{"id":383,"date":"2026-06-23T10:41:58","date_gmt":"2026-06-23T14:41:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/solutionsreview.com\/edtech\/?p=383"},"modified":"2026-06-23T10:43:31","modified_gmt":"2026-06-23T14:43:31","slug":"schools-keep-asking-if-students-should-use-ai-the-sharper-question-is-whether-they-should-help-govern-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/solutionsreview.com\/edtech\/2026\/06\/23\/schools-keep-asking-if-students-should-use-ai-the-sharper-question-is-whether-they-should-help-govern-it\/","title":{"rendered":"Schools Keep Asking if Students Should Use AI: The Sharper Question is Whether They Should Help Govern it"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/p>\n

Dr. Michael Lubelfeld offers this commentary on how the sharp question is whether students should help govern AI. <\/strong><\/em>This article originally appeared in Insight Jam<\/a>, an enterprise IT community that enables human conversation on AI.<\/span><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

In our suburban Chicago-area PK-8 school district, eighth-graders hold voting seats on the committee that governs how artificial intelligence (AI) is used in their schools. Not honorary seats, and not a suggestion box dressed up as participation. Voting seats on the body that sets the rules. Those rules now bind every adult in the building, including the superintendent who signs off on them.<\/p>\n

We did not start there. We started where almost everyone starts.<\/p>\n

The loudest version of the AI debate in K-12 runs on a single switch: ban it or allow it, detect it or permit it. The two camps argue fiercely, but they share an assumption worth naming out loud. Both treat students as a population to be managed: the potential cheaters to be caught on one side, the vulnerable minds to be shielded on the other. Both instincts are reasonable. Schools serve children, and caution is a feature here, not a bug. But both positions leave students in exactly the same place: as the objects of a policy written entirely by adults, about them, without them.<\/p>\n

I have come to believe that is the actual problem. Not whether the technology is good or bad, but who is in the room when we decide how to use it.<\/p>\n

My operating philosophy is what I call innovation with guardrails: move deliberately, preserve the foundational skills that make learning durable, keep equity at the center, and draw boundaries that are specific rather than aspirational. The difficulty lies in the tension underneath that phrase. AI moves at the speed of a product release. Schools move at the speed of trust. Lean too cautious, and you abandon kids to an unguided internet. Lean too eagerly, and you outsource judgment they have not yet built. Either way, it is the students who absorb the cost.<\/p>\n

Like most systems, we began by pointing AI at the adults. The earliest use cases were teacher efficiency: lesson scaffolding, translation for our multilingual families, and relief from the administrative drag that pulls educators away from children. All of it is useful, and all of it is entirely conventional. The shift that actually mattered came when we stopped treating students as end users of a tool and started treating them as designers of how that tool would live in our schools.<\/p>\n

We organized that work around a simple discipline for centering student voice, which I summarize with the acronym ASK’EM: ask students for their perspective, support their capacity to contribute, know the context they are genuinely operating in, empower them with real decisions rather than symbolic ones, and monitor what happens so the approach can be adjusted over time. The last two letters are where most \u201cstudent voice\u201d initiatives quietly fail. Asking is easy and costs a leader nothing. Handing over a vote is neither.<\/p>\n

Implementation in our district as part of my own action research through two fellowships, run in two deliberate lanes calibrated to developmental reality. For our youngest and most language-vulnerable learners, the fourth-grade English language learners (ELLs), we worked inside a closed, privacy-protected environment, a walled garden where the boundaries are set in advance and the exploration is safe by design. For our sixth- and eighth-graders, we opened the gate: an open-creation setting where students built their own chatbots, conducted their own research, and pushed the limits of the tools rather than simply consuming what the tools produced. Same philosophy, two settings, matched to where the children actually are. The point is the design, not the software brand underneath it.<\/p>\n

Then we did the thing that still surprises other superintendents when I describe it. We let the students co-author the policy and seated them, with voting rights, on our Educational Technology Committee.<\/p>\n

What happened next is the part I find most instructive. In several cases, the students were more conservative than the adults. They raised concerns about disclosure, fairness, and over-reliance that our committee had skated past. They were the ones who insisted that using AI to think faster is a different act from using it to avoid thinking at all, and they wrote that distinction into the guidance in language the adults had not produced on their own. We shared this model in February 2026 at the national conference of AASA, The School Superintendents Association, and the most common reaction in the room was not doubt about whether young people could handle the responsibility. It was a surprise we had thought to ask about.<\/p>\n

We named the arc of this work \u201cfrom urgency to agency.\u201d The urgency is real and external; it is the pressure every leader feels to do something visible about AI right now. The agency is the deliberate choice to convert that pressure into capacity. In this case, it is the students’ capacity to help govern a technology they will live alongside for decades after the rest of us have moved on.<\/p>\n

