On Thursday April 16, we rallied in City Hall Park, and called on the Mayor to place a moratorium on the use of AI for two years. Parents, students, teachers and advocates explained how AI poses clear risks to student privacy, their cognitive and skill development, creativity, emotional and mental health and the environment. Here is our coalition's press release, and articles about the rally in Fortune, Daily News, and Politico.
Serendipitously, the same day as our rally, the national group Fairplay released a letter, signed onto by more than 200 education and childhood organizations, as well as experts on mental health and medical professionals, asking for a five-year moratorium. Josh Golin, the Fairply Executive Director, attended our rally and he is shown speaking above.
After the rally, a bunch of us walked to the East entrance of City Hall, where students handed the Fairplay letter and our petition to Ailish Brady, Senior Advisor for Education, to the First Deputy Mayor.
I also handed her a copy of the NYC Kids PAC candidate survey filled out by Zohran Mamdani when he was running for mayor, in which he criticized "Eric Adams’ cavalier approach" to AI, and promised to consult parents, teachers and students before implementing careful guardrails.
Last week, at about the same time, at least seven high-ranking DOE officials were attending the ASU-GSV [Global Silicon Valley] conference in San Diego, mingling with ed tech vendors and executives, including Dr. Miatheresa Pate, the DOE chief academic officer, who led the aggressive AI expansion in NYC schools during the Adams administration and is still running it now.
As Sue Edelman in her Substack article points out, the cost of attendee registration ranges from $2,450 to $3,850 per person -- all at a time when the Mayor has asked city agencies including DOE to make big cuts because of the city's billion dollar deficits. In addition, Dr. Pate was named a Google GSV Education Innovation Fellow, the conference itself was subsidized by Google, as was the development of the pitifully weak AI guidance put out by DOE a few weeks ago.
Recently, the DOE placed Google Gemini, the company's AI platform on its TeachHub site, and is encouraging teachers to assign it to their students, despite the serious privacy and mental health concerns expressed by Fairplay, EPIC, and others. At the rally, I related a story a friend told me about what happened in her ten-year-old son's this week, related to the use of Google Gemini. See my comments below.
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Hi, my name is Leonie Haimson, and I’m the co-chair of the Parent Coalition for Student Privacy. Guess who wrote the following in response to a question asking him for his position on the use of AI in the classroom, when he was running for office last spring:
“Eric Adams’ cavalier approach to AI in schools is in keeping with his lack of support for our schools and sensitivities to the needs of teachers, students, and parents. I support regulating Al. AI can be a useful tool if deployed effectively, but it can also harm children’s ability to think critically and to write. It should not be expanded without careful guardrails. As Mayor, I would work directly with teacher, parent, and student groups to establish those guardrails and move forward with any expansion after careful deliberation.”
Yet right now, Mayor Mamdani is continuing the course that Eric Adams begam – rushing ahead with the expansion of AI without careful guardrails or any actual consultation with teachers, parents and students.
The only group who had input into the awful DOE AI guidance recently released was an AI advisory Council appointed by Chancellor Banks shortly before he left office whose members were primarily DOE educrats and ed tech vendors.
I was appointed to an AI working group by Chancellor Ramos and though we were repeatedly told that we would be able to give feedback on the guidance before it was released we were never provided with that opportunity.
In fact, the DOE completely sidelined and stonewalled us, and they refused even to give us the names of AI products currently used in schools along with their privacy policies, saying this would their violate their non-disclosure agreements with their vendors.
Dr. Miatheresa Pate, DOE Chief Academic Officer, who is leading the push for more AI use in NYC schools is a Google fellow and this week she is speaking at an ed tech conference sponsored by Google.
Sure enough, a few weeks ago the DOE put Google’s AI product called Gemini on TeachHub and started encouraging teachers to use it, without any consultation with parents or privacy experts.
Yesterday a friend of mine told me that her son, a fifth grader in a NYC public school, was assigned to read a poem together with his classmates. They were then asked to draw a picture about the poem. But teacher also told them if they didn’t want to draw a picture, they could simply upload the poem into Google Gemini and it would create the image for them. Is this the sort of education we want for our kids?
Mayor Mamdani, you recently said that you don’t use AI yourself, so why are you foisting it on our kids, when research shows it will undermine not only their privacy but their creativity, cognitive skills, critical thinking and exacerbate climate change?
We have a petition here signed by nearly 2,000 parents, educators and others, calling on you to stop before its too late, and impose a two year moratorium on the use of AI in the classroom, so that rigorous protections can be established to protect the quality of our children’s education, their safety, and their future.
More than 200 education and childhood groups and experts including medical professionals signed onto the Fairplay letter, calling for a 5 year moratorium. We hope that the Mayor will listen to our voices, stop catering to Google and other ed tech companies, and forge a new and more positive direction for our public schools.
