Tyler Kingkade

@tktk.bsky.social

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NBC News National Enterprise Reporter. Currently covering education and tech. Iowa raised, Los Angeles living. Bad at social media, good at petting animals. Signal: tylerkingkadenbc.20 tyler.kingkade[at]nbcuni.com https://www.tylerkingkade.com/

Cassie Fleming’s first grade daughter came home from school last August complaining about someone named Amira. “She doesn’t let me finish my sentences — she doesn’t listen,” Fleming said her daughter told her. As it turned out, Amira was not a teacher or another child but rather AI-powered software that spoke to Fleming’s daughter from a tablet assigned to her by Albuquerque Public Schools. Amira records and analyzes children’s voices as they read aloud, offering real-time feedback on their pronunciation and producing reports for their teachers. Last year, New Mexico began requiring kindergartners and first and second grade students to sit for Amira literacy screenings three times a year. Fleming hadn’t realized that, and she wondered what the software did with the recordings it made of her daughter. “It felt very icky to me,” Fleming said. “These kids can’t even tie their shoes yet, but there’s already a dataset that could follow them for the rest of their lives. And I just don’t think that’s an appropriate use of our public schools and our kids.” Amira is one of the most widely deployed AI tools in education, used by more than 4,000 school districts across all 50 states, according to the company, which says it gives personalized feedback that would be impossible to replicate with human tutors. But it’s also drawing backlash from parents across the country who are concerned about their children’s privacy and uncomfortable with AI’s taking over a task once done by teachers. In New Mexico — which has the nation’s lowest reading proficiency scores — an emerging group of parents, including Fleming, has spoken out against Amira at school board meetings and a legislative hearing in recent weeks. With days to go before the new school year begins, the parents’ protests persuaded two districts to object to a state mandate that all elementary schools use Amira for screening and 30 minutes of weekly tutoring for students.
According to news reports, “MyGenderDolls” will be available to Minnesota educators for use in classrooms with students as young as four years old this fall. The dolls – developed via a taxpayer-funded University of Minnesota program – feature removable, interchangeable internal and external genitalia, gender-neutral names, and clothing (including undergarments) for both sexes. The use of sexually explicit dolls to introduce young students to highly sensitive subject matters, with potential mental health implications for some children, undermines parents’ authority over their children’s safety and well-being. PPRA guarantees parents the right to opt their children out of surveys that elicit certain sensitive information about students or their families, and to review related instructional materials. “While Governor Walz and the radical left continue to funnel taxpayer dollars to perverted ideologies that can harm children, the Trump Administration is fighting to protect children’s innocence and defend parents’ role as the first and primary decision-makers in their child’s education,” said U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon. “No four-year-old should be exposed to such material – especially without a parent’s knowledge or consent. ED will enforce the law to its fullest extent, putting parents and families firmly in the driver’s seat of their child’s education.”
In arguing against dismissal, Ostergren said he had no obligation at this point in the proceedings to show evidence supporting the president’s claim that the poll was fabricated or rigged in some fashion. “The law is that all we have to do is put the defendants on notice as to why they are being sued,” Ostergren said. In response, Judge Beattie asked Ostergren whether he still has some obligation to articulate the specific elements of the legal claims being made. Ostergren rejected that position and said that after discovery takes place and evidence is gathered, the defendants can argue for summary judgment in their favor but until then, the case should be allowed to proceed. “Do you believe that is even the case when there is an issue with First Amendment import?” Beattie asked Ostergren. “It seems like there’d be a massive chilling effect if any case is allowed get past the motion-to-dismiss phase for a defendant of this nature.” Ostergren argued the First Amendment does not protect against fraud and said it will be impossible to determine to what extent that exception to the First Amendment applies in the case at hand until the discovery process produces documents and evidence. “We need to know how the poll was conducted and whether a poll was conducted,” Ostergren said. “We take it just on a simple assertion from the defendants that this was actually calling people and asking their views. What was the process when these flawed numbers were being considered and vetted? … What decisions were made about going ahead in the face of information that were so utterly implausible that it defies belief, that it could be anything other than deliberate misconduct? … These are all things we have to know.”
