Centering humans in education

In 1986, renowned American psychologist and behaviorist B.F. Skinner theorized that using computers in education would expedite the learning process and students would learn twice as much with the same time and effort.

“When tech entered education, it was promised to be the revolution,” educational neuroscientist Jared Cooney Horvath told those gathered at NYSUT’s “Unplugged: Reclaiming Human-Centered Education” conference on Sept. 25 at a hotel near Albany.

Forty years later, with educational technology ubiquitous in classrooms, that is far from true, said Horvath, author of “The Digital Delusion: How Classroom Technology Harms Our Kids’ Learning — and How to Help Them Thrive Again.” Study after study has found that adding technology ultimately does not improve grades and test scores. Computers are production tools that are helpful when a student already knows the concepts they are learning, not a learning tool for students to become experts, he said.

“The data is very clear,” he said. “You want to see good scores again, go back to analog testing and teach kids analog.”

Unlike what its name might suggest, the “Unplugged” conference — which brought together more than 500 educators, lawmakers, medical experts and advocates — was not anti-technology. Instead, UFT, NYSUT and AFT experts and advocates discussed how to tackle deficits educators are seeing in their schools due to overreliance on technology.

“Unplugged” took place weeks after New York City schools announced a one-year moratorium on student-facing generative AI in grades 2-K through 8, and limited use in high schools. They also banned 1:1 screen time in 2-K through grade 2 and strictly limited it in grades 3–8.

The UFT supports the AFT’s 10-point plan to rein in classroom technology, UFT Vice President for Education Mary Vaccaro told conference attendees while speaking on an AI in schools panel. That includes no screens (including online assessments) in pre-K through 2nd grade, no student-facing AI in elementary schools and educator supervision for all other student-facing AI, with exceptions for students with special needs. The plan also prohibits “social companion” chatbots for students under 16.

Newly retired teacher Debra Elhadri, who taught technology and 2-K at PS 75 in Brooklyn, said she was struck by lawyer and child safety advocate Megan Garcia’s lunchtime address about her son taking his own life in 2024 after being manipulated by an AI chatbot companion. “She was talking about how much she protected her children,” Elhadri said, “but he had found a way to have a separate email she didn’t know about.”

She also identified with Horvath’s comments about technology taking students in the wrong direction. “You see parents with their children in the strollers and they’re like, ‘Oh my kid is a genius with an iPad,” said Elhadri, who didn’t let her own children use technology before age 12.

“We shouldn’t be designing education around what technology can do,” said NYSUT President Melinda Person, who referenced a humanoid robot teacher that an upstate school district paused the use of after public backlash. “We should be designing it around what children need.”

In panels throughout the day, educators and experts discussed what classrooms look like in the AI age and a decade into 1:1 computers becoming the norm. Students are skimming content online and not absorbing it well, have executive functioning deficits and are multitasking on computers instead of fully focusing on schoolwork, they said.

English teacher Margaret Dean of St. Lawrence Central HS in upstate Brasher Falls said she has seen marked deficits in her 11th-graders, from reading below grade level to trouble with self-direction and memorization, and has fundamentally shifted her curriculum. Post-COVID-19, “our kids don’t have the muscle” they need to use technology, she said.

Horvath said two bright spots for technology are intelligent tutoring, in which AI personalizes instruction, and learning disorder remediation.

UFT Vice President for Special Education MaryJo Ginese, who also spoke at the conference, said it used to be difficult to get students with disabilities access to technology, but the COVID-19 pandemic and surge in technology use helped more people realize how it can level the playing field. Vaccaro shared that there are ways AI has helped English language learners, such as translating indigenous languages.

However, UFT and other experts cautioned that people must be at the forefront of education, not technology.

Horvath said nothing is more important in learning than the student-teacher relationship. An empathetic relationship drives learning, he said. “What is the one thing digital technology can never have? Empathy.”

Humans must be in charge of technology; technology cannot be in charge of us, said AFT President and panelist Randi Weingarten. The UFT and AFT’s National Academy for AI Instruction operates out of UFT headquarters, and Weingarten noted that teachers’ most-requested course is how to deal with critical thinking in an age of “cognitive offloading” — outsourcing cognitive tasks to technology.

Sometimes the way people learn is more complex than the skills they will need to perform, which makes transferring them to different contexts easier, said Horvath. For example, he said, a person trained on a car with a manual transmission can readily transition to using an automatic. The reverse is not true.

“Tech is easy. Nobody meant for digital technology to make our lives harder,” he said. That might be helpful for adults, but for children, “that means you are learning in the absolute easiest way,” and needed skills are hard to transfer.

In the lightning-fast-moving world of education technology and artificial intelligence, protecting the privacy and safety of students, educators and families must remain paramount.

To that end, the UFT and AFT’s National Academy for AI Instruction forged a landmark agreement with Microsoft that creates a National AI Safety & Privacy Standard (see box above). The protections are available on Nov. 1 for any school district to add to their agreements with Microsoft.

“The student data will not be monetized, will not be shared,” UFT President Michael Mulgrew said in announcing the guidelines in September. “The teachers’ interaction with the students will not be monetized, will not be shared. They will not allow platforms to open up into predatory algorithms that can manipulate students.”

The agreement, which took months to negotiate, ensures that Microsoft can’t track students and can’t sell student data, use it for advertising or use it to train AI, AFT President Randi Weingarten said. Schools will maintain control over how they use, keep and delete data. Beyond that, it requires Microsoft — or any other provider that signs on to it — to communicate in plain language about how it is using AI in schools, what data is collected and what safeguards are in place to protect it. The goal is for the standard to be enacted into laws and regulations, she said.

“Ultimately, we need the federal government and state governments to have the guardrails in terms of AI,” she said. “We need that and we will keep fighting for that.”

The role of a technology company is not to tell educators how to teach, said Brad Smith, vice chairman and president of Microsoft. “But it is our role and it’s even our responsibility to ensure that AI is provided in a form that teachers and kids and parents can trust. That is what this agreement does.”

The UFT and AFT formed the National Academy for AI Instruction in July 2025 with three partners: Microsoft, OpenAI and Anthropic.