New survey data puts hard numbers behind the steep rise of ChatGPT and other generative AI chatbots in America’s classrooms — and reveals a big spike in student discipline as a result.

As artificial intelligence tools become more common in schools, most teachers say their districts have adopted guidance and training for both educators and students, according to a new, nationally representative survey by the nonprofit Center for Democracy and Technology. What this guidance lacks, however, are clear instructions on how teachers should respond if they suspect a student used generative AI to cheat.

“Though there has been positive movement, schools are still grappling with how to effectively implement generative AI in the classroom — making this a critical moment for school officials to put appropriate guardrails in place to ensure that irresponsible use of this technology by teachers and students does not become entrenched,” report co-authors Maddy Dwyer and Elizabeth Laird write.

Among the middle and high school teachers who responded to the online survey, which was conducted in November and December, 60% said their schools permit the use of generative AI for schoolwork — double the number who said the same just five months earlier according to a Sept. 2023 survey by the Center for Democracy and Technology. And while a resounding 80% of educators said they have received formal training about the tools, including on how to incorporate generative AI into assignments, just 28% said they’ve received instruction on how to respond if they suspect a student has used ChatGPT to cheat.

Center for Democracy and Technology

Report statistics.

That doesn’t mean, however, that students aren’t getting into trouble. Among survey respondents, 64% said they were aware of students who were disciplined or faced some form of consequences — including not receiving credit for an assignment — for using generative AI on a school assignment. That represents a 16 percentage-point increase from August.

Center for Democracy and Technology

Report statistics.

Fighting fire with fire, a growing share of teachers say they rely on digital detection tools to sniff out students who may have used generative AI to plagiarize. Sixty-eight percent of teachers — and 76% of licensed special education teachers — said they turn to generative AI content detection tools to determine whether students’ work is actually their own.

The findings carry significant equity concerns for students with disabilities, researchers concluded, especially in the face of research suggesting that such detection tools are ineffective.

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Mark Keierleber is an investigative reporter at The 74. Previously, Mark was a reporter at the Student Press Law Center, a Washington, D.C.-based legal assistance agency, where he reported on government transparency and First Amendment issues relevant to students and educators.

The Center for Democracy and Technology is a nonprofit think tank focused on digital rights and expression.

This story first appeared at The 74, a nonprofit news site covering education. Sign up for free newsletters from The 74.

The blue and orange leaflets that arrived in Idaho Falls mailboxes ahead of the school bond election in November 2022 looked like the usual fare that voters across the country get. Sent out by the school district, the mailers encouraged people in the eastern Idaho city to register to vote and listed bullet points highlighting what the bond would pay for.

But the mailers, along with other materials the district distributed, would lead the county prosecutor’s office to fine the superintendent and the district’s spokesperson, accusing them of violating election law by using taxpayer money to advocate for the bond measure. According to the prosecutor, it was illegal for district officials to describe the schools as “overcrowded” and “aged” or to say that students “need modern, safe, and secure schools.”

Such penalties were made possible by a 2018 state law originally pushed by the Idaho Freedom Foundation, a conservative lobbying group that has become a big player in Idaho Republican politics. The foundation has stoked hostility toward public education across the state, pushing book bans in school libraries and accusing districts of indoctrinating students with “woke” ideas like critical race theory.

But unlike groups in other states, the Freedom Foundation has extended its reach by targeting school bond and levy elections, which have traditionally been local issues and are the main ways districts build and repair schools.

[Related: Idaho resolution would aim to lower voting threshold to pass school bonds]

Over the past year, the Idaho Statesman and ProPublica have reported on how many Idaho students learn in poor conditions, in part, because the state has one of the most restrictive policies in the nation: It is one of two states that require two-thirds of voters to approve a bond. Lawmakers recently passed legislation to invest $1.5 billion in new funding for school facilities and proposed a ballot initiative to lower the voting threshold during elections that typically have high turnout. But those measures wouldn’t change the 2018 election integrity law.

School bond supporters said they agree taxpayer money shouldn’t be used to campaign for ballot measures, but they said the interpretation of the law has restricted the ability of school district officials to explain to their communities why the measures are needed, making passing bonds more difficult. Since the law was passed, the Freedom Foundation and those with similar positions have publicly accused at least four school districts of improperly advocating for bonds and levies. In the other cases, prosecutors have not moved forward with fines.

Many states prohibit school districts from taking sides in bond elections to prevent public agencies from using taxpayer dollars to influence elections, and some laws include fines. A similar situation is playing out in Texas, where the attorney general sued several school districts over concerns that administrations were electioneering for candidates, measures or political parties. Generally, however, the laws allow school districts to educate voters. Idaho’s, for example, specifically permits providing information about the cost, purpose and property conditions in a “factually neutral manner.” But there is a lot of gray area between educating and advocating.

Don Lifto, a former Minnesota superintendent who consults for school districts running tax elections, said it’s rare for school administrators to be fined. “I think this was a pretty strict and conservative interpretation of the statute,” he said. Under most state laws, he said, it would be hard to argue that saying students “need modern, safe, and secure schools” is a violation.

A conservative anti-tax tilt has long defined Idaho, well before the Freedom Foundation launched in 2009. Since then, it has become the leading voice against public education in Idaho. Its lobbying arm, Idaho Freedom Action, was the top spender on Facebook ads before the last statewide primary election in 2022.

“They monitor every single vote, and then they really go after people that don’t vote in alignment with them. And I can tell you just from being around the Legislature that a lot of legislators are afraid of them,” said Rod Gramer, the president and CEO of Idaho Business for Education, a group of business leaders focused on improving public schools. “They’ve made it very clear that they want to defund education and privatize education.” (The Statesman is a member of Idaho Business for Education.)

