Help us speak out on class size and AI!

March 10, 2026

Dear all:

Parents, teachers and others should attend the Chancellor’s upcoming Listening Sessions to make your voice heard on the issues that concern you, whether this be the failure of the DOE to provide space for the hundreds of schools that do not have the room at their current enrollment to lower class, or the rapid expansion of AI without rigorous protections for learning, privacy and the environment.

If you can, please attend on Saturday March 14 session in Manhattan that starts at 10:30 AM at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Educational Campus at 122 Amsterdam Avenue. Please come a bit earlier, at 10 AM, to stand with the members of our AI Moratorium coalition and help us spread the word about the dangers of AI. You can RSVP for our 10 AM speak-out here.

Opposition to the overuse of ed tech in general and AI in particular is growing. Several states are now proposing legal limits on the amount of time students can spend on computers in schools, recognizing how the overuse of ed tech has led to drops in achievement, damage to student mental health and their disengagement from learning.

The Los Angeles school board is considering a resolution to examine the effect of screens in schools and come up with a comprehensive policy to limit its use. In NYC, the problem of excessive use of ed tech in the classroom is just as serious and growing with the expansion of AI. More than 1300 parents and teachers have now signed our petition calling for a moratorium, and many CECs have passed resolutions urging the Chancellor to do the same.

While DOE officials claim that they are in the process of developing guardrails to be released soon in the form of an “AI Playbook” to prevent harm to students, at the same time they are continuing to expand the use of AI in schools regardless. Recently they posted links to many new AI programs on the DOE’s TeachHub site, which serves as a central “one-stop-shop” for teachers, students, and administrators.

These include Google’s AI tool Gemini, and others though branded as NYC Public School likely incorporate AI programs operated by private companies with inadequate privacy protections.

Three HMH AI products are listed as “New” on the TeachHub: HMH Waggle, HMH Ed Digital, and HMH English 3D. HMH also produces Into Reading, one of the three mandated literacy curriculums, which has AI incorporated into its platform, “designed to assist teachers with lesson planning, differentiation, and assessment,” according to the company.

Into Reading is used in hundreds of NYC elementary schools though it has been much criticized for assigning short passages instead of whole books, and for its lack of cultural responsiveness.  The HMH privacy statement on the DOE website links to the company’s privacy policy which in turn says student data can be used for “product improvement,” which is a commercial use specifically prohibited by the state student privacy law.

HMH is owned by Veritas Capital. a private equity company that also owns NWEA MAP exams, as well as Writable, another AI product employed in many schools that teachers are encouraged to use to automatically grade essays and students to tell them how to write.  HMH also has an “exclusive partnership” with Amira, an AI chatbot which collects student voices and whose contract has been rejected by the Panel for Educational Policy four times but is still being used in many NYC schools.

Meanwhile, the NY State Education Department has advised that any program that collects biometric data like student voices should only be used with “parent input” – and yet no parent that I know of has been asked whether they want their child’s voice collected and processed by this product. I can also find no evidence that the other “new” HMH products on the TeachHub have ever been voted upon by the PEP.

HMH has already received more than $28 million from DOE this school year, and last week the former NYC Chancellor, Melissa Aviles Ramos, announced that she will be taking a job with HMH, as “a senior strategic advisor.”

I also recently received notification from a NYC parent who informed me that their child’s math teacher had assigned their class to do an assignment by using any off-the-shelf AI chatbot they liked, though nearly all of these products data-mine to improve their product, which is again prohibited by the state law. Open AI admits that their products have “the potential to be used …to identify private individuals when augmented with outside data”, and says the following on its website:

“ChatGPT is not meant for children under 13, and we require that children ages 13 to 18 obtain parental consent before using ChatGPT…”

Open AI has been much in the news this week, for agreeing to let the Defense Department to use its program to kill people without human oversight and to spy on US citizens, after another AI company, Anthropic, refused to comply. Our AI Moratorium coalition put out a press release after the news broke, saying this should prompt the AFT and UFT to cease their “partnership” with Open AI.

Sadly we’ve seen insufficient pushback vs. AI among the teacher unions, unlike the nurses union which is battling against AI in their profession, which they recognize could seriously threaten their jobs as well as their patients’ privacy and health.

Until recently, an app called Gen AI was listed on the TeachHub, created by Microsoft in partnership with Open AI, though that app was recently removed in the last week or so, for unknown reasons. Meanwhile Rep. Summer Lee pointed out at recent Congressional hearings that that Microsoft partners with ICE and that “teachers are rightfully concerned about using Microsoft’s AI tools in the classroom while their students are being deported”.

Last week as well, the Superintendent of Los Angeles schools, Alberto Carvalho, who was Mayor de Blasio’s first choice to replace Carmen Farina as our Chancellor, was put on indefinite leave while being investigated for hiring a company called AllHere to build an AI chatbot for students called “Ed”. The company was paid $6 million for the chatbot which was promoted by Carvalho as potentially revolutionary:

“He’s going to talk to you in 100 different languages, he’s going to connect with you, he’s going to fall in love with you. Hopefully you’ll love it, and in the process we are transforming a school system of 540,000 students into 540,000 ‘schools of one’ through absolute personalization and individualization.”

But as a whistleblower pointed out, the company’s vast access to student personal data and the way it processed and redisclosed the data likely violated their privacy.   In any event, the company soon folded, and the owner of AllHere was arrested in 2024 and charged with securities fraud and aggravated identity theft.

Clearly, the ed tech industry in general and the massively wealthy AI companies in particular have billions at their disposal to promote their products and push them onto our schools and kids, despite growing research showing they represent serious risks to student learning, privacy and the environment. Most AI companies like Open AI are intent on blocking the federal, state or local governments from regulating the use of AI, while trying to defeat any candidate who favors doing the same.

Don’t let them win! Instead, sign our petition if you haven’t already, and come to the Chancellor’s Listening session on Saturday March 14 at 10 AM to help us spread the word about the dangers of AI. You can sign up for the Chancellor’s listening session here and RSVP for our 10:00 anti-AI speak-out session here.

Leonie Haimson
Executive Director, Class Size Matters
Co-chair, Parent Coalition for Student Privacy