Hearings to examine the future of K-12 education in the age of artificial intelligence.

The Senate Help Committee on Education in the American family will come to order. Before coming to the Senate, I spent decades working with young people as a teacher, a coach, and mentor. I've been in classrooms, locker rooms, communities where the goal was always the same, help students reach their potential and prepare for the future. That's why today's hearing is so important. Artificial intelligence is changing the world. Our kids are growing up in and whether you like it or not, AIs are going to be part of their education, their careers, and their daily lives. The question isn't whether it's coming. AI is here. The real question is whether we're going to help students use it the right way. As a coach, I always told my players that talent is important. but you have to have skin in the game. The same is true in education. Technology can be a valuable tool, but it will never replace a great teacher, a strong mentor, or the hard work that learning requires. AI has the potential to help students learn at their own pace, give teachers more time to focus on teaching, and open doors for students who may need extra support. Those are opportunities we should take very, very seriously. But we also need to be honest about the challenges. How do we t- protect student privacy? How do we make sure AI is given accurate information? How do we prevent students from becoming dependent on technology instead of developing critical thinking skills? How do we ensure that rural America is, isn't left behind? Most importantly, how do we make sure AI strengthens education instead of weakening it? Our job isn't to chase every new trend. Our job is to figure out what works, what doesn't work, and what's best for students and parents and teachers. The students sitting in the classrooms today will enter a workforce that looks very different from the one many of us grew up in. We have the responsibility to make sure they're prepared, not just to use AI but to compete, innovate, and lead in a world where AI will be everywhere. Two weeks ago, my ranking member and I led a letter to the Government Accountability Office, asking them to begin an investigation into the effects of AI on K through twelve education. I'm proud to report that they have responded and planned to start work on that study very soon. Today I look forward to hearing from our witnesses about how we can encourage innovation while protecting students and preserving the values that make education successful in the first place. So thank you to our witnesses for being here today. I look forward to your testimony. And with that, I'd uh refer to my ranking member, Senator Blunt Rochester, for her opening statement.

Thank you, Mister Chairman, and thank you so much to uh you and your team for partnering with us on a hearing that I think is vitally important for our country. And I also wanna thank the witnesses for being here as well. Um, before I get into my formal remarks, um, I do wanna begin by acknowledging, uh, today's announcement that the Department of Education is attempting to follow through on Secretary McMahon's plan to shut down the department by transferring some of the core functions like today to the function of protecting students' civil rights, and students' disabilities to other agencies without the approval of congress and i while i strongly oppose those actions i'll continue to call on our chairman chairman cassidy to bring secretary mcmahon before our committee to discuss these moves to also be held accountable and really to make sure that um our american education system is strong and protects our children um The hearing today, I think, is one that is very timely, I mean we find ourselves in a moment of great uncertainty. Uh, you could call it a tale of two virtual realities. Some people are afraid we're gonna have a Star Trek moment, some people are afraid it's gonna be the Terminator. We wanna make sure that it is in the best interest of our students and our educators, and artificial intelligence seems to be everywhere. Um, our schools, our classrooms, and our students' homes. are no exception. Yet as AI reaches all parts of our lives, there are unanswered questions about its impacts, and the stakes are getting even higher alongside them. That is why I'm so glad that we're holding the hearing today, and why I was so pleased to work with the Chairman and Senator Cain to request that investigation by the Government Accountability Office on the current state of AI NK twelve education. I believe we should be gathering as much accurate information as possible in order to make informed decisions that will keep our students safe and help them succeed, as well as support our educators. Um, I come to this topic both as a ranking member of the subcommittee, uh, but also as a grandmother. Um, I, I have a granddaughter who is now three years old and will, be educated and is being educated in an AI age. And that means she's growing up with a new way, new things than that we had. Um, when she graduates from high school in twenty thirty nine, I want her to be able to be creative and have critical thinking skills to succeed. I want her to be interested in learning and understand that not all questions can be answered instantaneously. I wanted her to have the understanding of what it means to go to work, to start a business, and what careers are out there in this rapidly changing economy. And alongside my dreams for my granddaughter and for all students in this country, I also have concerns. The impact of AI will have on cognitive development and learning is not well understood. And some experts are sounding the alarm that cognitive skills are being negatively The guidelines about what safe and ethical AI should look like in the classroom are not well-defined and vary greatly from place to place. Yet reports show that eighty-four percent of high school students are using generative AI for schoolwork. Similarly, reports find that eighty-five percent of teachers are using AI in their work. I know teachers are looking for professional development opportunities, and clear guidance to support safe and effective use of AI. Schools, districts, states across this country are trying to craft responsible guidance and identify AI tools that will support student learning, while protecting their civil rights, mental health, and data privacy. My home state of Delaware is doing amazing work on this front, and I look forward to hearing from Secretary Cindy Martin about how our state is leading on this issue. Importantly, I think all of us here want to know what we as Congress can do to support the work. And I hope that this hearing helps us better understand the challenges and the opportunities that AI presents in education. With that, I yield back.