A Google spokesperson previously said that the heavily redacted internal documents released through court filings “mischaracterize our work” and that the company has responded to schools’ demand for its products. Magiera, a former Chicago public school teacher, said her goal in the recent training is to show educators how Google’s products can transform their jobs. “What we’re bringing AI here to do is to help create new pathways to overcome the obstacles that you’ve been facing and to create ways to reach new goals that you never dreamed possible with your learners,” she said. “It’s not going to be easy; I’m not trying to be naive about it. The probability that educators will be able to make that opportunity a reality is greatly increased when we give them training and support.” Speakers at the training emphasized that humans should always stay involved with any AI use and that technology shouldn’t replace teachers. They focused instead on how a teacher could use Gemini to create a comic strip that explains how greenhouse gases trap heat, for example, or how elementary school children could use AI to generate more realistic depictions of their ideas than they are capable of drawing.
STEM, N.C. — Stan Winborne remembers when his school district here in Granville County bought laptops for every student a decade ago. He expected that the devices would help students learn through individualized instruction and more detailed feedback. “We’ve made it,” he thought at the time. He was wrong. “Everything was supposed to be better, and honestly, the improvements never materialized,” said Winborne, superintendent of Granville County Public Schools, a rural, middle-class area near the Virginia border. “Our test scores remained flat as we continued to pump out more and more money for these devices and all the software.” So this past academic year, Winborne ran an experiment: “tech-free” Tuesdays and Thursdays, when students were not allowed to use district-issued laptops. He had high hopes for this shift — and while there were benefits, the trial collided with the reality of how much teachers and students have come to rely on technology.
Three days after Tiffany McElroy was taken to an Alabama jail just north of the Florida state line, she felt her water break. Her baby was coming several weeks early, and McElroy, 26, would later learn she was experiencing a pregnancy complication that could deteriorate into sepsis. She told a guard that her water had broken, expecting her to call an ambulance or take her to a hospital. Instead, according to a federal lawsuit filed in the Middle District of Alabama, another guard who checked on her that morning in May 2024 accused her of urinating on herself and told her to go back to her cell. Over the next 24 hours, the complaint alleges, McElroy was at the mercy of jail staff members who failed to call 911 as other inmates beat their cell windows and tables, begging for help. Health professionals, according to the lawsuit, provided McElroy with only a diaper and Tylenol as pain racked her body and she feared for her baby. “Just — it was such a strong sense of fear,” McElroy, now 28, said in an interview with NBC News. “It just overtook me, like I was completely out of it.” A fellow inmate ultimately helped McElroy as she pushed out a baby girl who wasn’t breathing, according to the lawsuit. Two women in her pod, the complaint says, worked to resuscitate the newborn, sucking mucus from her mouth and rubbing her until she began to cry.
Amid these concerns, some researchers have questioned whether the software works. Patrick Graff, an education policy researcher at the American Federation for Children, a nonprofit that promotes funding for children to attend private schools, wrote a thread on X in March that called the existing studies on i-Ready “weak and full of measurement tricks to make their product look better.” Some studies rely on the software’s own benchmark assessment to measure student outcomes and exclude students who don’t use the software as intended, for example by hitting random buttons. “We should just have a higher bar before experimenting on children at this scale,” Graff wrote. Curriculum Associates rejected Graff’s critique, defended its research as meeting “rigorous” industry standards and said the school districts it works with have seen benefits. “There’s loads of public data on improvements in big, big districts across the country where we’re a part of — test scores trending positively and faster than their peers,” said Sia, the CEO. In 2022, a study the company paid for at Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Research and Reform in Education found an advantage among students in one district who used i-Ready lessons for math, but the same researchers found mixed results in a study that measured reading scores. The researchers cautioned that the studies don’t tell a full story; they didn’t get a chance to interview teachers about how they used i-Ready and its data. Some of i-Ready’s defenders also said it can be hard to know what role the software plays in students’ growth. Katherine Cox, an Orlando-based education technology consultant, has coached teachers on using data from i-Ready to inform their instruction. Some teachers then saw their students’ state test scores in math rise over 20%.
The revolt against i-Ready is intensifying as parents across the country question how much time their children spend on screens at school, and as some districts and state legislatures seek to set limits. Now, i-Ready is caught up in a broader debate over whether students should return to printed worksheets and handwritten essays and whether education technology companies are living up to their promises on improving student performance. Curriculum Associates leaders have pushed back on criticisms, arguing in a series of recent blog posts that there’s a big difference between children using educational software like i-Ready versus scrolling social media. The company cites in-house white papers and research commissioned from other organizations showing some students’ test scores rose after using i-Ready’s personalized lessons. And the company says the time spent using i-Ready is minimal, about 5% of instructional time. Kelly Sia, Curriculum Associates’ CEO, sees i-Ready’s financial success — it brings in hundreds of millions of dollars a year — as proof that the software is working. “Teachers and administrators decide every year whether they want to hire or fire us,” Sia told NBC News. More than 90% of districts renew their i-Ready contracts, she said.
