{"id":541,"date":"2026-08-25T13:05:37","date_gmt":"2026-08-25T17:05:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/solutionsreview.com\/edtech\/?p=541"},"modified":"2026-08-25T13:23:59","modified_gmt":"2026-08-25T17:23:59","slug":"dont-wait-for-your-state-to-write-your-ai-rules","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/solutionsreview.com\/edtech\/2026\/08\/25\/dont-wait-for-your-state-to-write-your-ai-rules\/","title":{"rendered":"Don’t Wait for Your State to Write Your AI Rules"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Matthew Karabinos, MAT offers this commentary on why not to wait to wait for your state to write your AI rules. <\/strong>This article originally appeared in Insight Jam<\/a><\/em>, an enterprise IT community that enables human conversation on AI.<\/span><\/strong><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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

Teachers are using artificial intelligence (AI). Their districts have not told them how. Gallup and the Walton Family Foundation\u00a0surveyed 2,069 public school teachers<\/u><\/a>\u00a0this spring and found that 60 percent use AI tools for work while only 18 percent have received any formal guidance on applying them. A third have received none at all. The gap runs widest in the schools that are economically disadvantaged, where teachers were less likely to have gotten direction than their peers in wealthier districts.<\/p>\n

Districts have not been idle. They have been adopting policy. The two numbers from the Gallup survey diverge because a policy and a guidance document answer different questions, and districts have been treating them as one thing.<\/p>\n

Pennsylvania, where I work, has yet to give districts a framework. The\u00a0Pennsylvania Department of Education\u00a0<\/u><\/a>keeps a page telling schools to read vendor terms carefully, protect student data, and keep a person in the loop when a tool touches grading or discipline. The advice is sound as far as it goes. It stops short of a framework, and it does not answer the question a principal has on a Tuesday afternoon when a parent accuses a teacher of using AI to grade their student\u2019s work.<\/p>\n

More than 30 states have\u00a0published guidance of some kind<\/u><\/a>. Pennsylvania’s House Education Committee held a hearing in Pittsburgh this spring where educators\u00a0asked the state for direction<\/u><\/a>. Penn State University spent months\u00a0touring the commonwealth<\/u><\/a>\u00a0collecting input to inform whatever comes next. That is all good work, but none of it helps a superintendent in Somerset County who needs an answer before the September board meeting.<\/p>\n

The states that have acted are not solving this either. Ohio became the first to require every district to adopt a formal AI policy, and\u00a0Idaho, Maryland, Oklahoma, and Virginia followed<\/u><\/a>\u00a0with laws directing their education departments to issue guidance and their school boards to adopt policies. Those mandates produce policies. They do not produce the things teachers are missing: implementation, application, rollout, and integration.<\/p>\n

So write your own. The formula is not complicated. One vision, two layers.<\/p>\n

Policy is the Legal Layer but Guidance is Where the Work Lives<\/strong><\/h2>\n

When a policy is created, it goes to the board, it gets two public readings, and your solicitor reads every word. An AI policy should name the laws you are already bound by, the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), and your state’s student data provisions, and it states plainly what not to do. Things like no personally identifiable student information should go into a tool the district has not approved, no AI system should make a final call on grades or special education eligibility without a person behind the decision, and new tools should go through review before they touch student accounts.<\/p>\n

A policy that runs eight pages is a policy nobody reads, and it gives you eight pages to defend the first time something goes wrong.<\/p>\n

Look to your state departments of education or state organization workgroups to see what is already there. In my work I see that most schools have adopted the\u00a0Pennsylvania School Boards Association\u2019s model policy<\/u><\/a>. Borrow the policy. It is the layer that transfers, because the laws it names are the same everywhere. It cannot be the final step, though.<\/p>\n

Guidance is the other layer that you cannot borrow. It is not board policy; therefore, it does not need a vote. You can revise it anytime, including when a vendor changes its terms or when your school\u2019s AI models update with new features. The Pennsylvania districts that have gotten ahead of this chose to prioritize guidance for exactly that reason<\/u><\/a>, because policy requires a long committee process and multiple public readings, while guidance can be created and tweaked as often as needed and, hopefully, regularly. TeachAI provides\u00a0a free toolkit<\/u><\/a>\u00a0to help districts build their guidance locally.<\/p>\n