Thank you, Senator. Now we'll get to our witnesses. First, I'd like to introduce Josh Jones. proud Alabamian and a leader in AI space, Mr. Mr. Jones uh is the CEO of QuantHub, a Birmingham-based company that builds AI and data literacy, curriculum for schools, universities, and employers. He has partnered with my state's Department of Education and a number of businesses throughout Alabama to prepare for the age of AI. Mr. Jones' partnership with our state Department of Education is a huge reason why Alabama's students have some of the best numbers nationwide. in enrollment, in data science courses, and data literacy. QuantHub is reaching ever-field training educators, administrators, and our future workforce. He also created QuantHub's Data Scholars program that has placed one hundred high school and undergraduate students into paid dat- paid data and AI internships. QuantHub is creating opportunities for students to earn industrial recognized credentials in data and AI literacy before they even get their diploma. Mister Jones has a proven track record of tackling the world of AI head first. Mister Jones, your opening statement, please.

Chairman Tuberville, uh, ranking member Blount Rochester, members of the subcommittee, thank you for this opportunity to testify today. Uh, I am Joshua Jones, CEO at QuantHub, and, uh, a- as the Senator said, we're an Alabama-based company that builds AI and data literacy curriculum for schools universities and employers. And our mission is really to empower talent with a digital agility to thrive in this evolving world. I'm also honored to be joined today by our State Superintendent of Education, Doctor Eric Mackey, as well as my colleague, Doctor Veronique Brown. For the past four years, we partnered with the Alabama Department of Education on what I believe is one of the most ambitious statewide efforts in the country to prepare K-twelve and post-secondary learners for an AI-driven economy. Now, Alabama is not a state most people would associate with leading-edge tech And that's part of why what's happened there really matters. In rec- in its recent State of the Field Report, the National Data Science for Everyone Initiative, uh, ranked Alabama third in the nation in student enrollment in data science and related courses only behind California and Virginia. And through our efforts, we placed over a hundred high school students through a pilot program into paid AI and data internships throughout the state. Teachers and administrators have earned thousands of professional development hours. Uh, again in the National Data Science for Everyone report, we were ranked number one in the country in terms of the most professional development hours. Students are earning industry recognized credentials in data and AI literacy before they leave high school. As Doctor Eric Mackey has put it, integrating this kind of training into the state's educational framework is about preparing students for the future of work, while keeping Alabama competitive in a rapidly evolving digital economy. I'd like to share today three lessons from this work that I believe are directly relevant to federal policy. First, we must refresh our standards of in curriculum at the speed of technology. The traditional curriculum refresh rate of uh is typically five to ten years, yet in the age of AI, uh that's generations. At QuantHub, we've built a human-in-a-loop system that uses AI agents for curriculum generation, but it always validates with instructional designers, faculty, and subject matter experts before anything ever reaches a student. We've reduced curriculum development hours from roughly two hundred hours to create one learner hour to about ten hours of instructional validation. That's a twenty X improvement without compromising rigor, efficacy, or accuracy. Now in the interest of sharing these advancements with the education community, we published our process in the peer-reviewed journal, the Journal of Applied Instructional Design. Federal investments in workforce curriculum should reward speed and update cadence not just initial development, learner hours, or page counts. Second, the human side is where this work succeeds or fails. For years, data and analytics courses have lived on the fringes as obscure electives. The Breakthrough in Alabama was not a better course. It was building modular content that maps directly to existing state standards in math science social studies and CTE. So a teacher doesn't have to add a class, they integrate a unit into one that they already teach. Now that requires heavy investment in teacher training, instructional coaching, and integration support. Curriculum is a small piece of the puzzle. Change management is that critical linchpin. Third, you can't build a workforce pipeline from inside a school building alone. Our Data Scholars internship program works because we built bridges to employers, civic leaders, nonprofits, higher education partners, and we matched students to real paid roles. We didn't put these interns in jobs pouring coffee, But we made sure that the corporations were actually identifying upfront meaningful jobs related to data and AI so that these students could build real-world skills. And in many cases, they're getting job offers as soon as they complete their internship. Our Data Scholars program works. We've seen more than fifty employers host our scholars now. And in work-based learning, I would suggest that recruiting employers at that scale is typically the hardest part of the program, which makes the number itself a strong signal that this talent is in real demand. It also gives us a continuous feedback loop that keeps the curriculum aligned with what these employers actually need. The micro-credentials that our scholars earn are directly aligned with Alabama's talent triad, a talent marketplace, where a credential isn't just a certificate, it plugs into the system that the employers actually use to find workers. Now the pilot for the internship program was actually funded by a state innovation agency called Innovate Alabama, and it's been recognized as a model for rural talent retention. Now this matters enormously in a state, in a country, where small towns are losing young people to larger metros. A hundred placements on limited funding tells us that this model scales. Now with dedicated federal support, particularly through Parkins-five and existing workforce pathways, it can be replicated in any state. In closing, I'd respectfully offer three recommendations for consideration. One, fund curriculum infrastructure that can be updated continuously, not just developed once. Refresh rate should happen in semesters, not quadrennium or decades. Two, weight teacher training and classroom integration at least as heavily as content creation in federal workforce education grants and three, expand support for paid work-based learning in AI and data fields starting in high school. The Alabama model is replicable, it's not expensive relative to what it returns. And it works because we treated this as a workforce problem, an educator problem, and a curriculum problem, not just a technology problem. Thank you.

