphones and Chromebooks in schools just as districts are starting to contend with the infiltration of A.I. New York City recently paused the creation of an A.I.-focused high school in Manhattan after protests from parents.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Even the founders of educational tech companies are starting to reconsider. In 2023, Sal Khan, the founder and chief executive of Khan Academy, introduced Khanmigo, an A.I. chatbot. \u201cWe\u2019re at the cusp of using A.I. for probably the biggest positive transformation that education has ever seen. And the way we\u2019re going to do that is by giving every student on the planet an artificially intelligent but amazing personal tutor,\u201d Mr. Khan boasted in a TED Talk that year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 2026, Mr. Khan is softening some of those hyperbolic claims. \u201cFor a lot of students, it was a non-event,\u201d Mr. Khan told Chalkbeat\u2019s Matt Barnum in April. An Indiana teacher who was an early adopter of Khanmigo said many of her students found the bot frustrating, in part because it made mistakes, and in part because it didn\u2019t often deepen students\u2019 learning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is not what I heard from the teachers at Seckinger High. I asked them if they were concerned about A.I. hallucinations or outright cheating with chatbots, which a majority of teenagers say happens regularly at their schools. Beth Cure, who teaches math at Seckinger, said that she thinks her students have an awareness about when A.I. is helpful and when it\u2019s giving them the wrong answers. They can discern, she said, between \u201cwhen is it something that\u2019s furthering my understanding, or when am I not thinking at all, I\u2019m requiring something else to think for me?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My time at the Seckinger schools was so brief and highly choreographed that I was not sure I was getting the full picture. So I spent the weeks after I returned from Georgia talking to several recent Seckinger graduates and current parents of students in the cluster.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nearly all of them mentioned how much they loved the diversity of the schools and the high quality of the teaching staff. But they also told me they did not use as much artificial intelligence as the marketing brochure for the high school might imply.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Joseph Schrage graduated last year from Seckinger High, which he entered as a sophomore. One of the first things he said about his high school experience was that he was in the marching band, and \u201cour football team sucked.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When I asked him about how much he used artificial intelligence at Seckinger, he said, \u201cIn my experience, we would joke a lot about how Seckinger likes to advertise as being an A.I. school.\u201d Mr. Schrage added, \u201cI mean, you\u2019re a New York Times writer and you\u2019re looking at Seckinger. Yeah, it works.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He talked about the school\u2019s A.I.-specific pathway and said it incorporated the technology much more deeply, as did computer science classes, neither of which was his focus. Holly Hall, who teaches the three-course A.I. pathway, estimated that about 30 current seniors had taken all three classes, though many more take just the first two. The kids have only so much time in the Jenga of their schedules, she said, and many of them are taking dual-enrollment college classes or Advanced Placement courses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mr. Schrage said he felt the school taught him how to use A.I. the right way \u2014 ethically and functionally. But he was more of a humanities person, and \u201cthe pathway I took, realistically, I\u2019m not doing anything more in A.I. than I would be doing anywhere else.\u201d He just finished his freshman year at the University of Georgia, majoring in political science, with plans to go to law school.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Muhammad Rizwan, who graduated from Seckinger in 2024 and goes to Emory University, echoed much of what Mr. Schrage said: There was a lot of A.I. where you would expect it in, say, robotics classes, but not much of it elsewhere. In language-arts classes, he said, teachers made the kids write essays in class by hand to prevent them from cheating by using ChatGPT.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mr. Rizwan explained that teachers (whom he described as \u201camazing\u201d) still had to meet the county\u2019s standards, and teachers were supposed to tweak those standards to add an A.I. component. \u201cWould the teachers really follow this? Not really, but was it expected of them? Yes,\u201d said Mr. Rizwan, who is an anthropology and human biology major on the pre-med track. He said some of the teachers seemed almost offended by the incursion of chatbots.