E&W Blog

The Subcommittee on Early Childhood, Elementary, and Secondary Education held a hearing to look at how artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming the classroom, including how teachers teach.

Subcommittee Chairman Kevin Kiley (R-CA) started the hearing by highlighting how AI can help support teachers. “With AI tools, educators can more easily perform a wide range of classroom functions like analyzing student performance, creating lesson plans, and personalizing curriculum to help students succeed…In a world where thousands of teachers feel stressed or mounting burnout, AI can help teachers save time so that they can focus more on what they do best,” he said. 

Chairman Tim Walberg (R-MI) asked how AI is helping improve student outcomes. One witness pointed to a first-grade teacher in Houston who utilized AI and saw a 20 percent improvement in test scores. “I think this example speaks to a broader idea that AI has the potential to help support the personalization of learning opportunities for students while at the same time freeing up the teacher…to then spend that time building relationships with the students, to motivate those students to thrive, [and] to achieve their goals as well,” Mr. Aneesh Sohoni, CEO at Teach for America, explained.

Ms. Michele Blatt, State Superintendent of Schools at the West Virginia Department of Education, discussed withRep. Mark Harris (R-NC) how schools are protecting academic integrity and preventing cheating in the age of AI. “With our guidance we train our teachers in how to use…AI. As opposed to maybe telling a child that ‘I need you to write the definition for your 10 vocabulary words in 10 sentences’—which a child could do in ChatGPT in literally 10 seconds. We encourage our teachers to put into the platform themselves ‘how can I engage students to help them understand how to learn these vocabulary words and how to use them in sentences’,” she said.

Mrs. Allyson Knox, Senior Director of Education and Workforce Policy at Microsoft, told Rep. Burgess Owens (R-UT) that AI is not just improving student grades but also increasing parental involvement in their child’s education. “A special education teacher…in Wichita, Kansas…has found [a way] to use AI tools to [better] connect his special education students with the parents. At the beginning of the school year, they were only reading about four words per minute; today, they are reading 40 words a minute, and he believes it’s because of this new partnership with the parents so they can continue the reading at home,” she said.

Mrs. Knox discussed with Rep. Mark Messmer (R-IN) how collaboration between companies like Microsoft and schools are helping support teachers. “We have found through [our programs] that the best way to go about ensuring this great fly wheel of learning for teachers is to broker partnerships with…organizations…and we develop these partnerships so that we’re making sure our programs and certifications are real and grounded in what students are facing today,” she explained.

Bottom line: As America’s schools and classrooms are transformed by AI, Committee Republicans are working to better understand the benefits and challenges of this technology.