Friend or Foe? California schools & legislators battle with AI in classrooms

The future, a spectacle to all, is advancing rapidly with help of the spread of artificial intelligence, especially in the Los Angeles Unified School District, the second-largest school district in the country.

While teachers and students pave the way for AI usage and rules in schools, in the grand scheme of things, legislators are also finding AI spilling into the world of education. As teachers and students attempt to integrate AI and find appropriate guardrails, California has seen increasingly more legislative bills being proposed on AI implementation. 

Nora Smith, an incoming junior at El Camino Real Charter High School in Woodland Hills, said that she has “witnessed cheating and plagiarism by students using AI technology,” alongside increasing numbers of teachers using AI to generate assignments. 

“I worry that over time, students will have no drive to work originally as AI is spreading so quickly,” Smith said. 

Some students, however, think that AI is a useful tool to complete school work. 

“AI is one of the most efficient, swift, and ubiquitous ways that can help you discover eloquent and intelligent synonyms to describe exactly what you want to convey to the readers in your work,” incoming junior Sage Bellisi said.

High school students are increasingly using AI to assist with essays, homework and more. “Of the approximately 200 million papers assessed, 11% had at least 20% of AI-generated writing, while 3% of papers contained more than 80% of AI writing, according to Turnitin’s 2023 survey.

Teachers also find themselves avoiding AI usage by changing how they teach their students. Teachers are increasingly switching from digital to paper assignments as they’ve seen students’ work ethics change, according to Amy Carter, an English and journalism teacher at El Camino Real. 

“This last school year I did more work on paper than I have in the past couple of years,” Carter said. “I know it’s important for students to have some time without technology to think and write.” 

In 2024 alone, there have been about 50 bills proposed on AI, according to District 42 Assemblymember Jacqui Irwin, who is based in Thousand Oaks. Senate Bill 896, presented by Sen. Bill Dodd, who represents the 3rd Senate District in Napa, as well as Assembly Bill 2013, presented by Irwin, both target open access for the public to see what data was used to train AI systems.

“We should know what any model is trained on because what we want to do is make sure that people have trust in these AI models,” Irwin said. “The way to really develop trust is that there is transparency upfront on what type of training data was used.” 

Dodd often references concerns and cautionary facts on the rapidly rising use of AI among younger generations. He sees that children “are distracted, and they’re not putting the cognitive thought that needs to be done to move forward as rapidly as others are,” Dodd said. “I hope that all [AI] does is make a teacher better, a teacher more effective and a student more effective.” 

Educators are allowed to incorporate AI into their educating tools, and do as they would like with the approach of how they are teaching.

“Schools and educators need to be flexible and able to keep up with our changing world,” Carter said. “I want to develop lessons to help my students learn how to use it responsibly, instead of just trying to fight it.”

Still, the school district’s attitude towards technology is unclear. On one hand, the LAUSD Board most recently voted to ban cell phone usage during the school day for students. On the other hand, it recently launched “Ed,” an AI program designed to create personalized action plans uniquely tailored to each student’s needs. However, the chatbot will no longer be available for students after the company that created it had to put much of their staff on temporary leave.

“By leveraging the power of AI, we are creating a tool for all students that maximizes resources beyond the school day by individualizing their education and integrating information for accelerating learning at a level never before seen,” LAUSD Superintendent Alberto M. Carvalho said in a March 2024 press release. 

Legislators in California continue to work on passing AI accountability bills and regulating this growing tool among not only California but the entire nation. 

“My hope is first that people gain more trust through transparency and seeing what the positive aspects are,” Irwin said. “If we are able to move things, [and] deal with these risky situations, the solutions are really unlimited.”