Superintendents, school board trustees and community members in at least half a dozen school districts said in interviews that the Freedom Foundation’s arguments have spread across the state, with local advocates frequently parroting its talking points during board and bond elections.

At the Capitol, the Freedom Foundation’s legislative index has become the authority for some lawmakers when deciding how to vote on bills. Unlike typical lobbying report cards, the group’s elaborate ranking system assigns positive or negative points to each bill, serving as a regular reminder for lawmakers that any step outside the group’s platform could cost them.

“There’s some legislators who follow that religiously and just look at those notes and see how to vote,” said Sen. Rod Furniss, a Republican from Rigby in East Idaho.

Late last year, the local Republican committees in Idaho Falls cited the group’s scores when it decided to investigate six Republican lawmakers because of their votes on certain bills, including education spending bills. Some lawmakers were censured, although they defended their voting records.

Ron Nate, the president of the Idaho Freedom Foundation, declined to comment and did not answer written questions. The Freedom Foundation has called the index an “objective measure” of how legislators vote on the “principles of freedom and limited government.” “Score well, and your political profile is good; score low, and you have some explaining to do,” Nate wrote in 2023. The Freedom Foundation also said that the Idaho Falls case deserved “significantly worse consequences” but that the election integrity bill had been watered down by education groups before passing.

The high bond threshold and low voter turnout can allow well-funded interest groups like the Freedom Foundation to have significant influence, said John Rumel, a University of Idaho law professor. “There’s a relatively small number of people that they need to convince to change the outcome in those elections,” he said.

Even with a high turnout in a general election year, the 2022 bond measure in Idaho Falls failed despite getting 58% of the vote.

The fallout for the district didn’t end with the election. A week before, a complaint was filed with the Bonneville County Sheriff’s office, and three days later, the Freedom Foundation called for the district to be “held accountable for electioneering.”

In the end, the district said, the case cost $54,000 in legal fees.

The Rise of the Freedom Foundation

The Freedom Foundation’s mission is to “defeat Marxism and socialism” with principles of “limited government, free markets and self-reliance,” according to its website.

As broad as that sounds, early on, the group set its sights on bond and levy elections, which intersected with two of the group’s focus areas, taxes and public schools. In 2010, its founder, Wayne Hoffman, wrote an editorial in the Statesman decrying the city of Boise for spending money to educate voters on a ballot measure and warned of what he thought could happen next.

“What happens if Idaho’s 115 school districts decide that it is their job to help ‘educate’ Idahoans on the two-thirds majority needed to pass a school bond?” Hoffman wrote. “If government agencies across Idaho start to follow Boise’s lead, taxpayers — and freedom — don’t stand a chance.”

In 2014, the Freedom Foundation argued on its website that school districts had too many chances to hold bond and levy elections and called for the Legislature to limit them to once every two years. Since then, the Legislature has eliminated two election dates school districts could use each year.

Hoffman declined to comment and referred the Statesman to Nate.

In 2017, the foundation pushed for a strict election integrity law.

That version would have banned any mass communication or mailers leading up to the election, only allowing notices to be posted online or in the newspaper stating the election date, the bond’s impact on residents’ taxes and a “neutral and concise explanation” of what it would do. A public official who violated the law could be charged with a misdemeanor, fined up to $1,000 and sentenced to up to six months in jail. And the election result could be voided.

In part, the legislation grew out of a state Supreme Court case that barred public entities from promoting bonds but provided few guidelines.

Several key education groups sent a letter to Rep. Jason Monks, R-Meridian, who sponsored the legislation, with concerns that it would create a “heckler’s veto” to invalidate elections and have “a serious, chilling effect for anyone working in the public sphere to speak out on relative policy issues.”

A compromise bill in 2018 still banned advocating but specifically allowed districts and local governments to provide information in a “factually neutral manner.” It removed criminal charges, and the penalties were lowered to a $250 fine, though they rose if someone knowingly violated the law.

While some lawmakers raised concerns that the law’s language would inhibit school officials from knowing what they could say, education stakeholders thought the bill provided more clarity, and it passed in the Legislature overwhelmingly.

In the years since, as the education culture wars have heated up, the Freedom Foundation has again positioned itself at the center. The group started publishing a map that promises to reveal “if your school district is indoctrinating students with leftist nonsense,” like having gay-straight alliance clubs or asking students their pronouns. The map also includes diversity, equity and inclusion personnel; test scores; and superintendent salaries.

Last year, exhibiting the reach of the group’s influence, Branden Durst, a former Freedom Foundation analyst, was picked to be the superintendent of the West Bonner School District in North Idaho. Durst did not have the required experience in the classroom for the job, according to the State Board of Education. The trustees who hired him worried about a curriculum that included “social emotional learning.” The appointment and the board’s decision to toss the educational program led two trustees to be recalled. And after the public outcry, Durst submitted a letter that said he’d decided to step aside, and the board accepted it as his resignation. Durst declined to comment.

Organizers of the recall effort said that low voter turnout and a lack of involvement in recent years had fostered an environment that allowed the Freedom Foundation to take hold.

“We were passive about the elections,” said Candy Turner, one of the organizers. “And it came back to bite us.”

The Fallout in Idaho Falls

In May 2023, when Idaho Falls administrators learned the prosecutor was fining two district officials under the election law, the board felt the district had done nothing wrong. It had educated the public on the $250 million bond to build a new high school and two elementary schools, along with other repairs — and it had ultimately failed. Superintendent Karla LaOrange, who joined the district after the complaint was filed, said the district thought if it paid the fines, which came to $375 in total, it would signal to the community that it was admitting guilt. So the district, known as D91, spent the money to fight.

