Becky Pringle

Few parts of society have been impacted by the rise of AI in a more tangible way than education. Tools like ChatGPT have helped students learn, but also facilitated cheating and threatened students’ abilities to develop critical thinking techniques. Some AI learning tools that promised to increase student productivity and “democratize” education ended up failing and burning giant holes in school district budgets.

Becky Pringle, who leads the National Education Association—the largest labor union in the US.—has been watching these developments closely. As a public school teacher for three decades, Pringle saw how new waves of technology unsettled but then aided teaching. In order to aid the responsible deployment of artificial intelligence in classrooms, she convened a task force that released a roadmap exploring AI professional development, mitigating student harms, and equity in access.
The best practices, Pringle believes, will not be issued top-down, but emerge out of the first waves of schools that are excited to study and integrate AI. These best approaches might then spread through the nearly 3 million teachers in the NEA, who teach tens of millions of students across the country. “We cannot approach this technology in a way that eliminates the teacher,” Pringle tells TIME. “We want to think about it in terms of enhancing the educational experience.”