--- title: "Boston Embraces Classroom AI as New York and Los Angeles Tell Students to Log Off" description: "A $1 million gift from a tech founder pays for ‘AI Educator Ambassadors’ while other big districts hit pause" author: "Nate Ledger" published: 2026-10-05T22:03:58.288Z modified: 2026-10-06T06:21:25Z url: https://rews.cc/a/boston-embraces-classroom-ai-as-new-york-and-los-angeles-tel-67f914 language: en tags: ["education", "ai", "schools", "boston", "nyc", "us"] publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)" --- # Boston Embraces Classroom AI as New York and Los Angeles Tell Students to Log Off *A $1 million gift from a tech founder pays for ‘AI Educator Ambassadors’ while other big districts hit pause* By Nate Ledger · October 5, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/boston-embraces-classroom-ai-as-new-york-and-los-angeles-tel-67f914 ## In brief - A Pew report found most US teens use AI chatbots; 10% said chatbots help with most or all of their schoolwork - Los Angeles banned student AI at all grades and New York barred younger students, both for this academic year - Boston, with a $1 million gift from Kayak cofounder Paul English, trained roughly two dozen AI Educator Ambassadors - Teachers, students and parents are split; one parent group plans a petition urging a pause on classroom AI - Wu’s administration declined Globe requests to observe students and teachers using AI in a classroom Start with the state of play, because it explains everything else. A majority of US teenagers already use AI chatbots such as ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot, according to a February report from the Pew Research Center, which surveyed more than 1,400 kids aged 13 to 17. At least three in 10 said they use AI daily to help with schoolwork and search for information; about 10 percent said chatbots help with most, if not all, of their schoolwork; and 60 percent said students at their school used AI to do their work. Given that, the question facing a school district is not whether students will use AI. It is what the grown-ups should do about it. In early September, the country’s other two giant districts answered: keep it out. Los Angeles barred student access to AI across all grade levels, and New York, the nation’s largest district, announced a similar measure while letting high schoolers keep using it. Both said the bans cover the current academic year while they study the impact. New York’s mayor, Zohran Mamdani, cast his as an act of resistance. “The tech industry wants us to believe that AI-powered early education is not only inevitable, but necessary,” he said. “We do not see it that way.” Boston answered the other way. Last spring, Mayor Michelle Wu announced a partnership with local tech entrepreneur Paul English, the cofounder of the travel-booking site Kayak, and the University of Massachusetts Boston to train Boston teachers to use AI in education. The program’s “AI Educator Ambassadors” are funded by a $1 million donation from English; the first cohort of roughly two dozen teachers, covering grades 7 to 12, trained in August. The pitch is labor-market logic: employers expect employees will use AI, English said in an interview, and cities that put moratoriums on school AI risk their children falling behind. “We want to be deeply in the classes,” he said, “and ultimately, we want every teacher to be using AI.” The honest empirical position on all of this is that nobody knows. “There’s a risk of not engaging with AI and being left behind. But there’s also a risk that this is going to be harmful,” said Justin Reich, the director of MIT’s Teaching Systems Lab. “There’s no evidence which clearly says that one of these pathways is better than the other.” Which means Boston and New York are, in effect, running the two arms of the same experiment, with a few million children enrolled in it. The design principle inside Boston classrooms is the chatbot as “thinking partner”: students must work through the problem they are trying to solve, and identify the materials they need, before they touch it, according to Tara Correa, a teacher at the Eliot school. “We want to remind them \[of\] the benefits of using it as a thought partner,” Correa said in a video posted by Boston Public Schools, “not to use it to do their work and take away or strip away their foundational skills.” The paper guardrails are real enough. In June, the Boston School Committee approved an AI policy limiting the technology to a tool that enhances, rather than replaces, human judgment and critical thinking. Students below Grade 7 get no chatbot access through their school accounts, and classroom use is limited to approved tools under a teacher’s direction, according to city spokesperson Marcela Dwork. Announcing the initiative in March, Wu said AI would not replace educators and students’ private data would not be handed to an AI company. “This is about empowering our young people,” she said, “to have every bit of knowledge and understanding and fluency to make the most of the choices in front of them and the opportunities in front of them.” Meanwhile the technology will not sit still. In the five months between Wu’s announcement and New York’s ban, reports of rogue AI agents raised fresh alarms about safety, and last month executives from leading AI companies told the UN Security Council their technology carried immediate risks. The people building the product describe it as a matter of international security. The school argument is about which grade gets it. The critics speak with more certainty than the evidence currently allows, in both directions. Kids are over-relying on AI for homework, and some even forgo human relationships for ones with a chatbot, said Mitch Prinstein, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. “I don’t think AI is ready for kid use yet, period,” he said. “I’m not saying all AI is bad. I’m just saying it’s currently designed in a way that hooks kids in to use it for bad reasons for too long.” Northeastern University professor Eileen McGivney takes the opposite view of bans. “If a school district decides to ban AI, I think they have really good intentions,” she said. “But I also think that it’s very hard to understand how to use technologies appropriately if you’re not doing some kind of experimentation with them.” At the far end of the dial sits Alpha School, a national private chain where AI tutors instruct students in core subjects such as English and math. Alpha opened a Boston campus in September. It has 25 students. Most of the real fight is happening well short of that. Inside the system, opinion is split. A student in a video shared on the district’s Facebook page said AI helped her research immigration and improved her writing. Laura Lara Soto, a 17-year-old high schooler, said her classmates lean on it too much: “AI is telling young people what to think, versus young people thinking for themselves,” she said in Spanish through an interpreter. “AI is making it easier to do your work, and that’s not necessarily conducive to learning.” Pat Miguel Tomaino, a history teacher at Boston Green Academy, said the city’s initiative has provided guidance but the technology can interrupt learning: “I’m reluctant to focus on AI much at all with my students. Our time is better spent practicing essential skills, like argumentative writing, the old-fashioned way.” Alessandra Michener, a mother of three in the district, is organizing parents for a petition urging leaders to pause on several classroom technology issues, including screentime and AI. “I don’t really think it has a place in the classroom right now, until we have an understanding of the actual benefit for kids,” she said. One more wrinkle. Wu’s administration declined repeated *Boston Globe* requests this fall to visit a classroom and watch students and teachers use AI, though it did invite a reporter to an August training forum for the ambassadors at district headquarters in Roxbury. For now, most of what the public can see of AI in Boston’s classrooms is what the district films and posts itself. Everyone in this argument agrees the children should be prepared for the future; the fight is over whether the future is the box on the screen or whatever is supposed to happen inside the student’s head. Give it a few years and someone will write an excellent paper comparing Boston and New York. Someone, after all, has to be the control group.