Lisa Keller of D91 Taxpayers, a group that opposed the bond effort, said the group was not responsible for filing the complaint, though she and its members had concerns about the materials. She said community members worried about losing their homes due to the increase in taxes from the bond, which was the largest the district had ever run. She described the district’s plan for a new school as wanting to construct a Taj Mahal.

The formal allegation, however, came from Larry Lyon, a local resident who helped fund the political action committee behind D91 Taxpayers, with the help of Brian Stutzman, another nearby resident who has been involved in tax issues statewide, according to campaign finance records and the complaint obtained through a public records request. The Freedom Foundation had alleged the district violated the law in a website post days before the election, and D91 Taxpayers shared the post on its Facebook page.

Lyon said in a message he filed the complaint because he was “sincerely concerned” the district “crossed the line from simply presenting facts to advocating for higher taxes with public funds.” He said he was confident the prosecutor’s office would “be fair to everyone involved.” Stutzman said he and others had raised their concerns with the district but felt like the superintendent wasn’t taking them seriously.

Bonneville County Prosecutor Randy Neal said he had no choice but to move forward with the complaint because he thought it was a clear violation. In an interview, he went through the district’s mailers to explain the problematic language. Instead of saying “overcrowded,” the district could have said the school was built for a certain number of students and that it now served more. “What I can’t do is say, ‘We need to replace the school because it’s overcrowded.’ That’s advocating for the bond,” he said.

Neal said the district ignored its own legal advice, citing a memo from Idaho law firm Hawley Troxell that warned the “most questionable actions” happen when districts explain the “‘need’ for the new facilities” and said “crowding issues or age of facilities” may be better for others to talk about. Hawley Troxell and the school district didn’t respond to requests for comment about the memo.

Erin Bingham, one of the leading supporters of the bond effort, said she felt like Neal was associated with D91 Taxpayers and the Freedom Foundation. She called the complaint “frivolous” and a “waste of time and taxpayers’ money.”

“I feel like it creates a precedent that if they don’t fight it,” these groups will continue to file complaints against the school district during bond elections, she said.

Neal denied taking action for political reasons or being affiliated with any advocacy groups. “I have no dog in the fight,” he said. “I don’t have children. This isn’t the school district I live in. I don’t know any of these people.”

The district’s decision to fight the fines bred even more distrust with D91 Taxpayers, which said the district was wasting money on legal bills.

“What a breach of public trust, to fight the county prosecutor with my money, paying their lawyers with my money,” Keller told the Statesman and ProPublica. “This is ridiculous. It’s ridiculous.”

The district eventually settled the complaint. The total fine was lowered to $250, and the case was dismissed.

The prosecutor’s action, though, has had a chilling effect across the community and state, education stakeholders say.

“It’s panic I’ve heard for sure,” said Quinn Perry of the Idaho School Boards Association. ISBA, along with two other education groups, wrote an opinion piece last year noting that the Legislature has been making it increasingly difficult for school districts and local governments to run measures that raise taxes. If simply communicating a need is interpreted as advocacy, “we are not sure that school districts can sustain their operations or ever build a new school,” the groups wrote. “Perhaps that is the point.”

Idaho Falls board chair Hillary Radcliffe said district officials may feel they can’t speak as “frankly” about what’s going on because it could be construed as advocacy. “They have to be very, very limited in what they’re saying,” she said. “It makes it hard sometimes for our community to fully grasp some of the issues we have going on in our schools.”

Republican Sen. Dave Lent, who represents Idaho Falls and chairs the Senate Education Committee, said Neal took the law too far. “It’s an aggressive interpretation by our prosecuting attorney,” said Lent, a former Idaho Falls school board member. “You have to educate people as to the why. And if you’re not allowed to tell them the why, your hands are tied.”

The district has been grappling with how to fix its schools, with narrowing options and intense opposition and distrust from community members and groups like the Freedom Foundation.

The hallways of Idaho Falls schools are still overcrowded, and administrators worry about projected growth. The bathrooms regularly have to be closed at the district’s Skyline High School because the plumbing is failing, administrators said. Students with disabilities are crammed into small classrooms with doorways that barely fit wheelchairs.

Idaho Falls High School was built for 900 students but now serves about 1,250, administrators said. Between periods, hundreds of students rush out of their classrooms, walk down narrow staircases and push to get to their classes on time. Students eat lunch on the floor because the cafeteria accommodates only about 200 students, fewer than even the number of students who qualify for free and reduced lunch.

Classrooms flood, as does the athletic field.

After heavy rains last spring, Bingham said, “the kids were skipping rocks across it.”

***

Becca Savransky covers education for the Idaho Statesman. Becca graduated from Northwestern University and previously worked at the Seattlepi.com and The Hill.

ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.

After a former student killed six people last year at the private Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee, state leaders have been looking for ways to make schools safer. Their focus so far has been to ramp up penalties against current students who make mass threats against schools.

Months after the killings, legislators passed a law requiring students who make such threats to be expelled for a year (unless a school superintendent decides otherwise) and allowing schools not to enroll them afterward. This year, the legislature passed bills that make the offense a felony and that revoke driving privileges for a year.

[Related: Funerals set for Nashville school shooting’s 6 victims]

But a large body of research shows these zero-tolerance measures are not the most effective way to prevent violence in schools. In fact, some experts say those measures can counteract what they consider a crucial tool for protecting students as well as the larger community: threat assessments. When carried out correctly, threat assessments sort out behavior intended to cause real physical harm from simply disruptive acts and provide troubled students with the help they need.

The Secret Service pioneered threat assessments to help identify viable threats against public officials. After the Columbine High School massacre in 1999, a team of University of Virginia professors began adapting Secret Service and FBI threat-assessment recommendations for use in schools. They relied on reports from the two agencies showing that school shooters typically expressed their intentions well before acting violently, but that those statements and the underlying potential for harm were seldom thoroughly investigated.

