News from our anti-AI rally

April 21, 2026

1.     Save the date! Our annual Class Size Matters Skinny Award dinner will be held  on Tuesday May 19 at 6 PM; more info soon on where and how to purchase your ticket to support our work, whether on class size, student privacy or AI, and to honor the tremendously worthy individual who will receive the award this year.

2.     Last week, on Thursday April 16, we rallied in City Hall Park, to call on the Mayor to pause the use of AI in the classroom to develop rigorous protections against the risk to student privacy, their cognitive development, mental health and the environment. Articles about the event and our campaign appeared in Fortune, Daily News, and Politico.

Serendipitously, the same day, the group Fairplay released a letter, signed onto by more than 200 education and childhood organizations, as well as experts on mental health and medical professionals, urging a national five-year moratorium on AI use in schools. After the rally, a bunch of us walked to the East entrance of City Hall, where students handed the Fairplay letter and our petition to Ailish Brady, the Deputy Mayor’s Senior Advisor for Education. Mayor Mamdani himself doesn’t seem to have an advisor on education, and so far seems not to be paying much attention to this or any issue affecting kids in grades K through 12.

I also handed her a copy of the NYC Kids PAC candidate survey filled out by Mamdani when he was running for mayor, in which he criticized “Eric Adams’ cavalier approach” to AI, and promised to consult parents, teachers and students before implementing careful guardrails.

Clearly none of this was done before releasing the pitifully weak AI guidance. Meanwhile, last week at least seven high-ranking DOE officials were attending the ASU-GSV [Global Silicon Valley] conference in San Diego, mingling with ed tech vendors and executives, including Dr. Miatheresa Pate, the DOE chief academic officer and Google “fellow,” who is leading the aggressive AI expansion in NYC schools.

As Sue Edelman pointed out in  Substack , the cost of attendee registration ranges from $2,450 to $3,850 per person — all at a time when the Mayor has asked city agencies including DOE to cut back spending because of the city’s huge budget deficit. In addition, the conference itself was subsidized by Google, as was the development of the AI guidance itself.

Recently, the DOE placed Google Gemini, the company’s AI platform on its TeachHub site, and is encouraging teachers to assign it to their students, despite the serious privacy and mental health concerns expressed by Fairplay, EPIC, and others. At the rally, I related a sad story a friend told me about what happened in her son’s 5^th grade classroom this week, related to the use of Google Gemini.

This story, along with my full comments and some photos are on the blog here. Very soon, we will be posting a detailed critique of the AI guidance, along with suggestions on how you can respond to the DOE survey, with a deadline of May 8. Thanks!