Thank you very much. Our next witness is Miss Erin Mote. Founder of, co-founder of Innovate EDU, an organization that prioritizes innovation in education and empowering students, use of technology in the classroom. She is also the founder of Project Unicorn and the leader of the EdSafe AI Alliance. Miss Mote has a storied career of adapting technology for students and continuously finding solutions to put our nation's students ahead of the game. She brings extensive experience in the education technology space and securing our national digital ins- infrastructure. Through EdSafe AI Alliance, she has partnered with multiple state and school districts to bridge the gap of AI with students and teachers, while superintendents and administrators start panicking at how AI will change education, miss mode, gave real solutions, to adopt ai and not run from it this moat

chairman tubberbell ranking member of blunt rochester and distinguished members of the help committee thank you for convening this critical hearing my name is erin mote and i am the ceo of innovate edu a non-profit organization dedicating to ensuring technology serves as a powerful tool for access and opportunity for all students I come before this committee not only as a charter school founder, but also as a technologist who spent more than two decades working at the intersection of technology policy and systemic change. Yet perhaps my most important role is a deeply personal one. I'm the mother of two school-age children. Each day I see firsthand how these technologies impact real kids at the kitchen table and in classrooms, which fuels my urgency to ensure that our national digital infrastructure is secure, safe, and intentionally built to serve the next generation. To navigate this landscape, we must reject a pervasive false dichotomy. Safety is not the counter-polarity to innovation. Safety is not a drag on progress. Rather, safety is a necessary condition for the effective use of AI in education, the very guardrail that makes meaningful, sustainable innovation possible. Without it, we mistake rapid tool adoption for progress. Generative AI is an arrival technology. Like the internet or electricity, it is reshaping how students, educators in our society live, work, and relate to each other. Data shows that roughly eighty-five percent of teachers and eighty-four percent of students are already using generative AI in their classrooms. But this transition did not follow a linear path. of institutional procurement or risk evaluation. As a result, school districts and families are experiencing severe operational fatigue. More than half of schools have failed to provide any professional development on the safe use of AI. Our schools urgently need federal leadership, structured support, and dedicated funding. A consumer large language model is engineered for platform retention and user satisfaction. To keep users engaged, it defaults to a dangerous form of algorithmic sycophancy. It does not teach, it indulges. It validates incorrect premises and hand delivers answers, often bypassing the productive struggle required for cognitive development. Learning is an active process. True purpose-built Ed Tech scaffolds learning with a student zone of proximal development, much like the AI-driven math accelerators currently being utilized in Alabama to bridge foundational gaps for learners. When we substitute this with compu- consumer grade systems we trigger what Wharton researchers call cognitive surrender. When human psychology meets this unceasingly agreeable tack, independent reason is often relinquished. Alarming data shows that when a chatbot intentionally gave incorrect answers, users accepted the error eighty percent of the time. We are actively placing yet spots