In the course of their research, they learned that educators were concerned about overreacting to students who did not pose a serious threat.

“We also know that students frequently make threatening statements just in the routine course of their day. We have to be very careful that we don’t confuse the two,” said psychologist Dewey Cornell, who led the University of Virginia research and continues to study threat assessments. “And so we need a systematic process to sort out serious threats from threats that are not serious.”

We spoke to Cornell about how schools are handling threat assessments and his concerns about their overreliance on harsh discipline. More than two decades after he began his research, a growing number of states, including Tennessee, require school districts to adopt threat-assessment policies. But Cornell worries that too many are not properly carrying them out.

How Threat Assessments Work

Threat assessments are intended to be an alternative to zero tolerance, giving school leaders a way to resolve problems before they escalate to violence and allowing them discretion over whether and how to discipline students.

Cornell helped create a process to help school administrators carry out threat assessments, starting by interviewing anyone involved with the threat to assess the risk of serious injury. His research shows that the majority of the time, the assessment reveals there was no threat or no serious threat. The threat-assessment team should warn the intended victims of any major threats it finds, take necessary precautions to protect them and seek ways to resolve conflict.

[Related: Active shooter training: State-specific requirements for schools and law enforcement]

One of the most important parts of the process requires the threat-assessment team to refer students to mental health services they may need, no matter the level of threat. And the process states that law enforcement involvement and harsh disciplinary penalties should be reserved for the most serious cases.

Cornell’s initial research in Florida and Virginia shows that, when done well, threat assessments reduce expulsions and keep more students in school. In 2013, Virginia was the first state to mandate that public schools adopt threat-assessment teams. By 2018, nearly 80% of schools in the state reported at least one threat-assessment case; about three-fourths of cases resulted in students being referred for counseling, mental health treatment or psychological assessments. Most students were not expelled, placed in an alternative school or juvenile detention, or hospitalized as a result of a threat assessment.

A 2024 study of Florida public schools conducted over three years found that the implementation of threat assessment had been “widely, but not uniformly, successful,” with a third of cases resulting in a student being referred for mental health services and just 2% resulting in an expulsion.

“We’re not just looking for the needle in the haystack, that rare student, the one in a million students who’s going to actually shoot someone,” Cornell said. “We’re actually dealing with thousands and thousands of kids who maybe are angry or upset and so they say something threatening. Maybe they’re being bullied. We have an opportunity to intervene and work with them long before there’s any issue, if there is any issue at all.”

Threat Assessments and Zero Tolerance Don’t Work Together

According to Cornell, zero-tolerance policies and threat assessments are “antithetical” approaches to handling school safety. Tennessee legislators, however, passed a law mandating that school districts conduct threat assessments less than two weeks after they passed a law requiring expulsion for mass threats.

Zero tolerance requires school officials to automatically punish students who act out, no matter the circumstances. Threat assessment, on the other hand, requires officials to consider the context and motivation of the behavior before deciding how to respond.

There is no research showing that zero-tolerance policies make schools safer, according to a review of available evidence by the American Psychological Association. In fact, such policies can harm Black students and students with disabilities, who are more likely to be suspended or expelled from schools with zero-tolerance discipline policies and, by extension, more likely to end up in the criminal justice system, studies show.

[Related: 95% of public schools conduct active shooter drills. Are students safer?]

“So we have a disciplinary practice that research tells us does not work, yet we keep doing more and more of it,” Cornell said. “It’s the educational equivalent of bloodletting. The medical field for years would bleed people, and when they didn’t get better, they concluded they didn’t bleed them enough.”

After Tennessee lawmakers made “threats of mass violence on school property” a zero-tolerance offense last year, they received numerous complaints about students being arrested and disciplined even when they clearly didn’t pose a serious threat. At a recent education committee hearing, a lawmaker referred to a case in which a middle schooler threatened to fly a plane into the school. “I don’t know too many 12-year-olds that either A, have access to an aircraft, or B, know how to fly it,” he said. Tennessee has not released statewide numbers on expulsions for threats of mass violence.

Lawmakers are now considering a bill that would require a threat assessment to be completed and the threat to be deemed valid before an expulsion. Cornell said that limiting expulsions to valid threats still could pose safety risks. “If I am really concerned that a child is dangerous, I don’t want to turn them loose in the community without supervision,” he said. “I want to try to reach them and work with them and convince them that there is a better way to deal with whatever problem or concern they have.”

When Threat Assessment Goes Wrong

Civil and disability rights advocates argue that threat assessments can do more harm than good and point to examples of school officials referring students with disabilities and students of color for threat assessments more often. In Albuquerque Public Schools, for example, children with disabilities and Black children made up a disproportionately high percentage of those referred for threat assessments, according to a Searchlight New Mexico report. A study of four Colorado school districts found that Black students, Native American students, male students and students with disabilities were overrepresented in the threat-assessment data. No national study exists showing how schools are implementing threat assessments; Cornell has conducted studies in Virginia and Florida and is working on a national one with funding from the federal Department of Justice.

A Texas Observer investigation into threat assessments showed the vast majority of districts in the state failed to properly implement them. Only a small percentage of districts provided students with needed mental health support and other services as required by state law. In Tennessee, school officials are required to include law enforcement in their assessment of whether a student poses a threat — but including mental health professionals is optional.

“If you’re installing threat assessment in a school that doesn’t have a school psychologist, doesn’t have a school social worker and has one counselor for every thousand students, you’re gonna have a problem. It’s like putting new tires on a car with a busted engine,” Cornell said. “We have a school system that is strained and stretched to the limits.”

But Cornell said the reports of schools failing to properly carry out threat assessments shouldn’t serve to indict the entire idea. His research in Florida shows that Black students experienced slightly higher rates of out-of-school suspensions and expulsions than white students — a much smaller disparity than the national average. Students with disabilities did not receive harsher discipline or legal action than other students after a threat assessment.

