Context
Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly transforming the technology education ecosystem, potentially revolutionizing how we learn and changing school districts' operations. The rapid adoption of AI in the education sector raises critical challenges related to data privacy, ethical implementations of its use, addressing systemic biases, and the digital divide. School districts must assess the risks associated with AI by considering whether it is fair, safe, equitable, and designed to benefit educators, students, families, and communities.
The policy labs will focus on human-centered AI implementation, equity, safety, ethics,
effectiveness, and transparency. National and global AI strategy and policy require rapid merging, co-designing, and shared decision-making of policymakers, practitioners, academia, industry, and, most essential the education market - educators, students, and families.
Rooted in the Values of School and Educators
The AI Policy Lab is a transdisciplinary, cross-sector public-private partnership within NYCPS that fosters responsible development, deployment, and use of AI technologies in education. Using an open-science approach, the Lab will develop policies and resources to guide, educate, and inform the NYCPS, its teachers, students, and parents on responsible AI utilization. The Lab will focus on an open science and policy development approach that aims to share developed materials, broadly reflect on lessons learned through continuous improvement, and close the gap between policy and practice.
The K12 Policy Lab will be part of a larger NYCPS citywide initiative on AI Literacy and training, driven by NYCPS internal collaboration between the Digital Learning and Innovation (DLI) team in Teaching and Learning and the Computer Science for All Initiative (CS4ALL) in the Office of Student Pathways. The AI Literacy citywide training and resources will span across leaders, educators, students, and families/guardians.
The New York City Public Schools AI Policy Lab will anchor a national network of local policy labs based in school districts nationwide. Together, these labs will solve the real-time problem of rapid adoption of AI in education, building and iterating timely policymaking as a continuous support structure to districts, schools, students, and families. The policy labs will develop open-source one-pagers, district-level policy toolkits, and other resources such as training and family outreach materials. The Policy Lab anchors this work in real-world use cases and the experience of education practitioners.
I love this initiative. Not only is it important to ensure safe practice when it comes to the use of AI, but the more united we, as innovators, can be with regards to how we are using AI the more comfortable those who are using it are. The 'fear' of AI will not simply go away, we need to make people comfortable and confident that the solutions that are being developed and implemented are done so with integrity and security.