Mamdani Bans the Robot Teachers

Dare I say it? Is it possible that New York City’s public schools are actually being changed for…the better these days? Not what I expected with Mayor Zohran Mamdani in charge!

Most students will now be prohibited from using generative AI until high school, with a moratorium put in place on all digital devices until third grade. Teachers for all levels will not be able to use AI in their grading of assignments. “The department is also recommending caps on screen time, such as limiting middle schoolers to no more than 45 minutes a day,” reports The New York Times. “So-called companion chatbots, which offer emotional and mental support, will be banned in all grades.”

“The Education Department is ‘disabling’ AI features in 38 existing citywide ed tech contracts,” reports Chalkbeat. “Officials haven’t provided a list of those companies. But Mamdani’s education adviser Ailish Brady said that the widely used digital tutor Amira and the digital version of the Houghton Mifflin Harcourt reading curriculum—the most popular of the three mandated NYC Reads literacy programs—will both ‘turn off’ their AI components.”

In New Mexico, reports Reason‘s Elizabeth Nolan Brown, public schools were required to use Amira “for mandatory literacy assessments, dyslexia screenings, and weekly tutoring sessions in kindergarten through second grade.” This came with a whole host of privacy and efficacy worries. “‘Our families are asking questions we cannot fully answer: Where are these voice recordings stored, and for how long? Who can access them? Are they used to train or refine the vendor’s AI models? What safeguards protect them from breach or misuse?’ wrote Jennifer Guy, superintendent of Los Alamos Public Schools,” according to Brown.

I’m personally rather worried about Amira being both bad for child development and unhelpful at teaching kids how to read. “Teachers and parents are reporting that Amira can’t understand little-kid voices well, or kids with lisps or accents, and is inaccurately scoring kids on literacy and dyslexia assessments that are used to determine future school interventions,” notes Brown on X. “And that having to repeat themselves a lot, or being constantly misunderstood by the robo-teacher, is giving kids more anxiety around learning to read.”

AI is, of course, not inherently bad, nor is screen time necessarily a problem. Claude, ChatGPT, and all the rest are very useful research tools. I use them in my own research for Roundup sometimes. But learning how to be a critical consumer and verifier of information, as well as how to frame ideas and compelling arguments in your own words, is one of the main functions of K-12 education. These are standards we ought to uphold. Tools that provide shortcuts, like calculators, are not held up as substitutes for learning addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. Tools that help with research, such as large language models (LLMs), should be worked into a student’s workflow once the student has already developed an understanding of how to craft good writing and conduct good research. And when we’re teaching reading or math to younger kids, the human touch really matters: Teachers should develop relationships with their young students and tailor their approaches. It frustrates me that young children are required to attend public schools (unless you opt out and teach them elsewhere, to the state’s satisfaction), only for those schools to deprive them of social interaction and put them in front of screens. Mamdani’s no-screens policy for pre-school through second grade seems appropriate to me.

Funny split reaction to this I’m seeing that’s SF ppl fretting that kids won’t “learn how to use ai” and NYC actual parents thrilled to be getting rid of crummy edtech programs that try to teach 1st graders reading via chatbot https://t.co/0bIXgszihM

— Katie Notopoulos (@katienotopoulos) September 3, 2026

I would imagine many Roundup readers are not New York City parents, or parents of young kids at all. But the coming educational-system transformation should interest us all: How and what we’re teaching plays a big role in shaping our society’s competencies and pieties. (Just look at the era of wokeness, which arguably started on college campuses and found its way to a boardroom near you in record time.)

For what it’s worth, it’s possible I’m wrong, or that I have some pedagogical blind spots. We need more detail about how these policies will be rolled out. AI will change our world in ways too numerous too count, and some of those applications will be life- and productivity-enhancing while other applications will be destructive. (And even within the category of “destructive” maybe some things ought to be destroyed; destruction isn’t necessarily bad.) One question I keep asking myself, when it comes to reading instruction, is: Were the public schools doing a good job at this in the first place? In many places—New York City included—the answer is a firm no.

I cynically look forward to the future in which AI is deployed in all kinds of school districts, yet teachers there still ask for raises, claiming they’re underpaid even as they do less and less. Surely the unions will find a way to spin this.

Scenes from New York: Several days ago, a mentally ill 49-year-old woman, identified as Pamela Cisneros, wielded two knives and stabbed two victims in Times Square. One of the victims was a mother and Bank of America employee, Erin Piacenti, who had just returned to work from maternity leave. Cisneros was shot and killed by cops at the scene, and Piacenti also succumbed to her wounds.

Cisneros had a long history of mental illness, including several encounters with the cops in 2018 and 2019.

QUICK HITS

• “The world is awash in debt,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told reporters Monday at the G-20 summit. “The only way for us to get out of this is to grow our way out of it.”
• “A mom of five was convicted last week of contributing to the delinquency of a minor,” writes Lenore Skenazy for Reason. “Her offense: allowing her 5-year-old son to walk about a half-mile by himself in their gated community.”
• Gloria Steinem, the feminist activist, just died at 92. Steinem was a champion of abortion rights and the Equal Rights Amendment (famously going up against Phyllis Schlafly), and an opponent of apartheid and multiple wars. She famously went undercover as a bunny at one of New York’s Playboy Clubs, writing about her experience, and she never regretted her decision not to have kids (“not for a millisecond”).
• “U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. asked his new CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] director to remove a reference to two Pennsylvania deaths from the agency’s online measles tally after he questioned whether the disease contributed to the ​fatalities, three sources familiar with the situation said,” reports Reuters. “Kennedy’s request came after CDC staffers had already accepted the state’s characterization of the deaths as linked to measles, a Pennsylvania official ‌said.”