“States seem to be willing to spend millions of dollars on security hardware, but almost nothing on training and coaching,” he said. “The result is many schools are implementing threat assessment without adequate training, without the time allotted to them to carry out the procedures that are required. So they end up cutting corners.”

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Aliyya Swaby is a reporter in ProPublica’s South unit covering children, families and social inequality. Previously, she was a reporter at the Texas Tribune, where she covered public education and state politics starting in 2016.

ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.

This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters.

Indianapolis mom Alicia Smith home-schools her three children, working with another parent to organize field trips, virtual meet-ups, and community service projects.

Meanwhile, at Streams of Hope school in Fort Wayne, 35 students are taught in a church by three teachers for $5,000 a year in tuition.

And around 20 students from Purdue Polytechnic High School work on individualized lesson plans in an Indianapolis church basement.

These approaches to education are very different. But they can all be considered “microschools,” a loosely defined and regulated category of schooling that is growing in Indiana. They’re often described as a midway option between home school and traditional school. And in the case of private microschools, they could be eligible for vouchers in the near future.

Some state lawmakers say that next year, they’ll support a push to let all parents use Education Scholarship Accounts — established in 2021 for students with disabilities — to purchase classes, tutoring services, and extracurriculars from a variety of providers.

[Related: Georgia GOP pushes to pass school voucher bill this year]

This could lead to more state funding flowing toward the two most common kinds of microschools: Very small private schools and collectives of students educated at home. Both prioritize small class sizes and flexibility for student learning.

Indeed, as more states have expanded ESA programs to all students, they’ve seen a boom in microschooling.

“If we really want to make a difference, we need to give parents more than two choices,” said Indiana Treasurer Daniel Elliott earlier this year. “We need to give them the option to create their child’s unique educational pathway.”

But such an expansion would also raise concerns about academic accountability for the constellation of programs, which can be difficult to track in detail. Home-schooling families, too, may be divided by the question of whether to accept some government regulation in exchange for financial assistance.

And the use of the term “microschool” could proliferate even as clear definitions of it prove elusive.

Given Indiana’s robust school choice landscape that already includes nearly universal private school vouchers, a move to expand scholarship accounts to cover microschooling could draw opposition from private school as well as public school advocates over funding.

“With the use of public funds, shouldn’t there be some role — whether that’s data, outcomes, test scores — to make sure this was operating as it was designed to?” said Liz Cohen, policy director at FutureEd, a Washington-based nonpartisan think tank.

Regulations might ‘defeat the purpose’ of microschools

Microschooling grew during the pandemic, when families tried out pods, online, and hybrid learning and found these models to be beneficial to safety and mental health, said Ben DeGrow, a senior policy director of education choice for ExcelinEd, an education nonprofit.

Indiana has gone from just a handful of these schools a few years ago to around 45 microschools operated by tutoring organizations, private schools, and others, said Jill Haskins, Indiana field coordinator for the National Microschooling Center. The center has identified Indiana as a priority state for expansion.

It’s not clear how many Hoosier students participate in microschools, which don’t have a definition in state code, and are purposefully broadly defined by advocacy organizations.

Haskins is also the CEO of Streams of Hope, a private, nonaccredited microschool in Fort Wayne with 35 full-time students and three teachers.

The school charges around $5,000 in full-time tuition, but it also offers a menu of other services for home-schooled and ESA students.

[Related: Private schools, public money — School leaders are pushing parents to exploit voucher programs]

Home-schooled students can participate in per-credit classes and enrichment activities, while their parents remain responsible for grades and diplomas, Haskins said. Starting next year, the school will add a two-day hybrid program for home-schooled students.

Streams of Hope can also accept Education Scholarship Account students as a business entity, but not as a school. That’s an important distinction under the provisions of Indiana’s ESA law, which requires schools to be accredited to accept the funds.

One student currently uses the accounts to pay for the school’s tuition and enrollment fees, Haskins said, and next year, an additional four plan to use the accounts.

The requirements for each set of students — full-time, home school, or ESA — differs, but for each, Haskins said the Streams of Hope model can provide flexibility.

As Indiana considers expanding the ESA program to all students, Haskins said the Streams of Hope would consider participating as a school, if the accompanying regulations weren’t too onerous. A testing requirement might be acceptable, she said.

Currently, the school does not participate in state testing, and has been able to offer students flexible paths to graduation, Haskins said.

“The beautiful thing about microschools is that we approach education differently, to have regulation put on us would defeat the purpose,” Haskins said.

Vouchers and microschooling: Stackable or an awkward match?

Indiana lawmakers briefly discussed this year a proposal to combine the state’s three voucher tracks into one program and give parents funding directly to pay for classes and services, whether it’s a private school math class or lessons with a professional musician.

Though it was shelved, author Sen. Ryan Mishler expects the proposal to return next year, when lawmakers craft the biennial state budget.

In other states, this kind of universal ESA program has opened the doors for more microschooling as small groups of families pool resources to purchase curriculum, or enroll in a hybrid school option.

In the latter example, students might learn at home primarily from their parents, but take one or two courses from a microschool, an online program, or even a public or private school. ESA accounts could fund the per-credit costs of these classes. This is already allowed for students with disabilities under Indiana ESA law.

But Indiana has the well-established Choice Scholarship program that pays for tuition at private schools. After the state expanded eligibility for the scholarships last year, participation in the voucher program soared by about 30% to a record high of over 69,000 students.

In contrast, just 169 students participated in Indiana’s ESA program. And it’s not clear from the available data what educational setting they chose to use the dollars in, according to the Indiana Treasurer’s Office. Nationally, while most families used an ESA account like a voucher, around 10-15% opted for a custom option, noted DeGrow of ExcelinEd.

