The testimony of NYC students on the use -- and misuse-- of AI in the classroom

 

  

Above is a video of the terrific testimonies of four NYC students involved in NYCLU's Teen Activist Project on the use of AI in their schooling, presented at the Joint Hearings of the Education and Technology Committees on June 26, 2026 with also their responses to questions from Chair Eric Dinowitz.

 

Yelani Joseph’s testimony 

Good afternoon, my name is Yelani Joseph, I’m sixteen years old, a sophomore from Brooklyn, New York, and an organizer with the NYCLU’s Teen Activist Project. Thank you for the opportunity to speak today. 

When people talk about artificial intelligence in schools, I often hear one assumption: that students either fully support it or don’t care about its impact. But many of us do care — because we’re the ones experiencing these changes in real time. 

My concern is how quickly AI is being normalized in schools without enough accountability, transparency, or guidance on how it should support student learning. 

Recently, my friend and I were reviewing a reproductive health slideshow for class and came across a sentence full of scrambled words, errors and unclear information–our impression was that the teacher created classroom content with NotebookLM, an AI tool and we were shocked. Even though we were eventually able to make sense of it, we shouldn’t have had to spend time guessing what the curriculum was trying to say. Students deserve educational materials that are clear, accurate, and understandable — especially when learning about subjects as important and personal as our own health. 

And that experience reflects a larger issue — so much that it’s something I’ve also heard echoed when talking with my peers about AI in education. 

I had one of my peers recently tell me, “Although AI is helpful in some ways, students often use it to cheat instead of studying… and when exams come around, students can feel lost because they don’t have that sense of security they did before.” 

And another student, my friend, shared with me that her “My school is shutting down… and they’re opening up a school for an AI focused school in its place. I loved my school because everyone was able to get the attention they needed. And taking that away feels like a step in the wrong direction.” 

Even though the plan for an AI school was paused for now, what stood out to me wasn’t opposition to technology — it was a pattern: AI is being normalized faster than students are being taught how to engage with it responsibly. 

AI literacy has to mean something other than filling classrooms with AI products. It has to mean understanding how and when to question these products, and protect against the threat they pose to teaching and learning. Students are asking for accountability — clear standards that protect student learning and ensure human judgment stays at the center of education. 

Thank you.

 

Odin Adeler’s testimony 

Hello City Council, and thank you for spending time out of your busy day to listen to what I am here to say. 

My name is Odin Adeler, and I am a leader at the New York Civil Liberties Union’s Teen Activist Project. I am 18 years old, and have just graduated Urban Academy Laboratory High School this week. I am here to talk about my views on AI and tech products in schools. 

At my high school, we did a lot of writing. Before I went to Urban Academy, I did not feel so confident about my writing skills. We were also not allowed to use AI to write our papers at all. That was not a problem. Without AI, I could do something else. Ask my teachers for help, 

I now feel much more prepared for college. In college, which I will be starting this summer, I am sure there will be much to write. And it will be writing that I am sure I will be expected to come up with ideas for myself. Fortunately, I believe I can now put some of the many ideas I think about onto paper quite well, without AI. That also helped prepare for my high school’s frequent class discussions, where subject knowledge and critical thinking is essential. 

Knowing how to write well without AI also helps creatively. I am not sure I would have had as much fun or learned as much in my playwriting class, where I wrote up a play that got acted out to my school, if I just used AI. My classes felt much richer due to me and others avoiding using AI to replace thinking. 

I have heard that official guidance on artificial intelligence is being sent to schools. Part of the guidance encourages students to use AI for research, exploration, and creative projects–this is unwise. I am concerned that it will guide those in schools how to use software that is not useful in the classrooms. In schools, I believe not just the final typing up of a paper, but more, including gathering ideas, should all be done without AI. At schools, students should be taught to think for themselves. I am sure it is possible as people knew how to do so for a while before AI. That is why I am glad my high school is as restrictive of AI as it is, for both the writing students produce, and the creation of the material used to properly teach students to be critical thinkers. I support that kind of AI restrictive policy throughout the city.  

I am also concerned about risks to student data privacy. It is required by the government for minors to attend school. Students should not be effectively forced to sign away digital rights to big tech companies to fulfill that requirement. 

Instead of spending much taxpayer money on AI and data capturing products which are not what students need, the city should focus resources on actual human education. 

Thank you.

