As a new school year begins, parents across the U.S. are pushing back against AI’s use in education and classroom technology in general. They increasingly question whether edtech is worth it, citing excessive screen time, underwhelming learning gains, and the “cognitive offloading” AI produces in a school setting.
Families are also questioning whether widespread AI use will dull foundational skills, like critical thinking. Teachers share that concern. A June 2026 survey revealed that most educators worry the technology risks weakening students’ capacity for deep, independent reasoning.
It’s also clear that the technology isn’t going away. Even though there are roughly 80 bills in 27 states taking aim at AI in schools, it’s unclear what impact they would have and unlikely any of them would force changes this school year. So, for now, the challenge facing teachers and parents is ensuring that students use the technology thoughtfully, ethically, and responsibly and in ways that protect their creativity, curiosity, while promoting critical thinking.
But that can’t happen unless parents understand how AI is being used in schools – and what it means for their kids. To help them navigate this shifting terrain, we asked educators for the key questions every parent should ask teachers about AI in the classroom.
Question 1: What is the educational purpose (and frequency) of AI use in your classroom?
Ensuring that AI does not replace human reasoning starts with defining its role, as there is a significant difference between a student using AI as a writing editor while retaining ownership of their ideas, and using it as an answer machine that eliminates their need to think deeply. That’s why parents should understand the exact educational purpose and frequency of AI in their child’s day-to-day lessons. To that end, parents should ask both how the teacher uses AI and how their child might be asked to use it.
For the teachers, parents should ask how AI supports learning. Do you use it to modify and differentiate instruction? To enhance creative brainstorming? To provide preliminary writing feedback? Ask for examples of how AI improved their workflow, and ask them to provide the names of the platforms they use. It may also be useful to ask how much formal training they have received on how to incorporate AI into their teaching. Don’t be surprised if they say their answer is “very little.”
Knowing how your child is likely to interact with AI agents is also important. Do students have unfettered access to an AI like ChatCPT or Claude? Will they use a writing platform that will provide AI-generated critiques of their work? Are students allowed to use AI at home as a study partner?
Question 2: How will the school protect my child’s data to ensure privacy?
Schools are trusted with vast amounts of private data on their students – everything from personal information (like names, dates of birth, family income status) to academic performance to the native languages spoken by their parents. Granting third-party AI platforms access to this data raises serious questions about digital safety and data breaches. Parents should ask what explicit measures are in place to ensure that their child’s personal information and coursework remain secure and private. If an educator cannot explain the vendor’s data-handling policies, ask that school district to provide you with those policies.
Question 3. What expectations and rules have you set to ensure academic integrity?
It used to be fairly easy to identify cheating and academic dishonesty. Copying a classmate’s homework, plagiarizing a magazine article, or sneaking a calculator into a math exam are all pretty cut-and-dried examples of cheating. AI has blurred those lines. Is it cheating if a student used AI to outline an essay, but wrote it themselves? What if AI did all the research too? Today, it can be hard to know where permissible technology assistance ends and academic dishonesty begins.
Parents should ask what specific rules or guidelines teachers provide regarding ethical AI use. Find out if the rules are different when students are working at home. Clear guidelines eliminate confusion and help ensure that students engage in the critical “productive struggle” they need to learn the material deeply while maintaining their intellectual independence.
For the teachers who use AI to help grade student work, ask them what recourse is available if an AI tool misinterprets, misgrades, or unfairly penalizes authentic work.
Question 4. How are you teaching students to question, verify, and fact-check AI?
One of the biggest criticisms and concerns about AI is the frequency and confidence with which it generates authoritative responses that are simply wrong or wholly fabricated. Sometimes, the issues are more subtle, like an answer that is kind of right but contains incomplete or biased information. Parents should ask whether they are teaching students about AI hallucinations and how to approach AI outputs with skepticism, logic and independent critical judgment.
Effective instruction must explain how to spot algorithmic bias, identify credible sources, and practice “lateral reading” – the act of evaluating the credibility of a source by comparing it with other sources to verify evidence, contextualize information, and identify weaknesses. Teaching students to interrogate AI-generated answers ensures they develop sound information literacy rather than passively accepting AI as an authoritative source.
Question 5. Are you using AI to strengthen a student’s critical thinking skills and prepare them for the future?
Education’s ultimate goal is to prepare young people for college, fulfilling careers, and engaged citizenship – responsibilities that demand independent judgment, creative problem-solving, and intellectual stamina. The greatest long-term risk of classroom AI is when students use tools to bypass the friction of real learning and analytical reasoning. Parents should ask teachers for concrete examples of how classroom assignments push students beyond automated answers. Are students being taught to treat AI as an intellectual sparring partner by using it to challenge their assumptions, point out logical fallacies in their essays, or generate counterarguments to defend against? When students learn to direct the inquiry, critique machine outputs, and formulate sharper follow-up questions, they build durable AI literacy rather than dependency.
Generative AI does not have to undermine classroom learning. When parents and teachers establish open lines of communication around these issues, artificial intelligence can be a supportive tool that can help a young person develop their curiosity, critical judgment, and intellectual independence needed for a productive and fruitful life.
We would like to thank the following teachers for their input into this guide for parents:
- Sally Hubbard, a 6th-grade teacher at Westlake Charter School outside of Sacramento, Calif. Sally has spoken at national conferences about AI in education.
- Kim Sixta, a social studies teacher at Ruskin High School in Kansas City and the 2026 Missouri Teacher of the Year.
- Joann Purcell, a math teacher and instructional coach at Downers Grove North High School outside Chicago.
By Helen Lee Bouygues, President of the Reboot Foundation