Since Indiana lawmakers have favored incremental expansion of voucher eligibility over the last decade, it’s unlikely that they would eliminate the voucher program in favor of a new, universal ESA, said Betsy Wiley, President and CEO of the Institute for Quality Education, an Indianapolis-based school choice advocacy organization.

Wiley said the institute would support creating a universal ESA program to function as a stackable fund on top of Choice Scholarships: The latter would pay for tuition and fees, while the former could cover tutoring, therapies, and other costs.

If Indiana does opt to merge the programs, the state will likely continue to require voucher students to take state tests for accountability purposes. That could prompt a range of responses among home-schoolers and microschoolers.

It could also create confusion for students using the funds for single courses or nonacademic expenses like transportation, for home-schooled students who don’t expect to take state tests, and for school providers who would have to decide whether to accept the regulation that comes with the funding.

Microschools are not quite home school

Both home-schoolers and microschoolers use terms like pods and co-ops. But the key distinction is that home schools are nonpublic, nonaccredited schools with less than one employee, said Kylene Varner of the Indiana Association of Home Educators.

Home-schoolers were initially included in this year’s bill to create a universal ESA in Indiana, but lawmakers later cut them out of the proposal at the urging of home school advocates. While they’re eligible to receive ESA’s under existing Indiana law, they are no longer legally considered home-schoolers.

In states like Florida and Arizona that offer universal ESAs, home-schoolers are allowed to participate, but are similarly no longer considered home-schoolers.

This is because traditional home-schooling families don’t want government funds or intervention in their children’s education, said Wiley of the Institute for Quality Education. But an ESA may appeal to parents interested in a hybrid schooling model.

Microschools need to be clear about who they serve, and parents must understand what laws they will be subject to if they enroll in a microschool, Varner said. That could include testing, responsibility for grading and transcripts, Department of Child Services procedures, and more.

Smith, the Indianapolis mom who home-schools her children, said she’s worked with another friend to create something that’s become a microschool, she said.

She has considered whether she would use an ESA if it were to become available, but is wary of the potential strings attached. Furthermore, taking the money might mean less for children who have disabilities, she said.

Better, Smith said, for her and her friend to pool their talents and resources and provide the education that’s best for their children.

“There is a bigger opportunity here to educate children that don’t fit inside the mold,” Smith said. “And you shouldn’t have to get to a breaking point. I don’t think there should be a prerequisite for teaching you the way you learn best.”

***

Aleksandra Appleton covers Indiana education policy and writes about K-12 schools across the state. She previously reported on schools in Las Vegas and Fresno, California.

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Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.

FRANKLIN SQUARE, NEW YORK — The sixth-graders learning about ancient Greek vases in their classroom at John Street School looked like students in nearly any other social studies class in the country. Wearing sweatpants and hoodies, they heard a short lesson about what the vases were used for and how they were decorated before breaking into small groups to ponder specific questions and fill out worksheets.

But behind the scenes, preparing for the lesson was anything but typical for teachers Janice Donaghy and Jean D’Aurio. They had avoided the hours of preparation the lesson might normally have taken by using artificial intelligence to craft a plan that included a summary of ancient Greek vases, exit questions and student activities.

[Related: ‘Distrust, Detection & Discipline:’ New data reveals teachers’ ChatGPT crackdown]

“Classroom preparation goes from hours to seconds” when using AI, said D’Aurio. In the past, the co-teaching pair had created lesson plans by scouring the school’s literacy closet to sift through printed materials, perusing the Teachers Pay Teachers online marketplace and exploring Instagram or TikTok accounts.

For this lesson, the two consulted the county’s curriculum guide but also used Canva, a tool that automatically generated pictures of Grecian vases. The teachers turned to Diffit, another AI application, to craft a reading passage that explained the importance of vases in everyday life in ancient Greece. Diffit also created alternative versions of the text so it would be appropriate for kids reading at different levels, wrote three multiple choice questions to test comprehension and prompted students to draw pictures to show they understood the lesson’s key points. The teachers added short-answer questions that students answered on Google Classroom, and they wrapped up the multi-week lesson by having students paint a design on an actual vase.

“This is just touching the surface of what [AI] has the potential to do,” said Jared Bloom, the superintendent of Franklin Square School District, where both teachers work. “The promise really is to personalize learning, not just differentiate it, in a way that’s not taxing or exhausting for teachers. This could revolutionize education a year from now, as the tools get better and better.”

When ChatGPT was unveiled in late 2022, many educators saw the large language model chatbot as a shortcut students might use to complete — or cheat on — their homework. While it’s still unclear how the technology may ultimately affect schools, growing numbers of teachers are using various AI applications to help cut down on the work they do outside the classroom, from creating lessons to grading papers to emailing parents.

Teachers average about eight to 10 hours a week planning and doing administrative work, said Amanda Bickerstaff, CEO and co-founder of AI for Education, a company that advises districts on how to integrate artificial intelligence into their work. AI is a great way to find efficiencies and lessen that workload, she added.

In Franklin Square, a small K-6 district about 9 miles from John F. Kennedy Airport, the impetus to start using AI came from Bloom. Before the current school year, he highlighted various ways teachers could incorporate AI, from generating ideas for lesson plans to allowing students to use tools to enhance their work. In one example, after students studied houses that are shaped like cats, they created their own drawings. The teacher was then able to use AI tools to show the class how these buildings would look if they were constructed.

