A bipartisan group of senators in the Senate Subcommittee on Education and the American Family acknowledged during a Tuesday hearing that artificial intelligence's potential in schools is equaled by a number of concerning challenges.
“Artificial intelligence is changing the world our kids are growing up in, and — whether you like it or not — AI is going to be part of their education, their careers, and their daily lives,” said Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., in his opening remarks for the hearing. “The real question is whether we're going to help students use it the right way.”
Tuberville added that AI can help students learn at their own pace, give teachers more time to focus on instruction, and assist students who may need additional support. At the same time, he said, AI can lead to issues with student data privacy protections, the weakening of students’ critical thinking skills, and possibly leaving behind rural schools that may lack access to the technology.
The U.S. Government Accountability Office soon plans to study the effects of AI on K-12 education, said Tuberville, after he and Sen. Lisa Blunt Rochester, D-Del., sent a letter on June 4 to the office requesting an investigation on the issue. Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va. also signed onto the letter.
“As AI reaches all parts of our lives, there are unanswered questions about its impacts, and the stakes are getting even higher alongside them,.” said Blunt Rochester.
As senators expressed both interest and apprehension over the future of AI in schools, the hearing witnesses — experts and leaders in the AI education space — shared three key policy solutions where the federal government can support schools' approaches to AI.
Fund teacher AI training
Teachers need strong training and professional development to effectively use AI, the witnesses said.
“Barely half” of schools have facilitated professional development for teachers on AI since 2022, said Erin Mote, one of the witnesses and the CEO and founder of the education nonprofit InnovateEDU. This is despite teachers being the "frontline deliverers" of literacy and how students interact with AI "in a human-centered" way.
To help, Congress should fully fund Title II and Title IV, which are federal grant programs that can be used to help teachers get trained on the technology, said Mote, who also leads the EDSAFE AI Alliance, a group that designed a framework for AI policy and implementation in schools.
Cynthia Marten, education secretary for Delaware, also agreed in her testimony that investing in professional development is important. “A tool is no good if the person that’s using the tool doesn’t know how to use it,” she said.
Marten added that teacher training also can’t solely be an “afterthought” or a “tiny line item” once a big AI platform is purchased. Instead, such professional development should give teachers agency, voice and time to learn how to safely use AI tools.
There should also be investments in coaching to allow teachers to collaborate and build trust as they grow familiar with the technology, she said.
Research AI’s impacts on schools
There are currently no high-quality causal studies on the long-term effects AI has on students’ learning, equity or social-emotional development, Mote said.
But the federal government is in a unique position to help states and communities make decisions about AI use if the government provides research into the mental health, educational, and learning impacts of the technology, she said.
To do that, Mote said, the federal government needs to immediately reconstitute the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Educational Technology — which the Trump administration shuttered last year as part of department-wide layoffs. There should also be a federal joint interdisciplinary AI education research agenda and infrastructure between the National Science Foundation, the Institute of Education Sciences, and the National Institutes of Health, she added.
Marten agreed that federal research support is necessary for finding evidence and best practices for using AI in schools. That way, she said, not every state or district has to recreate their own evidence-based use cases for AI.
In Delaware, the state has developed an AI Assurance Lab that tests tools to see if they align with teaching standards and if they’re producing actual student outcomes, Marten said.
Protect E-rate funds and invest in K-12 cybersecurity
Mote also said that Congress must protect its $3 billion annual investment into the Federal Communications Commission’s E-Rate program, which helps connect schools and libraries to the internet nationwide at discounted rates.
“This is vital internet connectivity dollars that support rural communities in making sure that young people have access to the internet in schools,” Mote said. “This is critical money in order to ensure that we are not widening the digital divide.”
Mote’s emphasis on preserving E-Rate funds comes as the FCC announced earlier this month that it’s facilitating a “top-to-bottom” review of the E-Rate program as scrutiny increases on students’ screentime use in schools.
Additionally, Mote said, schools need more federal resources for cybersecurity supports in order to protect their student and teacher data — something senators acknowledged has become especially challenging as AI tools become more prevalent in schools.
Blunt Rochester noted that 52% of U.S. school districts experienced a cybersecurity incident in 2025. She also pointed to a major data breach at ed tech company PowerSchool over a year ago that exposed the information of 62 million students and 9.5 million teachers, adding that it was the “largest breach of children’s educational data in U.S. history.”
Since then, however, another significant data breach impacting Instructure’s Canvas platform occurred in late April. The cyber gang ShinyHunters claimed it stole 3.65 TB of data from about 275 million users across 9,000 schools worldwide.
Marten added that, given the current ed tech landscape, it’s important for states to help ensure that AI tools have strong cybersecurity policies and student data privacy protections before they’re implemented in classrooms.