 

Ariana Ahmed Misha's testimony 

Hello Chair Dinowitz, Chair De La Rosa, and members and staff of the Committees on Education and Technology, 

I am Ariana Ahmed Misha. I am a rising junior at the Institute for Collaborative Education,, and a member of the Teen Activist Project at NYCLU.  

This spring, I helped plan a weekend student event,, with over one hundred students, to listen to their concerns about the new AI guidance.  There was a very specific session about AI policy, where the conversation among the students about AI was so deep, that the session had to go overtime. Even after the event, we students could not stop talking about how much we hate this new policy. 

Critical thinking is the whole purpose of education. All we are supposed to get at the end of everything is having the skill to critically think, Ai is something which prevents the students from critical thinking and does the work for them. Ai gets in the way of real learning. 

As students, we want real human teachers to teach us about the world. We want real human teachers to teach us effective human communication.  We want real human teachers to create assignments backed by human expertise, and we want real human teachers,, to provide us feedback,, on how to improve our work,, by reading  our hard worked assignments,, and get to know how we think,, and who we are as human students.  

However, for many students today, they instead have an AI teacher bot telling them how to work on improvements  and how to do assignments. The difference is clear. Not only is an AI bot biased against certain ways of thinking,, it is also highly perfectionist,, which makes the students discouraged about any work they do,, as it tells  them to fix any work  again and again and again until infinity. These AI products simply do not work.  

AI policy at the end of the day pushes us into being a fake and unrealistic world. We do not want a robotic policy, in this already robotic world, where real connection with people has been rare.  

For this reason, I, on behalf of hundreds of students who care, would like to request you,  to push the DOE to make our policy dependent on humans,, rather than AI,, because rearranging the system after AI would destroy it might be possible,, but the lives which would be destroyed in the process cannot ever be fixed. 

 

Selena Wu’s testimony 

Hello city council, thank you for allowing me to speak today. My name is Selena Wu, and I am a rising senior from Francis Lewis High School and a member of the Teen Activist Project 

The field and market of AI is growing at a rapid rate, which is why it starts getting implemented everywhere. First handedly, I know how strong artificial intelligence can be. In fact, I’ve spent my past summers researching and building machine learning models at schools like  MIT and Princeton. This is why I would like to oppose the use of AI technology in the school system. My comments will focus on the use of GenAI products. 

Firstly, the highlights of learning are the interactions and jokes my teachers make when teaching. In my AP Lang class, we start off every day spending 10 minutes discussing different things, whether it is political, philosophical or controversial. These interactions not only creates a bond between the class and makes the classroom more lively, it also sharpens our critical thinking.  It actually makes me look forward to learning and attending class, which is something not many students experience.  Having to think about complicated topics and shaping them into concrete words are a skill needed for the AP Lang curriculum and AP test. Offloading tasks to AI jeopardizes these human relationships, and means me, my classmates, and my teachers understand one another less.   

Furthermore, when GenAI is used in school, it is often incorrect. Last year, I had an English teacher that graded our essays with AI. Not only did his AI incorrectly deduct points from us , it also accused multiple of my classmates of using AI themselves to write their essays. However, we wrote the essay in class on paper, with the prompt given to us the day of. There was no possible way for us to use AI, and we were unfairly getting points deducted despite following the rubric. Compared to my AP Lang class this year, there is a huge contrast between my learning and relationship with a teacher that uses AI compared to one that doesn’t.  

Secondly, I have seen that implementing AI and robots into the education system has made learning even more boring for some students. The rise of AI chat bots like ChatGPT and Claude have encouraged students to cheat, plagiarize and break numerous honor codes. But this issue is much more complicated than adults acknowledge. Rather than implementing AI into schools and allowing students to further rely on such technology, I think that there should be a focus on creating an engaging learning environment that addresses why students use such technology in the first place.  By encouraging curiosity and making learning more interesting, students may feel more confident, less afraid, and find less need for AI.   

In all ways, by bringing AI into schools, it can hinder students' education and growth.  

Thank you! 

Class size hearings tonight thru Thursday; please speak out if you want smaller classes for your kids

 

The state-mandated class size hearings are being held tonight Monday June 29 at 6 PM and run through Thursday via Zoom. Any parent, teacher or community member can attend one of these meetings to speak out about what the DOE's class size plan should include to make sure your school is able to be provided with smaller classes or can keep them, if you have them now. Though tonight's hearing is supposed to be for Manhattan, with Staten Island, Queens and Brooklyn to follow (as Bronx was last week) , you can attend any of them to have your voice heard, no matter what borough you live in or where your child attends school.