in front of neurologically vulnerable youth, conditioning a generation to surrender c- critical discernment. Moreover, today the average school district accesses nearly three thousand digital tools a year, creating a fragmented, unmanageable landscape for teachers, families, and students. We must transition to evidence-based purchasing, anchored in five EdTech quality indicators. ensuring tools are safe, interoperable, usable, inclusive, and evidence-based. Meeting a baseline level of evidence, tier four within the federal SF framework, must be a non-negotiable ticket to enter America's classrooms. When less than half of purpose-built ed tech tools meet this standard, only two percent of consumer tools do. We must shift our focus to a new ROI, return on instruction. We also must replace the blunt outdated metric of screen time with screen value. Counting minutes does not tell us if an interaction is meaningful. For instance, screen-based reading is six to eight times less effective for reading comprehension than physical books. Yet for decoding a skill essential to the science of reading that requires a thousand at-bats to achieve fluency, purpose-built AI excels. Furthermore, blanket bans or hourly limits can disproportionately harm the many children with disabilities, or who who rely on digital tools for mandated accommodations. We cannot rely on digital avoidance. Congress must ensure that AI is built for our children's safety, learning, and healthy development, while also building tech literacy and digital responsibility in our students. To protect our students without stifling innovation or widening the digital divide, Congress must approach a waterfall approach to safety. This means applying heavy-handed safety controls to high-risk applications at the top, such as public consumer platforms and relationship-stimulating chatbots, while easing the regulatory burden on lower-risk, purpose-driven educational tools. Finally, the federal government must enact immediate structural policy changes, reconstitute and fully staff the Office of Education Technology. Establish a joint interdisciplinary AI and education federal research agenda and infrastructure through the NSF, IES, and NIH. Protect ERIIT and fund non-consensual intimate imagery enforcement agencies like the FTC. We cannot afford a passive wait-and-see approach. We must design digital regulatory ecosystems at the federal and state level that aggressively target genuine harms while keeping human values Ethics and Critical Judgment at the Center of the American Classroom. Thank you, and I look forward to your questions.

And it's my honor to introduce uh Secretary Cindy Martin, who is the Secretary of Education in Delaware. She has more than thirty-five years of experience in education leadership, policy, and classroom instruction. She holds a Master's of Art in Teaching and Learning, from the University of California, San Diego, and a Bachelor of Science in Education from the University of Wisconsin, La Crosse. Secretary Martin began her career as a teacher. In the years since, she has been a leader at every level, serving as a principal, a superintendent of San Diego, uh, unified school district, and as Deputy Secretary of the United States Department of Education, where she oversaw K twelve initiatives, including the Office of Education Technology. She has done remarkable work, from greatly improving literacy outcomes at the school district level, to leading efforts to close opportunity gaps at the federal level. I'm grateful that she has brought her knowledge and expertise to Delaware, where she is now leading on education reform in our state. Secretary, Madam Secretary, thank you for being with us today, and I will turn it over to you for your testimony.

