The goal: to embrace the inevitable as artificial intelligence becomes more ubiquitous — a change from the approach educators took to the advent of social media.
Microsoft President Brad Smith on Tuesday explained at the Cascadia Innovation Corridor Conference in Seattle that his Washington-based tech company has been working with schools and technical and community colleges to view AI as a tool.
School districts, he said, can harness it to create streamlined bus schedules, for instance, or to make the most of tight budgets.
“It’s enabling educators to figure out how to put together lesson plans that are better tailored for students of multiple needs,” Smith said. “And it is the future for students themselves.”
Washington was among the first states to kick off AI guidance to the field, State Superintendent Chris Reykdal said in an interview.
The resulting framework from the Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction (OSPI): H-AI-H, which stands for “human, AI, human” — or human intervention on both the front and back ends of an AI query. Students can start by asking a question, then use AI to broaden information access and gain insight before critically analyzing results.
Today, more than half of states’ education departments have adopted their own AI guidance.
Still, critics have raised questions about how the technology could facilitate widespread cheating and erode critical thinking. In a recent NBC News Decision Desk poll, 47 percent of Americans said barring AI from schools would better prepare students for the future — although 53 percent thought the ideal approach would be to integrate the technology.
OSPI understands that AI will change the way educators teach, Reykdal said. Instead of assigning five-page papers to take home, which can be knocked out in “about 30 seconds,” perhaps writing assessments should be done in class, for example.
Reykdal acknowledged parents’ AI-related concerns.
“The fact that our state’s really leaning into it, it is scary, and I want to validate that feeling,” he said. “But the consequences of ignoring it are going to be dangerous.”
Senate Minority Leader John Braun, who recently penned a commentary on the state’s chronic absenteeism rate, thinks that AI has a role in education and that it could be a powerful tool. But he doesn’t want it to stand in the way of K-12 kids learning real skills. He cited recent standardized test scores, which haven’t returned to pre-pandemic levels.
“I don’t want to see us get distracted with a new toy and lose sight of the fact that we’ve lost ground that we need to make up for in our children’s education,” the Centralia Republican said in a call.
Adam Aguilera, a National Board Certified Teacher in English Language Arts with the Evergreen Public Schools in Vancouver, is no stranger to using AI. He’s worked on the AI task forces of the Washington and National Education Associations. He also served on OSPI’s AI task force that developed the state’s AI guidance.
Aguilera said that in the beginning, teachers viewed AI with more fear, and there was an overall lack of awareness. Over time, though, the data has shifted. Now most educators have experience interacting with generative AI, which can be helpful in developing curriculum and planning lessons, he said.
“So what would normally take a teacher maybe an hour or two to put a lesson together, can now happen within minutes,” Aguilera said.
In Aguilera’s class, students can interact with an AI tool where he’s uploaded his curriculum as well as model examples and lesson plans. It then trains a chatbot to those specific instructions.
So, on days when he’s stretched thin in a class of nearly 30 kids, they can ask the technology questions about how to help craft a speech they’re writing. AI can also aid in quickly generating flashcards and quizzes.
But Aguilera hopes that society learns lessons from the roll-out of social media, which was initially treated with a hands-off, unregulated approach. He said AI is even more powerful because it engages with users in a way where it can distort their view of reality and enhance existing feelings of isolation or lead to worsened mental health.
Some students have gotten sucked down rabbit holes with a chatbot. There have been reports of teens who turned to AI to act as a de facto therapist before taking their own lives.
Despite it all, AI appears here to stay. A Gallup study published in January projected that 99 percent of U.S. adults had used AI-enabled products in the past week (social media, Amazon Alexa, streaming services, etc.), although most didn’t realize it.
Looking ahead, Reykdal thinks Washington schools should offer classes on AI, similar to how students can take coding or computer-science courses.
OSPI wants to teach kids about AI and be upfront about it, he said.
“Faced with this big, big change in the world of information and knowledge, we are going to lead the country in understanding its potential strengths and its weaknesses instead of ignoring it,” he said.
© 2025 The Olympian (Olympia, Wash.). Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