None of this requires a new budget line or a new platform. It requires a decision about who counts as a stakeholder. Three moves are available to any district on Monday morning. First, audit your AI governance body and ask a blunt question: Is there a student on it, and does that student have a vote or merely a chair? Second, separate your implementation by developmental stage rather than running one policy across PK through high school, because what protects a fourth grader constrains an eighth grader, and what frees an eighth grader endangers a fourth grader. Third, write your boundaries as specific, enforceable practices (approved tools, privacy standards, grade-appropriate use cases, clear academic-integrity lines) rather than as values statements no one can act on.<\/p>\n

I want to be careful not to oversell this. Student governance does not replace adult responsibility; if anything, it raises the bar, because you cannot hand young people a real vote and then look away from how they use it. The teaching, the protecting, and the final accountability still sit squarely with the adults. But the missing party in most school AI policy is not a better detection tool or a more confident ban. It is the student we keep writing the policy about. Bring that student to the table with an actual vote, and the guardrails do not get weaker. They get wiser.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dr. Michael Lubelfeld offers this commentary on how the sharp question is whether students should help govern AI. This article originally appeared in Insight Jam, an enterprise IT community that enables human conversation on AI. In our suburban Chicago-area PK-8 school district, eighth-graders hold voting seats on the committee that governs how artificial intelligence (AI) […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1449,"featured_media":391,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[46],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nSchools Keep Asking if Students Should Use AI: The Sharper Question is Whether They Should Help Govern it<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Dr. Michael Lubelfeld offers this commentary on how the sharp question is whether students should help govern AI.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/solutionsreview.com\/edtech\/2026\/06\/23\/schools-keep-asking-if-students-should-use-ai-the-sharper-question-is-whether-they-should-help-govern-it\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Schools Keep Asking if Students Should Use AI: The Sharper Question is Whether They Should Help Govern it\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Dr. Michael Lubelfeld offers this commentary on how the sharp question is whether students should help govern AI.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/solutionsreview.com\/edtech\/2026\/06\/23\/schools-keep-asking-if-students-should-use-ai-the-sharper-question-is-whether-they-should-help-govern-it\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"The Hub for Educational Technology News in the Changing World of Education\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2026-06-23T14:41:58+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2026-06-23T14:43:31+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/solutionsreview.com\/edtech\/files\/2026\/06\/AdobeStock_826565477-1.jpeg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"800\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"400\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Dr. Michael Lubelfeld\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Dr. Michael Lubelfeld\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"6 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/solutionsreview.com\/edtech\/2026\/06\/23\/schools-keep-asking-if-students-should-use-ai-the-sharper-question-is-whether-they-should-help-govern-it\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/solutionsreview.com\/edtech\/2026\/06\/23\/schools-keep-asking-if-students-should-use-ai-the-sharper-question-is-whether-they-should-help-govern-it\/\",\"name\":\"Schools Keep Asking if Students Should Use AI: The Sharper Question is Whether They Should Help Govern it\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/solutionsreview.com\/edtech\/#website\"},\"primaryImageOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/solutionsreview.com\/edtech\/2026\/06\/23\/schools-keep-asking-if-students-should-use-ai-the-sharper-question-is-whether-they-should-help-govern-it\/#primaryimage\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/solutionsreview.com\/edtech\/2026\/06\/23\/schools-keep-asking-if-students-should-use-ai-the-sharper-question-is-whether-they-should-help-govern-it\/#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\/\/solutionsreview.com\/edtech\/files\/2026\/06\/AdobeStock_826565477-1.jpeg\",\"datePublished\":\"2026-06-23T14:41:58+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2026-06-23T14:43:31+00:00\",\"author\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/solutionsreview.com\/edtech\/#\/schema\/person\/a83a7fc3fee2437ce7cdf6ffc55584a0\"},\"description\":\"Dr. Michael Lubelfeld offers this commentary on how the sharp question is whether students should help govern AI.