Thank you very much, Chairman Tuberville and Ranking Member Blunt-Rochester. It's an honor to be here today before the members of this subcommittee, and to address this important topic. As mentioned, I've spent more than three decades as a teacher, a principal, a superintendent, and deputy secretary at the US Department of Education. And today I am proudly serving as Delaware Secretary of Education, where our focus is to start with students and then build for impact. Across every one of those roles where I've served, one thing has always remained true. Our responsibility is not to prepare students for the world that we grew up in, but to prepare students for the world that they are entering. That's why in Delaware we are approaching artificial intelligence with both urgency and care that's required. I wanna start with something that a Delaware student recently told us. The student said, " AI should be a collaborator and a tool, not something that does the work for us." And I think that is exactly right. This conversation is not really about technology. This is about learning. It's about critical thinking and helping students to develop the very skills that they need to enter into the world, where AI is going to be a part of nearly every single profession. The reality is, as we've heard, AI is already in our schools. Students are using it, families are asking about it, and our educators are left navigating it. So the question is not whether AI is going to impact education. The real question is whether we will shape its use, thoughtfully, responsibly. And our answer in Delaware is yes. Our work supports a goal in Delaware's strategic plan that seventy-five percent of our districts and charter schools will use AI tools to support educators and students while they maintain full compliance with data security, privacy, and the human in the loop requirements. Under Governor Matt Meyer's leadership, Delaware has chosen to lead. We are developing statewide guidance, we are investing in AI literacy, and building what we believe is one of the nation's first statewide AI assurance efforts. focused on K twelve education. In twenty twenty four, Delaware released statewide guidance to support effective use of generative AI in schools. That guidance is is grounded in four priorities, protect student data, ensure ethical use, promote equity, and enhance teaching and learning. These priorities are consistent with the national guidance d- and developer guides and tool kits that were published by the federal office of EdTech. We're also listening closely to our students. One student told us we have to make sure students still develop critical thinking skills not just let the AI do all the thinking for us straight from our students. Another student emphasized emphasized that AI generated information has to be checked has to be checked because systems can make mistakes and hallucinate many of the students raise concerns about data privacy and the need for adults to protect student information see what strikes me is that students aren't asking us to slow down innovation. They're asking us to lead and lead responsibly. They're asking us to do what good educators have always done, teach them how to think, not what to think. That's why Delaware is taking the next step through our AI assurance lab. The goal of our AI assurance lab is not to slow innovation. It is to ensure that innovation is worthy of the trust that students, families, and educators place. in our schools. The lab creates this trusted transparent process for evaluating AI tools before schools adopt them at scale. Delaware recently completed a statewide scan of AI use and what we found was encouraging but it reinforced the need for this independent review. Most AI use today is focused on helping educators with productivity and planning. That's a great data point. If we use AI and use it well, teachers can get time back and do the human work that only teachers can do. We, districts and charters still have unanswered questions though. They want to know about privacy protections, integrations, and how tools actually perform in real education settings. That is why our assurance lab does not simply review the vendor claims. Vision has to come before vendor. Trained educators, administrators, technical s experts, and DOE staff are testing tools used in our Delaware classroom scenarios. We're evaluating tools against national frameworks and our own state guidance, and we're looking to make sure our tools are protecting students and whether the outputs are accurate and appr- appropriate and whether there is bias showing up or not and how accessibility is working to lead towards better teaching, learning, and outcomes. This is practical implementation work. It's not technology for technology's sake, because a safe tool is not automatically a useful tool. We need to help educators and families understand the tools and earn greater public trust, and we need to support our educators, not sideline them. We want students to develop judgment, creativity, and critical thinking that no technology will ever replace. When we keep students at the center, lead with strong guardrails and shared responsibility and judge AI by outcomes, rather than hype, I believe AI can expand opportunity while preserving what matters most about education, human relationships, human judgment, and human learning. Thank you and I look forward to your questions.

Thank you very much. Now we'll start a round of questioning. We'll start with Senator Banks.

