How thoroughly has the adoption of commercial AI already toppled our capacity to think? How much has it degraded the ability of young children in elementary or middle school to learn? Or has it somehow improved their cognition and learning abilities (I would not bet on this) in the era since we all first heard the term “ChatGPT”? New York City intends to learn the answers to these questions, and then some, given the announcement this week that the city would broadly ban most uses of AI in classroom settings for public school children all the way up to the beginning of high school. Even the use of individual screens will be greatly reduced for the youngest of students, forcing developing brains to learn in more tactile, decidedly older fashion. Nor are the teachers immune from the effects of the new policy, as they too will supposedly be banned from using AI for tasks such as grading assignments, or “counseling a student in crisis,” although we would contend that one should not need to be told that Claude is not the authority one turns to on that topic. Still, it’s a sweeping set of new policies, and a fairly ambitious attempt to address a growing reliance on AI from both young learners and the people assigned to teach them.
“The tech industry wants us to believe that A.I.-powered early education is not only inevitable, but necessary,” said NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani in a statement. “We do not see it that way.”
Mayor Mamdani: AI is present in nearly every aspect of our lives. I am proud to announce New York City's first ever AI policy for our public schools. Children need teachers and human connection to learn and grow. This school year, we will implement a 1 year moratorium on AI from 2k through 8th grade
— Headquarters (@headquartersnews.bsky.social) 11:55 AM · Sep 2, 2026
The New York City Public Schools system is the nation’s largest, and potentially its most complex, which means this particular experiment could potentially serve as an important bellwether. It will affect roughly 600,000 students, or two-thirds of the kids in NYC public schools, who will by and large be restricted from AI use in the classroom, or through school-provided devices, through the entirety of their most formative years. Even still, it perhaps unsurprisingly isn’t seen as enough by some of the more zealous parents and advocacy groups, which had called for a complete, two-year moratorium on any use of AI in schools. What they got instead is a system that will make the occasional exceptions for a wide array of specific cases, for both students and teachers alike. But even with those exceptions, it’s difficult to argue this is anything but the most wide-ranging, intentional restriction of digital tools that a huge public school system of this kind has seen in recent memory. In addition to limiting middle schoolers to no more than 45 minutes of working on screens per day, the new policy also contains other, specific bans, such as restricting all access to the “companion chatbot” apps that have, in well-publicized cases, been involved in the development of delusional behavior in young people. For kids who have already been reared on this technology, the transition will no doubt come as a shock.
What will this look like in practice? According to Kamar Samuels, the chancellor of New York City Public Schools, it will first involve the removal or altering of more than 40 different educational apps used by the school system for subjects that range from reading, to math and beyond. But there will be the aforementioned exceptions, especially found in “centrally approved instructional programs” approved by the school system, including e-books or coding software, which will still retain AI components. AI will also apparently squeak its way into certain student tests, or be available in tools for students with disabilities or those speaking English as a second language. Similarly, teachers will still be able to use AI for purposes such as designing lesson plans or translating material. It will be banned for aiding in more concrete evaluation of students, which is apparently something New York City Public Schools believes a teacher should do on their own. Go figure! Regardless, this will involve a greater degree of standardization for teachers than had been present in the past, where individual teachers had been largely free to make use of these tools to whatever degree they wished in teachings.
“[Students] learn best when they are wrestling with hard problems, when they’re getting it wrong, when they’re trying again and finally getting it right,” said Kamar Samuels in a statement this week. “No app, chatbot, or algorithm can replicate that productive struggle for a child.”
Mayor Zohran Mamdani and other city officials announced a sweeping new policy Wednesday imposing a one-year ban on student use of generative artificial intelligence in New York City public schools from 2-K through 8th grade, while also launching AI literacy lessons for high schoolers. #Mamdani
— Meta Resistance (@metaresistance.bsky.social) 1:08 PM · Sep 2, 2026
It should go without saying that all of this applies only to the classroom setting, as New York City Public Schools can’t exactly stop elementary school or middle school students from still turning to AI programs or chatbots during their home hours. The hope, though, is that by restricting the use of these AI tools in one place, it will lead to genuine introspection between kids and parents on their use of the same technology everywhere else. Those lessons would hopefully then carry over to public high school classes, which will also find their use of AI limited in other ways. At the same time, NYC even apparently intends to teach high schoolers about “AI literacy,” which would explore “both the opportunities and pitfalls of the technology, including its capability of producing confident but incorrect information, known as hallucinations,” according to The New York Times.
Proponents of the new policy have referred to it as a method of using the vast resources and student body of the New York City Public Schools system as leverage to affect positive change within the AI industry itself, in a way that could parallel the court outcomes that are forcing dramatic, pending redesigns to the social media products offered by Meta, such as Facebook and Instagram. If other school districts and whole city public school systems ultimately follow suit, it could represent a way to force AI companies to address persistent concerns about the effects their products may have on the most impressionable of young minds.
And all New York City and its students have to do is prove that children can still learn in most of the same ways that they did 10 or 20 years ago. Good luck, kids. We’ll be rooting for you.