Additional hearings will be held at CECs through the end of July. By August 14. the DOE is supposed to have revised their class size plan to take into account public input, and have sent it to the state for their consideration, along with a summary of public comments.

Last night we presented a briefing that is posted here.  We  spoke about the changes to the class size law and pointed out flaws in the DOE's draft proposed plan for the 2026-2027 school year, which despite assurances from Mayor Mamdani and Chancellor Samuels does not provide any actual roadmap for hundreds of NYC schools that enroll hundreds of thousands students to obtain smaller classes, next year or ever. We also discussed how many NYC schools that already have smaller classes that meet the mandated caps may see their compliance levels drop sharply next year.

Because of the lack of detail and specificity in the DOE's draft proposal, we believe it  does not align with the requirements of the class size law. During the course of the presentation and our discussion afterward, we provided parents and teachers with possible talking points if they do attend one of these briefings, and strategies they can adopt to advocate for smaller classes for their schools.

Additional C4e/class size hearings will be held at CECs through the end of July. Written comments on the city's draft proposal can also be submitted now through July 29 via ContractsForExcellence@schools.nyc.gov. if you do send in comments, please copy us at info@classsizematters.org as well as the other public officials mentioned in our presentation.

Here is a copy of the powerpoint presentation as well as the video of the briefing, including our discussion afterwards, though inadvertently some of the slides were  partly blocked in the video. But please attend one of these hearings this week, and speak out if you can. Thanks!

Class size briefing on Sunday, and report and testimony from yesterday's AI hearing

 

1.     Please sign up for our Zoom briefing this Sunday at 5 PM if you haven’t already, where we will summarize the changes in the class size law, point out the serious flaws in the DOE’s proposed class size plan for next year, and provide strategies that parents and teachers can use to better ensure that your kids as well as all NYC students get smaller classes as soon as possible – whether next year or in the years to come. We will also try to answer any questions you may have to the best of our ability.

2.     Yesterday, a joint hearing of the NYC Council Education and Technology committees was held. At the hearing, the Chancellor did not testify but many other DoE officials did, including First Deputy Chancellor Danielle Giunta. Unfortunately, neither she nor anyone else offered any timeline when the revised AI guidelines would be released, no date when the feedback survey results for those guidelines will be provided, no proposals as to how their privacy vetting would be improved despite the recent findings of the scathing Comptroller audit, and no assurances that AI tools used in schools will be analyzed for racial bias.

More on the highlights and lowlights of the hearing are described here, as well as my testimony outlining the shoddy, irresponsible privacy and AI policies of the DOE. Included in my testimony are a few comments from the thousands of signers of our AI moratorium petition, and an Appendix listing just some of the AI tools currently used in schools which the DOE has refused to provide. I also provide links to videos of the hearing, and suggestions on how the two AI reporting bills recently introduced by the Council could be strengthened.

If you have serious concerns related to student privacy and/or the use of AI in the classroom,  you can upload your thoughts in written form to this Council webpage up to 72 hours following the close of the hearing – which is Saturday, June 27, 2026 at about 6 PM. I suggest you also copy your thoughts to your Councilmember and your State Legislators, to ensure they are alerted to your concerns. If you would like to share your testimony publicly, please email it to us at info@studentprivacymatters.org.

In any case, please remember to sign up for Sunday’s class size briefing here. Thanks!

-Leonie 

Important news on DOE contracting, AI moratorium, & class size funding for next year!

 

Last week was extremely eventful, with news regarding DOE contracts, AI, and class size, so buckle in. If only one of these issues interest you, feel free to skip to that section; but all are important.

Spending on Contracts

Education budget hearings were held on Monday, and a major focus was DOE’s problematic contracting process. Speaker Menin began by asking the Chancellor why they had not received any of the 600 contracts they’d requested back in March. The DOE chief procurement officer Elisheba Lewi responded that this would “take months” because the contracts exist on “a secure system that very few people have access to.”

What? Contracts are public documents and shouldn’t be hidden in vaults as though they are top-secret information. While it can take months and sometimes years for me to access DOE contracts through Freedom of Information requests, I was gobsmacked that DOE stonewalled the City Council in this way.

The Speaker and the Ed Chair Eric Dinowitz then questioned the Chancellor about the contract he’d signed back in 2023 when he was District 3 Superintendent for $180,000 with a company that supplied temporary foreign-language teachers to schools. This contract apparently had been artificially divided into $25,000 increments to evade the DOE centralized contracting process.