Thank you, Mister Chairman, to you and the ranking member, uh, what an important subject and topic, uh, to host this subcommittee on, and to all of you for being here. I'm encouraged by the audience, uh, the those of you who have come to participate and listen to this and uh such an important conversation ms. moat like you i have three daughters in public schools high school middle school they're in a great public school district with great teachers administrators and a school board um i think they're they're trying to figure all of this out but they i don't i don't think they have yet i don't think any any school yet has figured out where we're going with this and and uh i think we all agree we have to be flexible i do think secretary martin that the answers to a lot of these questions are gonna come from indiana and delaware and the states much more than they're gonna come from bureaucrats and anybody in washington d. c. so this the partnership that we have with you and and those at the state level i think is really important why this this uh subcommittee uh hearing is so important today i wonder just to start with if all of you could be just a little more specific about what are the what are the ai skills today that are schools should be teaching students and if you could just sum that up in a succinct way and then maybe you could talk a little bit as well i'll i'll uh defer to each of you uh how do and how do how do we measure that how do we how do we measure that our students are being uh being taught effectively in this new age uh uh uh and adapting to these ai skills but if you secretary if you could just start with like what what um what are the skills that teachers in delaware are teaching or that they should be teaching to kids about ai and the use of it that is uh that's that's adding to a more constructive and productive learning environment

thank you for thank you for that question and the skills skill base is for the students and also for the educators so there is a skill ai literacy that we speak about first the educators have to have a skill set and then i think you're asking specifically about student skills how do we use the tools that are part of the teaching and learning that's happening in the classroom teachers have their state standards and things that they're required to teach and content that must be learned by the end of a year. And as they're teaching, how can a tool be used to enhance the critical thinking that students are doing? So as they're creating work, as they're working together, as they're doing research, are these tools allowing them to personalize their learning, to make it more um related to their own background and their own interests, and make the learning more meaningful for them? So the skill base ends up being how do you pick up this tool what am I gonna use it for you could go to I'll use since it's a tool analogy you could go to any I won't say the name of a store but any tool store buy a tool it's how are you gonna use this to create this end of course paper that you're going to write the school the the skills have have to do with literacy and they have to do with math and they have to be connected to science as well and each of these tools end up being something that if a student knows how to use it they'll be able to produce a stronger product and they'll be able to evaluate critically the information that the tool is producing. They can't just accept the answer as it's, as it's being produced.

Uh, that's great. Ma- Miss Mo, can you talk more about what the, the specific skills the teacher should be teaching kids with use of the

Thank you so much for the question. I think we need to be thinking about AI literacy as a foundational literacy across all subjects, that it's important that we're able to interrogate the inputs and the outputs of this technology, in history and in biology and in computer science. And so, when I think about what I want to cultivate in my own children, I want them to be critical consumers of this technology. I want them to grow the skill of discernment. And frankly, that means working in multifunctional teams with humans, but also with AI as a teammate. And increasingly, I think that's what workplaces are demanding, that AI is a tool and a teammate. in the work that they're doing to discuss, to discern, and to be in discourse with each other.

And, Mister Jones, I mean, is there a, is there a way that schools can measure that?

Um, so, absolutely, and, and I might add from a skill perspective if I could, just a couple of the quick skills that we offer. So, the, the foundations of AI, what is it, where did it come from, uh, the basic ethics of when should I be using AI, when is that OK, tool selection. You know, in the early days, particularly of generative AI, we had one vendor that was the name everyone knew, but now you have, so many different leading vendors, understanding their strengths and weaknesses, when would I use one tool versus the other based on the job or the task at hand. Um, I would suggest, we don't call it this, but a healthy cynicism around not just assuming that everything that AI tells you is correct. And so how do we teach these students to understand that this is basically an informed opinion that you need to really judge with your own uh research. So to the and we go well beyond that, but to your question around um, how do we test this? Something that we've been a little bit hesitant, or I should say very hesitant to do, is expose learners directly to large language models due to the predictive nature of these so everything that we do in teaching we use AI on the back-end to accelerate curriculum creation but it always has the backstop of validation by a subject matter expert so students are actually getting a fixed version of that educational material so when we talk about actually testing them, how do you test when, if you put a prompt into an AI, you know, a large language model three times and you get four different answers. How do you test that from a rigor standpoint and an accreditation standpoint? So what we've done is we've created controlled environments with simulations, where we we leverage really the best of both of those technologies, but as we're teaching them prompting, we're not just teaching them the tactical say this word or this, because that's changing so fast. Almost by the time you publish it, it's gonna be, you know, chances are out of date. So how do you back up and teach those critical thinking skills? Um, so what should I be using, you know, what should I be using these for? What are their strengths and weaknesses? Those sorts of things. And those are things that we can definitely test. And so we do those in what we refer to as our summative assessments.