Guidance answers the questions your staff are already asking each other in the hallways. What does appropriate use look like in a fourth-grade classroom? Can a counselor use a chatbot to draft a letter home? Does the English department have one position on AI in the writing process or more? Where does a student have to disclose that they used a tool, and what happens when they do not?<\/p>\n

The Document Matters Less Than the 12 People<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Here is the part most districts skip: Build the guidance with your staff. Put 10 or 12 people in a room: teachers from each subject or level, a librarian, a special education supervisor, whoever runs your technology, a couple of building administrators, and a student or two if your board will allow it. Give them six meetings and a deadline. What they produce will be better than anything an outside consultant hands you because they know which tools are already in the building and which ones the students already found.<\/p>\n

When guidance is created this way, everyone walks out knowing why each line is there. They become \u201cwalking resources\u201d for the other teachers and students.”<\/p>\n

Most districts cannot see themselves using AI right now, but teachers and students already are. I have yet to walk into a district where that is not true. Without a policy and guidance, teachers and students feel compelled to keep their AI use silent because they do not ask questions they think will get them disciplined. A district with clear guidance and policy is aware of what is happening in its buildings on any given day. A district with a policy and no guidance finds out when a parent files a complaint.<\/p>\n

This Investment Takes the Most Limited Resource of All: Time<\/strong><\/h4>\n

Districts in my region run lean. My region includes Blair, Cambria, Somerset, and Bedford counties, which are rural and semi-rural. It\u2019s where, if you have a technology director, they are also the data privacy officer, the football coach, and the student information system administrator. Hosting six meetings across a semester costs real money in coverage. The Gallup survey, referenced earlier, found that guidance is scarcest in economically disadvantaged schools. This is a problem on the national level. Researchers at the National Association of State Boards of Education found that districts without investments created by leadership schools adopt AI by\u00a0vendor offerings and their limited capacity<\/u><\/a>, rather than by a coherent plan.<\/p>\n

There are two ways around that. The first is to stop doing it alone. Most states have a regional layer built for precisely this, whether it is called an intermediate unit, like here in Pennsylvania, an educational service agency, a board of cooperative educational services, or a regional education service agency. Neighboring districts can build a single draft together, and a regional agency can own the revision cycle that no single district has staff to maintain.<\/p>\n

The second way is to lower the bar for the first version. Guidance does not have to be comprehensive. Guidance that covers staff use, student use, data rules, and disclosure will carry a district through a school year. A common practice now is using AI to draft the guidance. Let AI produce the strawman. It is easier to argue with a bad draft than to start at a blank page, and the discussion is the part that matters.<\/p>\n

Then, during staff meetings, or other times within the district schedule, discuss the pros and cons of that draft. This feedback period is a time when teachers and students can find the weak spots and suggest improvements. This process may take a whole year, but the result is well thought out guidance with buy-in from staff and students.<\/p>\n

Now What?<\/strong><\/h4>\n

Pull your acceptable use policy and read it with AI in mind. Most of them were written for a computer lab and a web filter, and you will find they already cover more than you expected while missing the things that matter now. Make note of what is missing. Think about what the technology infrastructure of your school is currently and how AI fits, or doesn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

Then, name your 12 people, put the first meeting on the September calendar, and set December as the date guidance goes out to staff. The process may take longer than you want, but the decision to include all the stakeholders will pay off tenfold. If you want someone to run the first meeting, your regional service agency is a great place to start.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Matthew Karabinos, MAT offers this commentary on why not to wait to wait for your state to write your AI rules. This article originally appeared in Insight Jam, an enterprise IT community that enables human conversation on AI. Teachers are using artificial intelligence (AI). Their districts have not told them how. Gallup and the Walton […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1486,"featured_media":546,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[77],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nDon't Wait for Your State to Write Your AI Rules<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Matthew Karabinos, MAT offers this commentary on why not to wait to wait for your state to write your AI rules.\" \/>\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\/08\/25\/dont-wait-for-your-state-to-write-your-ai-rules\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Don't Wait for Your State to Write Your AI Rules\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" 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