This finding was first reported by Sue Edelman on her Substack, who took a look at a Special Commissioner of Investigator’s report from June 2025 that castigated the District 3 Deputy Superintendent Mariela Graham for doing the very same thing in 2024. This report recommended that Graham be fired—without the SCI noticing Samuels had done the very same thing as Superintendent the year before.

Instead of being fired, Graham was promoted to DOE’s senior executive director of strategy. When questioned about this at the hearing, Chancellor Samuels responded that whatever he did was to benefit students. After he was repeatedly pressed, Liz Vladeck, the DOE’s General Counsel, advised him not to answer any more questions, since this issue is likely now being investigated by the SCI. Vladeck also admitted that she had approved of Graham’s promotion, despite the recommendation that she be fired.

Though many media outlets have picked up on this story, including most recently the NY Times, most have failed to explain that dividing up contracts to evade the centralized DOE contracting process that supposedly requires competitive bidding (though often does not) and a more careful privacy vetting process, (which is still inadequate) this parceling out bigger contracts to $25,000 amounts is a widespread and long-standing practice at DOE. As Chair Dinowitz pointed out, $386 million in contracts were divided into $25,000 increments in 2024. In my view, the Chancellor should not be uniquely targeted in this way, but instead the entire contracting process at DOE needs radical reform, as it has led to many millions wasted on ineffective or even damaging ed tech products as well as breaches and other privacy violations.

NYC Council’s Push for an AI Moratorium

The day following the hearing on Tuesday our AI Moratorium Coalition held a rally in City Hall Park, to release a NYC Council letter to the Mayor and Chancellor, urging them to enact the call for a two year moratorium on the use of AI in the classroom. What’s impressive about this letter is that it was signed by 29 Council Members – more than half the entire body – including elected officials left, right and center. This event and the letter were widely covered by the media, including the NY Times, the Daily News, and NY1. Many thanks to CM Alexa Aviles for spearheading this effort.

Evidently the Chancellor was not overly impressed, however, because on Thursday, he told the Chancellor’s Parent Advisory Council that he would be “beta testing” more AI tools on NYC students next year. On Friday, he appeared as a keynote speaker on an AI conference sponsored by Google, on how “education can and will continue to adapt amidst a rapidly evolving AI landscape.” No update yet when the wretched AI guidance will be updated and released. As usual, the Mayor has been noncommittal and done his best to evade this issue when asked about it at press conferences and the like.

Thankfully, the City Council is not ignoring the problems with AI and will be holding joint hearings of the Education and Technology Committees on Student Privacy and AI on Wednesday June 24 at 1 PM. Please sign up to testify in person or remotely if you are concerned about the continued proliferation of AI tools in our schools, and their damaging impact on your children. You can also submit written testimony at the same link. If you do, please share it with us at info@studentprivacymatters.org .

Disappointing news on Class Size

On Thursday, hundreds of schools  received an impersonal mass email from the DOE saying that their application for class size reduction funding for next year was rejected. These schools were also told that they should “continue to reduce class sizes where you are able for SY2026-2027” anyway, though how this could be accomplished with no additional funding is unclear. Many of these schools had already been interviewed and were in the process of hiring additional teachers. Others had worked hard to reconfigure their buildings and classrooms in order to make space for smaller classes.

Also on Thursday, the DOE released a proposed class size “plan” which the Chancellor had promised at the budget hearing would be a detailed, multi-year plan—in contrast to the sketchy documents submitted during the Adams administration. Though the Mayor received an extension of two more years for compliance in return for a promise that he, unlike Eric Adams, was serious about delivering smaller classes to NYC children, sadly there is little evidence of a commitment to real planning and implementation in this document .

Though it is very lengthy, it is lacking in necessary detail as to which changes in policies and practices will be adopted to enable schools to lower class size to mandated levels, especially as regards the more than 600 schools which at their current enrollment do not have the space for smaller classes. Instead, it is full of repetitive, conditional and ambiguous language as well as misleading argumentation.

A typical example of this evasiveness are the 133 schools so overcrowded that the DOE admits more capital construction is needed. Not only do they refuse to name these schools or explain where new schools will be built as a result, they do not even claim that they are committed to doing so at any point in the future. Instead, they write that the “SCA will work to identify viable solutions for these schools in accordance with available funding.”

