For Schools · Teacher Training
Grow, don't Chase.
The reality on the ground
2 in 3
US teens use AI chatbots. 30% daily. 54% for schoolwork.Pew Research, late 2025
46%
of teens who used AI for schoolwork did so without teacher permission.Common Sense Media, Sept 2024
68%
of US teachers report no school or district AI training. None.Walton / Gallup, 2025
19%
of US teachers say their school has any AI policy at all.RAND American Educator Panel, 2025
The horse has left the barn. The question is whether the faculty knows.
NYC banned ChatGPT in January 2023. The Chancellor reversed it in May, calling the original move "knee-jerk fear."
Outcome: students use AI anyway. In secret. Without judgment, citation, or supervision.
LAUSD signed $6.2M with AllHere. Eight weeks later: bankruptcy. Student data routed to eight foreign countries. CEO indicted. FBI raided the Superintendent's home.
South Korea: ₩1.2 trillion. 86% of teachers and parents opposed it. Adoption fell 37% → 19%. Downgraded to "supplementary materials."
This workshop is the path between.
01 · The students moved first
2 in 3 teens use AI chatbots. 30% every day. Almost half do schoolwork on it without telling you.Pew 2025 · Common Sense 2024
02 · The other systems moved next
Estonia put every upper-secondary school on AI in Sept 2025. India's CBSE makes AI compulsory in Classes 9–10 by 2027–28. China: 8+ class hours of AI a year, every grade, from Sept 2025.Estonia · CBSE · China MoE
03 · Your faculty hasn't
68% of teachers have no AI training at all. 96% of parents have heard nothing from your school. The headline writes itself when something goes wrong.RAND / Walton / Common Sense, 2025
The new category of incident
Deepfake nudes · New Jersey
Westfield High, Oct 2023. Boys generated AI nudes of 30+ sophomore girls via the Clothoff app. School read victims' names over the intercom. No charges filed.
Deepfake nudes · Pennsylvania
Lancaster Country Day. Two 14-year-olds made 347 explicit images of 59 minors. The school received a tip in November. Did not report. Police were told six months later, by a parent.
Deepfake nudes · South Korea
Telegram scandal, Aug 2024. Over 500 schools targeted. ~920 school-based victims. 74% of suspects were aged 10–19. One channel: 220,000+ subscribers.
False AI-cheating accusation
Marley Stevens, UNG. Lost her HOPE scholarship after an AI detector flagged her Grammarly use. Stanford finding: 50%+ of TOEFL essays by non-native English speakers are misclassified as AI-written.
Surveillance harm · Kansas
Lawrence Public Schools. Federal lawsuit filed Sept 2024 over Gaggle alerts. Reporters found 1 in 3 LGBTQ students were outed by digital monitoring nationally. Mental-health phrases triggered alerts.
Algorithmic bias · assessment
ETS draft, June 2024. GPT-4o scoring 13,121 student essays penalized Asian American students more than other ethnicities. Differences not explainable by the data.
Cognitive harm · learning loss
Bastani et al., PNAS 2025. When AI access was removed for the test, students who had been using ChatGPT scored 17% lower than the control group. The dependence is measurable.
Cognitive harm · neural
MIT Media Lab, June 2025. EEG study of students writing essays. ChatGPT group showed the lowest neural connectivity. Almost none could quote a sentence from their own essay.
Federal law (the TAKE IT DOWN Act, May 2025) and the EU AI Act (Aug 2026) now apply to schools. The faculty has to know.
The example to study
All 154 upper-secondary schools. ChatGPT Edu and Gemini, free for every teacher. €4M year one, half public, half private donors. Five things they did differently:
"Estonia's true leap is to learn to think with artificial intelligence, not instead of it."
— Kristina Kallas, Minister of Education
The honest counter-example
$15 per student. Free for every teacher worldwide via Microsoft. 795 districts. 2 million users. The closest thing to a "global AI tutor" we've ever had.
In April 2026, Khan publicly admitted: only 15% of students with access regularly engage. The product was rebuilt. The PNAS RCT found no effect for lower-performing students.
"For a lot of students, it was a non-event. They just didn't use it much. Our biggest lever is investing in the human systems."
— Sal Khan, Chalkbeat April 2026
Across Estonia, Singapore, South Australia, Newark, Peninsula. All of them. Every time.
01
Pilot, don't mandate.
8–50 schools. Measured. Then expanded. South Australia is the textbook case.
02
Train teachers first.
Before the tool. Not after. The 68% with no training is not an accident.
03
Write policy. Tell parents.
96% of elementary families have heard nothing from their school. Fix that first.
04
Design for student agency.
Estonia's app refuses direct answers. The Bastani "Tutor mode" neutralized the harm.
05
Augment teachers, never replace.
Aila pauses to keep the teacher in the driving seat. Alpha School's "no teachers" claim is collapsing.
The teacher ladder
Most schools have an L0/L1 average and don't know it. The workshop moves a cohort to L2 in 12 hours, with the trajectory and tools to reach L3 on their own.
"I tried ChatGPT once." No classroom use. Most of your faculty.
Lesson plans, rubrics, parent emails drafted with AI. Personal productivity only.
Designs assignments AI can't shortcut. Uses AI as a Socratic peer for students.
Builds AI-resilient assessment. Models judgment publicly. Mentors colleagues.
Stage 1
15 principles teachers walk in repeating.
Stage 2
Build classroom playbooks, in your subject, in your voice.
Stage 3
Draft your school's own AI policy. Run incident drills.
Stage 4
Synthetic environments for differentiation, IEPs, tough conversations.
Anjali, middle-school English. She has finished Stage 1. This is how she now thinks.
Anjali is rebuilding her Year 8 essay rubric →
What was between Anjali's ears now runs as classroom playbooks — in her voice, on her timetable.
These spread to her department next →
Anjali's cohort co-authored what 96% of families haven't seen from their school: a policy that's actually theirs.
A real document. Defensible to the board, the parents, and the regulator →
Anjali uses synthetic AI environments for preparation, training, and difficult conversations — her own, and her team's.
Things her school could not rehearse before AI →
01
Each teacher leaves with their own 90-day plan, their own playbooks, in their own subject and voice. Not a template. The thing they will actually use on Monday.
Per teacher · Subject-specific
02
The cohort co-authors one document — classroom use, integrity, incidents, parent comms, and what the school will never do. Defensible to your board, parents, and the regulator.
Per school · Board-ready
For Schools
Grow, don't Chase.
shalin@masalagames.com