Thank you. My time has expired.

I am so excited about this conversation and apparently so is America, because the line is out the door and around the corner to get into this room. We have a lot of young people in in the audience as well. Um, raise your hand if you're under forty. The whole audience just, uh, okay, uh, this is what happens when hallucination of the of the But I I I have to say So, I don't know if this is a large learning model glitch or what, but back here. But I will say, um, it really demonstrates just how timely this hearing is, just how important these issues are. Um, as you were talking, Uh, Mister Jones, I was thinking recently I um University of Delaware has a AI literacy test that you can take so I took the test myself to see how much do I know, do I know about the ethical issues, do I know about um how to protect myself? I've even had these models um argue a prop, I put it in the same prompt into all three, like maybe I won't name names either, but a couple of different ones, and get different answers. And then, then I have to say critically, well, what's right? And so, um, to me, I, I, I'm glad that you mentioned not relying just on what spit out, what's, you know, comes out, cuz what we put in is what comes out. Um, and also change management. I think, eh, we've done a lot of things, eh, in the past using technology, and it was change management that was necessary to make people prepared and accepting and be able to use appropriately. Um, my first question I wanna ask is to Secretary Martin. Would, I would love to hear some of the things that you think have been the most exciting things that you're seeing right now in Delaware as it pertains to AI in education, and then what have been the biggest challenges uh that you've, that you've faced. And lastly in that question, how can we at the federal level support it? Because my colleague just shared a lot of incredible things are having happening at the state level. almost as laboratories to help us to figure out what we need to do next. But are there things that only we could do at the federal level? So one, share anything that is exciting happening in Delaware, two, some challenges, and three, what is it that we in Congress should be focused on? And that question I will ask of all three.

OK. Thank you. Thank you for the question. I am very excited about what I see in Delaware, having had the opportunity to lead at the federal level and the guidance and tool kits and uh materials that we were able to publish, I'm now in a position in leading a state to be able to implement that strong guidance that came out of the Office of Educational Technology that included playbooks, it included vendor guidance, it included teacher K-twelve guidance. And what I see in Delaware, so much optimism. But that comes with a lot of responsibility. So what's exciting to me is this tremendous potential. And that Delaware has been working on this before I came as the Secretary of Education, in their generative ai guidance and they see the promise in being able to reduce administrative burden for teachers being able to give teachers more time with students to take some things off a teacher's already very busy plate i see the promise i'm excited about opportunities for accessibility for students with disability having more access to learning through some tools that help them access if it's an auditory deficit or visual processing these tools are helping, that's a lot of promise there, and the ability to give feedback, as students are learning real immediate feedback, not waiting till the end of the year to know if somebody's learned and what you're going to do about it, but instantaneous feedback with teaching and learning in the classroom, always with the teacher, right with the students, so all of that excitement happens because it's strengthening the accessibility and improving operational tasks that teachers have to do. That's exciting. anything that has to do with differentiation, translation, all of that is good. The challenges are real though. The challenges are that this technology is evolving faster than systems are made to adapt and what I see are challenges around privacy, security, procurement, instructional use, the bias that is built into the models, the governance that needs to happen with limited capacity and the district's ability to be able to create this guidance quickly and be able to act on it so that they can enable innovation. We do not wanna be stopped by fear. We wanna be able to move forward. So being able to make complex decisions and be supported with federal guidance at the state level, so district leaders, elected school board members and superintendents have clear evidence-based paths forward.

And, Mister Chairman, if you would indulge for that second question, I'm just curious, what can and should we be doing at this level? Miss Mote.

Thank you for that question. One thing that we need to understand is what works for whom and under what conditions. Right now there are currently no high quality causal studies on the long-term effects of AI on student learning equity or s social emotional development.

Mm-hmm.

