Across Philadelphia and the surrounding region, schools are being pushed to answer a question that has become urgent almost overnight: What role should artificial intelligence play in learning?
The question is showing up in district meetings, faculty lounges, parent conversations, professional development sessions and student work. School leaders are writing guidance. Parents are trying to understand what AI will mean for their children.
Teachers understand something that many conversations about education technology overlook: learning is a human process before it is a technological one.
Technology companies are moving quickly to build products for classrooms. But amid all that activity, one group is too often treated as an audience for AI decisions rather than a partner in making them: teachers.
As a former Philadelphia teacher who now works at the intersection of education and technology, I have been watching these conversations with growing interest and real concern. AI is changing how we write, search, communicate, create and solve problems.
Schools cannot ignore it. The question is who gets to shape how it is used. If teachers are not central to that process, AI decisions in schools will be less practical, less equitable and less connected to how students actually learn.
For much of the past year, the conversation about AI in education has swung between two poles: Some people see AI as a powerful solution to longstanding challenges in education. Others see it mostly as a threat to learning, creativity and critical thinking. I understand both impulses, but the binary positions feel incomplete. They focus so much on the technology itself that they can miss the people responsible for helping students learn.
When I taught high school English, there was always a new tool that promised to transform education. Interactive whiteboards. Learning management systems. One-to-one laptop initiatives. The names changed, but the promise remained familiar: this technology would make learning better. Sometimes those tools helped. Sometimes they did not.
More often, their impact depended less on the tool itself than on the teacher’s judgment about how, when and whether to use it.
Teachers know when AI helps — and when it gets in the way
Teachers understand something that many conversations about education technology overlook: learning is a human process before it is a technological one.
Over the past three years, I have worked with educators across Pennsylvania and around the country who are navigating questions about AI in real time.
What strikes me is not that they are reflexively for or against AI. It is that their questions are practical, student-centered and grounded in classroom reality: Will this help my students understand more deeply? Will it make learning more accessible? Or will it do the thinking for them?
In the right context, AI can be useful.
Teachers are using it to translate family communications, adapt reading materials so students at different levels can engage with the same ideas, generate examples, brainstorm lesson plans and reduce administrative work that consumes too much of their time.
A teacher might use AI to help a student understand a complex scientific concept. That same teacher might decide that data analysis should remain entirely the student’s own work because the goal is to help the student develop their own thinking, voice and self-awareness. The ability to make that distinction is exactly why teachers need to be at the center of this conversation.
These uses are not flashy, but they matter. They show how AI can support the relationships, preparation and differentiation that good teaching already requires.
Educators should shape AI policy, not just implement it
Everyone has a stake in what happens next. Parents should have a voice. School leaders should have a voice. Policymakers have real responsibilities. Technology companies can contribute useful expertise and innovation.
For AI in schools to work, teachers should be involved before products are piloted, before policies are finalized and before success is measured only by adoption rates, efficiency gains, or usage dashboards.
Instead of asking teachers to simply react to AI, we should invite them to help shape it.
That means giving educators paid time to test tools, identify risks, design classroom norms and define what responsible use looks like by grade level and subject area. It means asking teachers not just whether AI saves time, but whether it supports learning. And it means treating teacher feedback as evidence, not as resistance to innovation.
Philadelphia has long understood education as a pathway to opportunity. As AI reshapes work, communication and civic life, the choices we make in schools will affect how young people navigate that future. Those choices should not be driven by hype or fear alone. They should be guided by the people closest to student learning.
If we want AI in schools to be wise, practical and humane, we should start by listening to teachers.