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Is there proof that incorporating A.I., even if it is not ubiquitous, is helping prepare Seckinger students for the world? By the county\u2019s own measures, only 38.4 percent of Seckinger graduates are \u201ccollege ready,\u201d which means they took the ACT and SAT, and met a selected group of benchmarks; an additional 19.4 percent complete a career, technical and agricultural education pathway. Seckinger underperforms other high schools in the county with similar socioeconomic profiles on both metrics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In fairness to Seckinger, it is new, and since there is no clear definition of A.I. literacy, it would be difficult to independently assess how well versed its graduates are in the technology. When I asked Bernard Watson, the interim chief engagement officer for Gwinnett County schools, about the comparison with other nearby schools, he pointed out that Seckinger\u2019s graduation rate, at over 95 percent, is among the highest in the district, and he said that is an example of strong student engagement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I also asked why so many students and parents felt there wasn\u2019t very much A.I. in the curriculum when the cluster labels itself as A.I.-focused. \u201cWhen we talk about being \u2018A.I. ready,\u2019 we understand that some may assume we\u2019re just talking about new software or coding. In reality, our focus is much more human. We\u2019re prioritizing \u2018durable skills\u2019 that machines can\u2019t replicate \u2014 like creative problem solving, ethical thinking and collaborative leadership,\u201d Mr. Watson said in an email. He added that on some days the school may look traditional, but teachers are always looking for new ways to infuse Seckinger\u2019s A.I. framework into their lessons.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As I walked the halls of Seckinger, I thought about my own public high school experience, from 1996 to 2000. That\u2019s when schools were dealing with the dawn of the internet. I reconnected with one of my favorite teachers, John Hackenburg, who started teaching in New York State in 1964 and retired the year that I graduated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mr. Hackenburg, who taught social studies, described several different trends that passed through Irvington High School, in the suburbs of New York City, in his decades of work. He started teaching in Irvington in 1972, and he talked about a push for interdisciplinary teaching in the \u201970s and \u201980s, then a state requirement that every student take an economics class in the late \u201980s, and finally, the installation of a computer lab so that students might become computer-literate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I have one faint recollection of being in the computer lab to work on the student newspaper, but I have no other memories of using a computer in high school. Mostly I used the internet at home, instant messaging my friends on AOL and spending hours on AllMusic looking up indie rock bands. I learned some coding basics working on websites in my early 20s. Those skills are now totally obsolete.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Many of the innovations of Web 1.0 were meant to prepare kids for college and for life, the same pitch for A.I. today, Mr. Hackenburg told me. When I asked him if that\u2019s what he thought school was for, he wrote me a beautiful email: \u201cEvery society has a process by which children are nurtured into becoming useful and productive members. Public education is a big part of that in our culture. It gives children the ability to enter in and become part of social institutions with skills to make meaningful contributions for our mutual progress. And to go beyond the provincial and appreciate and engage with the broader world.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nurturing from thoughtful, engaged teachers like Mr. Hackenburg seems to be the best part of Seckinger. It is absolutely essential to a good school, and it\u2019s also hard to measure. The parents of current students I spoke to were wild about the staff.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lydia Clark, who has children at Harmony Elementary, Jones Middle and Seckinger High School, said that \u201cHarmony is the most warm, enveloping culture\u201d and that the teachers at Jones had a \u201clifelong impact\u201d on her kids. When her child at Seckinger needed an accommodation, it took only a few minutes of speaking to a counselor whom Ms. Clark trusted to set her mind at ease that the problem would be handled. A.I. isn\u2019t the reason her kids are excelling in the classroom, Ms. Clark said. She doesn\u2019t see it much in her children\u2019s education \u2014 her high schooler uses the technology sparingly because of A.I.\u2019s impact on the environment \u2014 and it isn\u2019t why her family chose the district.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When I first heard about the Seckinger cluster\u2019s focus, I was worried that all of the A.I. would remove the humanity from those schools. But as with the Magna-Tile houses that I watched those sweet-faced first graders making, the earthquake of A.I. cannot ruin the foundation of a solid school, where there is so much else going on: sports and band and A.P. classes and puberty and the messiness of growing up. It\u2019s good that schools are not like start-ups, because children\u2019s minds should not be tied to the whims of the marketplace.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One of the last things I saw at Seckinger High School was a student working in the mechanical engineering classroom. His assignment was to make a carnival game, and he had a bunch of cardboard cutouts in front of him. He told me he was making a giant target that spins, with a laser gun that would shoot the targets. His partner was working on the circuitry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I asked him if he used A.I. for any of it. No, he said, \u201cI\u2019m just using the human mind.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n