The federal government is uniquely positioned to help us understand both what we know and what we don't know so that we can empower states and educators families and communities to make decisions about ai with knowledge and facts and so there's a place where the federal government by working together to understand the mental health aspects the education aspects and the learning aspects can really help lead communities and states with evidence to guide their decisions.

thank you and mister jones

uh i would suggest at quant hub we're really focused on the refresh rates of curriculum. We're in an environment where the technology is advancing on an exponential curve. And what we were seeing now with these AI models, for example, building other AI models, the pace of change is increasing faster and faster. And so from an educational standpoint, how do we deliver curriculum that is built knowing that this curriculum is only gonna last for six months, and we have to have, you know, so, so that refresh rate, I would suggest when you're thinking about funding different, um, both from an all sorts of teacher training, educator training, all the way down to the students, everything that you're funding you have to realize that that that time uh factor is, is something that we've never seen before and it's gonna continue to increase.

i i'm gonna yield back my time but i i have if we go into another round of questions i have a lot more for the record but for all the young people who are here or watching please reach out to our offices send us your thoughts you can do it through our website you can mail it to us however is best for you But we wanna hear from you too. So thank you so much for being here and I yield back.

Yeah, they can use AI, right?

They can use AI, exactly.

Yeah. Senator, I see.

Yeah, thank, thank you, Mister Chairman and uh, ranking member, appreciate you having this committee. I I was actuall this committee hearing I was actually involved in AI at the state government level, prior to becoming a US Senator, in which before ChatGPT was even introduced on November thirtieth, twenty twenty two, we had already used an AI tool to uh recommend five million words for elimination out of the state's regulatory code, of seventeen million words using an ai tool with human collaboration. And then we so this is so new, cause we're most people's consciousness didn't really understand what ai was in their lives, even though it existed until we had this uh release in November of twenty twenty two. And since that time uh we created i- I know in Ohio we created an ai tool kit. for trusted resources for for um parents educators students to to look at and you're correct mister jones this stuff needs to be updated constantly uh because things change so quickly but in conversations i've had with educators and experience i've had as a parent educators tell me that have incorporated this in the classroom that they've used it and they feel more knowledgeable about the progress of students on individual level than they've ever felt before i talked to one language arts teacher who told me that that over the course of the day she has something like a hundred and forty students and she knows exactly where each one of them are in their development of their language skills because she can follow it along and then she can reach those students on an individualized basis uh to help them learn and to reach them where they are so i see a lot of heads nodding it seems like this and i also believe it can be an egalitarian technology in the sense that every student will have access to a tutor and and these ai tools get better they're better at it if you were gonna ask me to help you with your pre-calc homework i wouldn't be very good at it but my ai tools can and they can help your children uh have a tutor twenty four seven three sixty five so those are the virtuous things of course we don't know about what the harm may be Just like with social media tools that we know have become harmful in the lives of children. So, it's a constant process and creating an awareness around this is very important. And so, so I, I wanna ask you and I'll, and I'll start um, with you, Mister Jones, and we'll go right down the line, just quickly. So, parents that are concerned about this. What should they be asking their local school leadership about AI uh, to feel comfortable that it's being used appropriately in their schools.

I think one of the great disservices educators do in many cases is they don't address it. They stick their head in the sand, they hope it'll go away, and so the worst thing you can do is just have a syllabus or or or not clearly defined rules. So talking about many, uh, particularly in university settings, uh, in a class, a green light, yellow light, red light situation, we're gonna use AI in these situations, but here's a situation where you should not use it. Because in some cases it can help you do things like research much better, but in others you should s- you should set it aside, use critical thinking skills. And so really having your educators just addressing that up front, not saying it's, it's the great evil, we're gonna stay away from it, but also not using it everywhere, but really being methodical about where are we going to incorporate it into our classes, how are we going to use it. Start by teaching those ethical skills up front, and just being thoughtful in your, your approach to it.

'Kay. Ms. Mow?

Thank you. Parents are fearful that their students' data is being used in a way that is not protected. And so the most important thing that educators can do is to actually say, this is what this tool is being used for, this is how I'm using it in my human-centered relationship with your student, and really address that fear straight on. At SafeAI, Common Sense Media, and the National Parents Union, actually earlier this year,

And Secretary Martin.

Thank you. I noticed in your two examples you've totally kept the human in the loop, which is exactly what we're talking about. teacher that you referenced is a teacher who wanted to use a tool to get to know her students more so she could help them in their individualized personalized learning. That is the promise. Parents can ask the same hard questions that a teacher is asking, is this helping me teach better?