\",\"breadcrumb\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/solutionsreview.com\/edtech\/2026\/06\/23\/schools-keep-asking-if-students-should-use-ai-the-sharper-question-is-whether-they-should-help-govern-it\/#breadcrumb\"},\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"ReadAction\",\"target\":[\"https:\/\/solutionsreview.com\/edtech\/2026\/06\/23\/schools-keep-asking-if-students-should-use-ai-the-sharper-question-is-whether-they-should-help-govern-it\/\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"ImageObject\",\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/solutionsreview.com\/edtech\/2026\/06\/23\/schools-keep-asking-if-students-should-use-ai-the-sharper-question-is-whether-they-should-help-govern-it\/#primaryimage\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/solutionsreview.com\/edtech\/files\/2026\/06\/AdobeStock_826565477-1.jpeg\",\"contentUrl\":\"https:\/\/solutionsreview.com\/edtech\/files\/2026\/06\/AdobeStock_826565477-1.jpeg\",\"width\":800,\"height\":400},{\"@type\":\"BreadcrumbList\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/solutionsreview.com\/edtech\/2026\/06\/23\/schools-keep-asking-if-students-should-use-ai-the-sharper-question-is-whether-they-should-help-govern-it\/#breadcrumb\",\"itemListElement\":[{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":1,\"name\":\"Home\",\"item\":\"https:\/\/solutionsreview.com\/edtech\/\"},{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":2,\"name\":\"Schools Keep Asking if Students Should Use AI: The Sharper Question is Whether They Should Help Govern it\"}]},{\"@type\":\"WebSite\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/solutionsreview.com\/edtech\/#website\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/solutionsreview.com\/edtech\/\",\"name\":\"The Hub for Educational Technology News in the Changing World of Education\",\"description\":\"\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"SearchAction\",\"target\":{\"@type\":\"EntryPoint\",\"urlTemplate\":\"https:\/\/solutionsreview.com\/edtech\/?s={search_term_string}\"},\"query-input\":{\"@type\":\"PropertyValueSpecification\",\"valueRequired\":true,\"valueName\":\"search_term_string\"}}],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\"},{\"@type\":\"Person\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/solutionsreview.com\/edtech\/#\/schema\/person\/a83a7fc3fee2437ce7cdf6ffc55584a0\",\"name\":\"Dr. Michael Lubelfeld\",\"image\":{\"@type\":\"ImageObject\",\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/solutionsreview.com\/edtech\/#\/schema\/person\/image\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/solutionsreview.com\/edtech\/files\/2026\/06\/Lubelfeld.jpg\",\"contentUrl\":\"https:\/\/solutionsreview.com\/edtech\/files\/2026\/06\/Lubelfeld.jpg\",\"caption\":\"Dr. Michael Lubelfeld\"},\"description\":\"Dr. Michael Lubelfeld is a 16-year veteran superintendent who led North Shore School District 112 in Highland Park and Highwood, Illinois, from 2018 to 2026. He is the founder of Michael Lubelfeld Educational Consulting (MLEC LLC) and a practitioner-scholar focused on K-12 leadership, AI governance, and organizational change. He serves as an adjunct professor at National Louis University and is a series author and series editor with Bloomsbury. He is an ISTE-ASCD Generation AI Fellow and a Google GSV Fellow.\",\"sameAs\":[\"https:\/\/www.linkedin.com\/in\/michaellubelfeld\/\"],\"url\":\"https:\/\/solutionsreview.com\/edtech\/author\/mlubelfeld\/\"}]}<\/script>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"Schools Keep Asking if Students Should Use AI: The Sharper Question is Whether They Should Help Govern it","description":"Dr. Michael Lubelfeld offers this commentary on how the sharp question is whether students should help govern AI.","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/solutionsreview.com\/edtech\/2026\/06\/23\/schools-keep-asking-if-students-should-use-ai-the-sharper-question-is-whether-they-should-help-govern-it\/","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"Schools Keep Asking if Students Should Use AI: The Sharper Question is Whether They Should Help Govern it","og_description":"Dr. Michael Lubelfeld offers this commentary on how the sharp question is whether students should help govern AI.","og_url":"https:\/\/solutionsreview.com\/edtech\/2026\/06\/23\/schools-keep-asking-if-students-should-use-ai-the-sharper-question-is-whether-they-should-help-govern-it\/","og_site_name":"The Hub for Educational Technology News in the Changing World of Education","article_published_time":"2026-06-23T14:41:58+00:00","article_modified_time":"2026-06-23T14:43:31+00:00","og_image":[{"width":800,"height":400,"url":"https:\/\/solutionsreview.com\/edtech\/files\/2026\/06\/AdobeStock_826565477-1.jpeg","type":"image\/jpeg"}],"author":"Dr. Michael Lubelfeld","twitter_card":"summary_large_image","twitter_misc":{"Written by":"Dr. Michael Lubelfeld","Est. reading time":"6 minutes"},"schema":{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https:\/\/solutionsreview.com\/edtech\/2026\/06\/23\/schools-keep-asking-if-students-should-use-ai-the-sharper-question-is-whether-they-should-help-govern-it\/","url":"https:\/\/solutionsreview.com\/edtech\/2026\/06\/23\/schools-keep-asking-if-students-should-use-ai-the-sharper-question-is-whether-they-should-help-govern-it\/","name":"Schools