[Related: 7 AI trends that could reshape education in 2024]

D’Aurio said she and Donaghy are “tech nerds” who were the first in their school to experiment with the new technology, and she’s noticed more teachers getting on board “a little at a time.” They use a variety of applications, including Diffit, which can create lesson plans from a few prompts. For instance, teachers can type in “ancient Greek vases” and a grade level, the application takes less than 20 seconds to return an adapted reading passage, a summary, key vocabulary words, and multiple-choice, short-answer and open-ended questions. These elements can be edited and quickly added into activities for students to complete.

Users can also ask the technology to adapt existing text for students reading at different levels. “In one classroom, you could go from second-grade reading level to 10^th grade,” Donaghy said.

Other companies help teachers create interactive slideshows, give writing feedback or generate images around various topics.

Wayne D’Orio for The 74

John Street School teacher Jean D’Aurio reviews lesson on Greek vases with a small group of students.

The inclusion class the pair co-teach contains both general and special education students. Donaghy said AI tools can help her not only create materials that meet students’ individual learning plans, they can track their progress in a variety of areas — a huge time saving because each student can have five or more individual goals.

AI really helped when a new student from El Salvador showed up speaking only Spanish, said Donaghy. The teachers used it to translate every classroom lesson for her, allowing her to understand assignments while she worked in both Spanish and English.

Donaghy said it did take a little trial and error to understand how to best craft queries to get the desired output. But she encourages her peers to try the tools by telling them, “I know tech can be scary, but guys, this is easy.”

While acknowledging that most teachers in the small district haven’t used these tools yet, Bloom said 87% told him at the beginning of this school year that they were interested in trying them out. “They’re intrigued,” he added.

Bickerstaff said about 84% of people who use a smartphone or a computer interact with AI every day, often without realizing it.

John Street School librarian Paige Chambers said she used AI while earning her master’s degree and was eager to see how it could help her at school. Chambers, who teaches media literacy and related lessons to students in her library, said she uses AI tools to help her find ideas for lesson plans. Because results are so quick, she added, it’s easy to modify prompts when they don’t return what she wants.

She has uploaded YouTube videos to AI applications to get a summary of the videos’ contents as well as questions for the students to answer. The tools can also break down a lesson plan into step-by-step directions for her while offering sample projects for students to complete.

Because these tools can add to an existing lesson, Chambers said they can boost an idea she has by filling it out with extra ideas.

[Related: Testing AI’s pluses and minuses in after-school programming]

Donaghy, D’Aurio and Chambers said they were aware that AI can sometimes hallucinate — make up facts — but reading through what the program creates can help avoid this problem. To stop misinformation, Chambers said she specifically asks these tools to let her know if the application doesn’t have any information about a particular topic. This can prevent them from inventing answers to her prompts.

One area the teachers haven’t used AI for yet is helping to grade student work. This would require teachers to upload students’ writing into AI tools, which could breach the security of student information.

Bloom said he expects technology upgrades to eventually solve this dilemma by creating tools that keep student work from being uploaded to the entire internet. “We’re not trying to remove teachers [from the grading process]. We just want students to get support in the moment. It could be like having a tutor on your shoulder.”

Donaghy said having a tool that checks whether her grading is accurate and fair and hews to a lesson’s rubric would be a big help.
“This is an exciting time for education,” Chambers said. AI “is getting better every day. It’s worlds different in just the half a year I’ve been using it.”

***

Wayne D’Orio is a freelance journalist who writes frequently about education, equity, and rural issues. D’Orio is a regular contributor for The 74.  His byline has also appeared in Christian Science Monitor, EducationNext, Mindshift, Pacific Standard, The Atlantic, The Hechinger Report, U.S. News and World Report, and Wired.

This story was produced by The 74, a non-profit, independent news organization focused on education in America.

Hey there, youth pastor! So, you’ve got a conference coming up, huh? Awesome! These events are like fuel for our ministry engines—full of ideas, inspiration, and, let’s be real, a little bit of overwhelm too. But fear not, I’ve got some tips to help you rock that conference like a pro.

Take Notes: Scribble, Type, Whatever Works!

First things first, bring something to take notes with. Whether you’re a pen-and-paper purist or a digital note-taker, just make sure you’re jotting down those gems of wisdom that speakers drop, those lightbulb moments during workshops, and maybe even the occasional doodle (hey, creativity knows no bounds, right?).

Cut Yourself Some Slack

Listen, we all want to be superheroes and implement a gazillion new ideas the second we get back to our ministries. But reality check: that’s just not feasible. So, don’t beat yourself up if you can’t do it all. Pick a couple of things that really resonate with you, and focus on those. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither will your ministry be transformed overnight. It’s a process, friend.

One Big Action: Keep It Simple

Alright, so you’re jazzed up after the conference and ready to conquer the world. But here’s the deal: pick one big action to take when you get back. Just one. Whether it’s launching a new small group series, revamping your social media game, or finally getting that coffee hangout with your youth group rolling—choose something and go all in. Trust me, simplicity is key.

Embrace the Vibes and the Community

Last but not least, soak it all in. Connect with your fellow youth pastors, swap stories, share struggles, and lift each other up. You’re not in this alone, my friend. And remember, it’s not just about the sessions and workshops—it’s about the relationships you build and the community you’re a part of. Soak up those good vibes and let them fuel your journey.

In a nutshell, youth pastor conferences are like a buffet of goodness for our souls and ministries. Take notes, be kind to yourself, focus on one big action, and soak up the community vibes. You’ve got this! Now go out there and rock that conference like the youth ministry ninja you are.

Looking for a youth pastor conference? We’ve got a great one for you! Check it out below:

Pamela Redmon recently joined the Child Mind Institute as its chief marketing officer. The position is a newly created one at the nation’s leading children’s mental health nonprofit.

Redmon arrives from a stint as senior vice president and chief communications and marketing officer at the national anti-hunger nonprofit, Share Our Strength. While there she was responsible for leading the organization’s first rebranding in its 40-year history as well as working extensively on its massively successful No Kid Hungry campaign.

