In response to Assembly Bill 2876, the new artificial intelligence (AI) literacy bill, Palo Alto Unified School District superintendent Don Austin set the goal of enhancing current AI policies in a meeting with Veritas reporters.
The bill, which was signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom in October, mandates that California’s K-12 curriculum include core concepts of AI, its applications, limitations, and ethical issues. This new curriculum is set to roll out in January 2025.
According to Palo Alto Unified School District superintendent Don Austin, the bill adds too much onto what is expected of school districts from a legislative level. In addition to this, Austin says that AI in education is still too new to be implemented in school curriculum at the moment.
“Those guys are just clowns when it comes to trying to legislate from the state level school board decisions, including creating graduation requirements and always adding to what’s expected,” Austin said. “I don’t see it as a standalone curriculum. I think it’s got to be something that’s part of the fabric of who we are. And I wish they would just stay out of these things. It’s too new right now.”
PAUSD assistant superintendent Jeong Choe says that since AI is rapidly evolving, the district is not rushing to develop a concrete policy based on the bill.
“We want it broad right now,” Choe said. “If we wrote the [new] policies today, the uses and evolution of AI would be different in two months than the policy we just wrote. So we’re just trying not to box ourselves in. It’s going to just change too fast.”
Austin seconds this, saying that we do not need clear answers to what the AI in education should look like at the moment. PAUSD is continuing to have an open discussion on how to implement AI in schools, with hopes of leading discussions in AI literacy.
“No one has to be right or wrong right now, I think right and wrong should be blurred, and we’re gonna have to figure it out,” Austin said. “I think we’re going to be one of the absolute leaders, not only in the state of California, but the entire country.”
Austin also says the bill will transform how students and teachers perceive responsible AI use in education. For example, it will change what counts as cheating in terms of brainstorming and editing.
“I think in the beginning, people used it [AI] superficially to have it do the writing for them,” Austin said. “I think that’s a terrible use of it. But we can put large data sources in and ask it for takeaway messages, questions, places that we should probe deeper saves us hours. And it’s not cheating, it’s our data.”
Choe says that although the district does not exactly have policies based on the bill, they have been having conversations on how to address it. They hope to underscore a “process over product” mindset, with students encouraged to cite how they used AI in their assignments—although it could look different for each subject.
“You can take that Bill and if you’re an English teacher, that might look very different from a math teacher,” Choe said. “So the teachers are definitely having those conversations, and we are going to have some conversation around how to recognize or how to teach students to ethically state that I use AI to do x, y, z, and this part was my creation.”
PAUSD has currently been working on training teachers and staff to identify opportunities and challenges with the use of AI in the classroom through the AI Ad-Hoc committee. Last spring, the committee launched the AI Now! initiative, which designs and facilitates AI training sessions for staff. The initiative’s team involves multiple AI teacher leads from each secondary school and leads from most of the elementary sites. According to Jackie Smith — PAUSD’s educational technology coordinator and a member of the initiative’s team — a lot is still under discussion and the committee is deliberating on how the district should respond to legislation.
“A lot of it is speculation on our part, because we’re waiting for the California Department of Education to fully interpret what as a state we’re expecting from instruction and how it’s integrated as we adopt new curriculum going forward, next year and beyond,” Smith said. “So right now, we know for sure that we need to help our staff and students become more comfortable understanding what is or is not allowed … but a lot of it right now is just kind of waiting for more information to come forward.”