Instead of adopting any of the cost-effective, practical suggestions on how to accelerate the creation of more classroom space as proposed by the Class Size Working Group report, including aligning school enrollment policies with the smaller classes required by law, DOE seems to be counting on exempting hundreds more schools to add to the more than 120 already exempted this year. In fact, they use the word exemption 35 times in the document and admit they “hope to use the exemption process as part of the overall strategy to comply with the law.”

The only specific reform offered to facilitate school construction is this troubling proposal: “The City is currently engaging with elected officials at the State level on a proposed SEQRA reform that would carve out public school construction projects from environmental review.” The answer to providing NYC students with the smaller classes they need is not to expose them to environmental harm. More serious problems with this document are detailed in our critique here.

Public hearings on this proposed class size “plan” via Zoom will begin Thursday, June 25 for the Bronx public hearing, followed by June 29 for Manhattan, June 30 for Staten Island July 1 for Queens and Brooklyn on July 2, though anyone can speak at any of these hearings, no matter where you live or your child attends school. Sadly, these hearings are even more delayed than usual because of the lateness of the state budget. Please put these dates in your calendar anyway and plan to speak out at least one of these meetings if you care about this issue; more info here, though no registration links are available yet.

FYI, the UFT and CSA also have to sign off on this so-called “plan” before it is sent to the state for approval, so if you are a teacher or school administrator, I’d suggest you contact your union and tell them not to approve any such sketchy document unless the DOE makes major improvements in it, including more transparency and solid commitments.

Final PEP meeting of the school year

The last Panel for Educational Policy meeting of this school year will be held this Wednesday, June 17, 2026, at 6 pm at the Prospects Heights Campus (883 Classon Avenue, Brooklyn). Come to speak out if your school was unfairly rejected for class size funding, or if you feel the DOE should stop the use of AI on your child, or you think there's a crying need to reform DOE contracting, or any of the other problems of this highly dysfunctional government agency.

And thank you if you got to the end of this long message -- because I couldn't figure out what to leave out.

PTA President's letter about unacceptable class sizes in his child's public school & demanding a real class size plan from DOE

The DOE still has not provided any funding for schools to hire teachers for smaller classes next year.  Parents at many schools are distraught, especially as the only comments from the Mayor are his happiness that he can save over $500 million by extending the deadline for another two years -- by which time hundreds of thousands of students will be left out of the opportunities to learn in a small enough class to be able to thrive.  Here is a letter sent by Gilbert Lal, the PTA President of MS 104, about his daughter's plight. 

Dear CMs Epstein and Maloney: 

I am your constituent and my child attends MS104 Simon Baruch Middle School school in District 2 where I am the PTA president. I am very concerned that while the administration has received two more years to comply with the goals in the class size law, neither the Mayor nor the Chancellor has yet provided any information to show how they will lower class size to ensure all students receive smaller classes even within the extended timeframe.

My child’s classes this year were unacceptably large in 7th grade hitting the old cap sizes in all her classes. MS104 was able to reduce only the current 6th grade class this year and has a plan to reduce class sizes for the rest of the school in grades 7th and 8th next year.  At the beginning of the year we were extremely optimistic that the budget would be approved to allow the school to reduce class sizes next year. However, the Mayor has not approved the budget to allow the school to hire teachers to implement this program.  

My daughter  is extremely distraught that in her words "it is unfair that we fought for class size reduction and it is the law, yet I will never benefit from it. It is unfair that  [her younger siblings] got reduced class sizes at PS116 and that they will get lower class sizes in middle school in the coming years." She is right! It is unfair that I advocated for years to lower class sizes and she will not see the benefit of this. It is unfair that my other children have lower class sizes now in elementary school and will go to middle school only to have the class size almost double.  

All our children in NYC deserve lower class sizes.  We cannot delay this another 2 years. Middle School years are critical years for children as they go through so many changes. Lower class sizes will allow teachers to provide more individual attention to students and work with their needs. It is impossible in a class of 35 students to give one on one instruction. With District 2 implementing Wit & Wisdom for ELA and pressuring schools to add Geometry courses, it is even more important to lower class sizes so every child can get "What I Need". 

At the education budget hearings on Monday, please ask the Chancellor and the SCA whether they have an actual, realistic, and detailed multi-year plan to achieve the goals in the law and if so, will they provide it to you as soon as possible. I also urge you to hold off approving the education budget or the capital plan before you’re confident that such a plan exists and will be implemented.

Thanks so much,  

Gilberte Lal

PTA President, MS104