[Related: Child Mind Institute Names Mimi Corcoran as New Executive Director]

Previously, Redmon served as senior director of strategy at the Partnership for a Healthier America, focusing on childhood obesity prevention efforts as well as supporting Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move! campaign.

Redmon also has extensive public sector experience, having worked on national public health communications with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Institutes of Health, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Redmon holds a bachelors degree in political science from Hampton University and is currently working towards a master of public health degree from the Milken Institute of Public Health at The George Washington University.

“We are thrilled that Pamela is joining our leadership team as the Child Mind Institute continues to grow our brand both nationally and internationally,” said Child Mind Institute Founding President and Medical Director Harold S. Koplewicz, MD in a press release about the appointment. “Pamela brings an extensive background supporting the work of nonprofits and I look forward to collaborating with her as we work to tackle the youth mental health crisis.”

Redmon will initially focus her work in the new position on growing digital fundraising and small donor programs as well as leading the development of new partnerships with for-profit institutions.

In October 1911, Roald Amundsen set out on the first-ever expedition to the South Pole. It took him and his team almost 2 months to make the journey, and when they got there, you know what they saw?

Snow… They saw lots and lots of snow.

Well, our developers have also been hard at work over the last 2 months, and quite frankly, we think they have a little more to show for it than tiny bits of frozen water. That’s right, today is the day that we proudly announce TWO MAJOR UPDATES to Sidekick!

The first new Sidekick feature is one that youth workers have been asking for since we first unveiled Sidekick back in December (we can’t believe Sidekick only launched a few months ago!). That’s right, we’re talking about…

This article was first published by The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization covering the U.S. criminal justice system. 

In separate trials earlier this year, Jennifer and James Crumbley became the first parents in U.S. history to be convicted of involuntary manslaughter for a mass shooting committed by their child.

On Tuesday, they were each sentenced to 10–15 years in prison, the maximum penalty for the crime. Prosecutors argued the Crumbleys ignored urgent warning signs that their son Ethan was having violent thoughts, and that the parents provided access to the gun he used to kill four classmates and injure seven other people at his school in November 2021.

Legal observers have said that the facts of the case are unusual, yet many still wonder if it now sets a precedent for a “slippery slope,” where more parents could be criminally charged for what their children do. “I don’t have a lot of confidence in the exercise of prosecutorial discretion to pick and choose only cases like this,” Northern Illinois University law professor Evan Bernick told Al Jazeera this week. “Once you’ve got a hammer — and this is definitely a hammer — everything can look like a nail.”

Some worry that while the Crumbleys are White, an expansion of criminal charges against parents for the actions of their children would disproportionately affect Black parents or poor parents. That’s the concern in Tennessee, where some lawmakers recently introduced a bill that would fine parents up to $1,000 if a child commits more than one criminal offense.

[Related: A history of holding parents responsible for their kids’ crimes]

At least one other recent school shooting case has also led to the novel application of criminal charges against adults. This week in Newport News, Virginia, prosecutors charged a former assistant principal with felony child neglect. The charges came after a grand jury report concluded that school administrators ignored four warnings from students and staff that a 6-year-old boy had a gun at school. The boy shot his teacher the same day. Like in the Crumbley case, the charge against a school administrator is believed to be the first of its kind, and prosecutors said Thursday that there could be more charges to come.

Deja Taylor, the mother of the child, was sentenced to two years for child neglect in December. The state sentence was in addition to a separate 21 months for federal crimes related to her purchase of the gun used.

In an edition of this newsletter last year, we discussed how the Newsport News elementary school shooting was a test case for the legal question of how young is too young for a child to face criminal charges. Prosecutors have since said they will not charge the boy, but legally nothing stopped them from doing so. Last month, Virginia Gov. Glen Youngkin vetoed a bill that would have restricted prosecutors from charging children younger than 11, saying in part that it undermined public safety.

This week a group of former and current prosecutors chimed in on Youngkin’s decision, arguing in a USA Today opinion article that, “A child who can barely read needs treatment, not incarceration, and there are countless ways to address accountability and also get that child the necessary support to thrive and grow without involving a courtroom or prosecution.”

In Maryland, the issues of charging parents for what children do, and how young is too young for criminal prosecution, have also been roiling. This week, state lawmakers passed a bill that will let prosecutors charge children as young as 10 with certain crimes. The previous limit was age 13. The move comes as some crimes spike, especially carjackings, allegedly committed by young people. It also follows a pair of high-profile mass shootings involving young people last year. But the measure also comes against the backdrop of an overall decline in youth crime in the state over the past decade.

Only a handful of children in Maryland each year are accused of the crimes in the new law, something that advocates on both sides of the legislation have pointed to, according to reporting by The Baltimore Banner’s Brenda Wintrode. Opponents of the law said it was unnecessary to address something so uncommon. Critics also generally argue that involvement with the juvenile criminal justice system may create more crime rather than prevent it. Supporters of the law said that given the small number of incidents, the legislation won’t cause a notable increase in the number of kids being pulled into the system.

Kids aren’t the only ones who could start being pulled into the system more often in Maryland. In an announcement highlighting the arrest of 20 young people accused of crimes earlier this month, Baltimore City State’s Attorney Ivan Bates made a point to mention “parental accountability,” warning: “From here on out, if you are found to be contributing to the delinquency of a minor child, my office will look to charge you and hold you accountable.”

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Jamiles Lartey is a New Orleans-based staff writer for The Marshall Project. Previously, he worked as a reporter for the Guardian covering issues of criminal justice, race and policing.

This story was featured in The Marshall Project’s Closing Argument newsletter, a weekly deep dive into a key criminal justice issue. Want the newsletter delivered to your inbox? Subscribe to future newsletters here.