AI is in nearly every classroom

Artificial intelligence is rapidly becoming part of everyday academic life for America’s students. By mid-2025, up to 84% of high school students were using AI for schoolwork, including writing essays, summarizing readings, and completing assignments. Despite widespread usage, students themselves are growing wary of what this means. A 2026 Gallup–Walton Family Foundation survey found Gen Z’s excitement about AI has dropped 14% since 2025, and nearly half of working Gen Zers now believe AI’s risks in the workforce outweigh its benefits. At the same time, schools are buying AI tools at remarkable speed, often with little independent evidence about how these technologies affect long-term learning outcomes. Districts are making procurement decisions that shape how millions of students think and learn, with almost no infrastructure to evaluate whether any of it is working. AI is unusually disruptive. A decade ago, kids in a computer lab could Google a research question while writing an essay; today they can access generative AI tools that write the essay for them. Generative AI can draft arguments, solve equations, summarize texts, and simulate expertise across subjects, performing the intellectual tasks students are supposed to learn to do on their own. EVIDENCE AND INFRASTRUCTURE Yet the evidence base remains remarkably thin. A recent Stanford Accelerator for Learning review of more than 800 studies on AI in K-12 found only 20 high-quality causal studies examining learning outcomes. And the studies that do exist point to a complicated picture: Students frequently produce stronger work while using AI, but those gains often disappear—and sometimes reverse—when AI access is removed, as the OECD’s 2026 Digital Education Outlook recently found. Schools lack the infrastructure to evaluate these differences at scale, and only 31% of U.S. public schools even have a written AI policy in place. The Alliance for Learning Innovation (ALI), a coalition of over 140