Gen Z Resentment Toward AI Grows as Adoption Stagnates and Workplace Fears Mount Walton-GSV-Gallup survey finds young people are feeling angrier about AI, cautious about integrating AI in the classroom WASHINGTON, D.C. — April 9, 2026 — Gen Z is growing increasingly angry about the role of artificial intelligence in their lives. A new Gallup survey released today by the Walton Family Foundation and GSV Ventures shows that a generation once seen as AI’s early adopters is now sounding the alarm on its risks, particularly in the workplace. While the majority of Gen Zers (51%) still use the technology weekly, growth has slowed to a crawl, increasing only four percentage points over the past year. This stagnation in adoption is accompanied by a sharp decline in positive sentiment. Excitement and hopefulness have dropped by 14 and nine percentage points, respectively, while 31% of Gen Z now report feeling outright anger toward the technology, up from 22% last year. Anxiety remains high, with slightly more than four in 10 young people continuing to report feeling uneasy about the technology’s trajectory. The Workplace Risk Gap Nearly half of Gen Z workers (48%) now believe the risks of AI in the workforce outweigh its benefits, a significant 11-point increase over the prior year. This skepticism persists even as 56% of Gen Zers acknowledge that AI tools can help them complete their work faster. However, this recognition of speed comes with a steep perceived cost: Eight in 10 Gen Zers (80%) believe that relying on AI to complete tasks faster will likely make learning more difficult in the future.
Erik Simpson, a professor at Grinnell College who teaches British and Irish literature and digital humanities, said the narrative that students are clamoring to use generative AI while professors cling to tradition does not match what he sees in the classroom at his private liberal-arts college. “I’m sure some of that is true in some circumstances, but I’m seeing something else, especially in arts and humanities students,” Simpson said. His students voice concerns about the environmental costs of AI, the devaluation of human creativity, privacy risks, and what they describe as the corporate capture of the tools of thinking.
In one instance, students allege Botstein invoked a Nazi reference in discussing a drunk woman being attacked, though the college said as they described it, it's a "gross distortion." The complaint with the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights is the second to be filed against Bard, a liberal arts school in Annandale-On-Hudson, New York. A woman who said the college mishandled her sexual assault case submitted a federal complaint in November. In that case, Bard initially disregarded its own policy about how students deemed guilty of sexual assault would be punished. In an April 14 open house event cited in the new complaint, Botstein was asked about his role as final arbiter of college sexual assault cases. Three students who were present told The Huffington Post that during the discussion about sexual assault he commented: "You have to use common sense. A girl drinking a bottle of vodka and then going to a party is as wise as me walking into a Nuremberg Rally while wearing the yellow badge." Advertisement image Botstein is Jewish and his family lost members in the Warsaw Ghetto in Nazi-occupied Poland. He has written about Jewish European culture, and as conductor of the American Symphony Orchestra he has celebrated the works of musicians whose careers Nazi rule interrupted. Botstein has served as Bard's president since 1975.
“I think we have to ask students, what level of surveillance are you willing to subject yourself to so that we can actually know that you’re learning?” he said. “There is a new agreement that needs to be made.” Students surveilling themselves Superhuman, the company that makes Grammarly, developed a tool it calls Authorship that’s included with basic accounts. Students can turn it on to surveil themselves on Google Docs or Microsoft Word as they write and playback later. It will show which sections were typed, pasted from another source or generated with AI. “We’re going to keep track of when you are going to Wikipedia,” said Jenny Maxwell, Superhuman’s head of education. “We’re going to keep track of when Grammarly is making suggestions and you’re taking them, we’re going to keep track of how much time you’ve spent in this paper or how many sessions.” As many as 5 million Authorship reports were created in the past year alone, she said, though most of the time they aren’t submitted. Maxwell said the tool was inspired by a viral TikTok video from Marley Stevens, who described the havoc of what she said was a false accusation of AI use that landed her on academic probation in 2023 at the University of North Georgia. In reality, Stevens said, she’d only used Grammarly’s extension to help fix spelling and punctuation.