Keep Asking if Students Should Use AI: The Sharper Question is Whether They Should Help Govern it","isPartOf":{"@id":"https:\/\/solutionsreview.com\/edtech\/#website"},"primaryImageOfPage":{"@id":"https:\/\/solutionsreview.com\/edtech\/2026\/06\/23\/schools-keep-asking-if-students-should-use-ai-the-sharper-question-is-whether-they-should-help-govern-it\/#primaryimage"},"image":{"@id":"https:\/\/solutionsreview.com\/edtech\/2026\/06\/23\/schools-keep-asking-if-students-should-use-ai-the-sharper-question-is-whether-they-should-help-govern-it\/#primaryimage"},"thumbnailUrl":"https:\/\/solutionsreview.com\/edtech\/files\/2026\/06\/AdobeStock_826565477-1.jpeg","datePublished":"2026-06-23T14:41:58+00:00","dateModified":"2026-06-23T14:43:31+00:00","author":{"@id":"https:\/\/solutionsreview.com\/edtech\/#\/schema\/person\/a83a7fc3fee2437ce7cdf6ffc55584a0"},"description":"Dr. Michael Lubelfeld offers this commentary on how the sharp question is whether students should help govern AI.","breadcrumb":{"@id":"https:\/\/solutionsreview.com\/edtech\/2026\/06\/23\/schools-keep-asking-if-students-should-use-ai-the-sharper-question-is-whether-they-should-help-govern-it\/#breadcrumb"},"inLanguage":"en-US","potentialAction":[{"@type":"ReadAction","target":["https:\/\/solutionsreview.com\/edtech\/2026\/06\/23\/schools-keep-asking-if-students-should-use-ai-the-sharper-question-is-whether-they-should-help-govern-it\/"]}]},{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"https:\/\/solutionsreview.com\/edtech\/2026\/06\/23\/schools-keep-asking-if-students-should-use-ai-the-sharper-question-is-whether-they-should-help-govern-it\/#primaryimage","url":"https:\/\/solutionsreview.com\/edtech\/files\/2026\/06\/AdobeStock_826565477-1.jpeg","contentUrl":"https:\/\/solutionsreview.com\/edtech\/files\/2026\/06\/AdobeStock_826565477-1.jpeg","width":800,"height":400},{"@type":"BreadcrumbList","@id":"https:\/\/solutionsreview.com\/edtech\/2026\/06\/23\/schools-keep-asking-if-students-should-use-ai-the-sharper-question-is-whether-they-should-help-govern-it\/#breadcrumb","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https:\/\/solutionsreview.com\/edtech\/"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"Schools Keep Asking if Students Should Use AI: The Sharper Question is Whether They Should Help Govern it"}]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https:\/\/solutionsreview.com\/edtech\/#website","url":"https:\/\/solutionsreview.com\/edtech\/","name":"The Hub for Educational Technology News in the Changing World of Education","description":"","potentialAction":[{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https:\/\/solutionsreview.com\/edtech\/?s={search_term_string}"},"query-input":{"@type":"PropertyValueSpecification","valueRequired":true,"valueName":"search_term_string"}}],"inLanguage":"en-US"},{"@type":"Person","@id":"https:\/\/solutionsreview.com\/edtech\/#\/schema\/person\/a83a7fc3fee2437ce7cdf6ffc55584a0","name":"Dr. Michael Lubelfeld","image":{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"https:\/\/solutionsreview.com\/edtech\/#\/schema\/person\/image\/","url":"https:\/\/solutionsreview.com\/edtech\/files\/2026\/06\/Lubelfeld.jpg","contentUrl":"https:\/\/solutionsreview.com\/edtech\/files\/2026\/06\/Lubelfeld.jpg","caption":"Dr. Michael Lubelfeld"},"description":"Dr. Michael Lubelfeld is a 16-year veteran superintendent who led North Shore School District 112 in Highland Park and Highwood, Illinois, from 2018 to 2026. He is the founder of Michael Lubelfeld Educational Consulting (MLEC LLC) and a practitioner-scholar focused on K-12 leadership, AI governance, and organizational change. He serves as an adjunct professor at National Louis University and is a series author and series editor with Bloomsbury. He is an ISTE-ASCD Generation AI Fellow and a Google GSV Fellow.","sameAs":["https:\/\/www.linkedin.com\/in\/michaellubelfeld\/"],"url":"https:\/\/solutionsreview.com\/edtech\/author\/mlubelfeld\/"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/solutionsreview.com\/edtech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/383"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/solutionsreview.com\/edtech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/solutionsreview.com\/edtech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/solutionsreview.com\/edtech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1449"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/solutionsreview.com\/edtech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=383"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/solutionsreview.com\/edtech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/383\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/solutionsreview.com\/edtech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/391"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/solutionsreview.com\/edtech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=383"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/solutionsreview.com\/edtech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=383"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/solutionsreview.com\/edtech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=383"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}