A new executive order signed by President Donald Trump calls for infusing artificial intelligence throughout K-12 education. A major focus of that plan is training teachers on how to integrate AI into their instruction and workflows.
This was one of seven executive orders Trump signed on April 23 focused on education, including one on “ensuring commonsense school discipline policies” and a handful focused on higher education institutions.
Some educators and education organizations have welcomed the order, saying that AI literacy for educators and students is important and much needed.
“I’m very excited about it,” said Pam Amendola, an English teacher at Dawson County High School in Dawsonville, Ga. “AI is not the future. AI is right now, and we need direction from the federal government.”
While her district has yet to provide training on AI, Amendola has attended AI trainings on her own time and has started teaching her students what AI is, how it works, and how to use AI-powered tools responsibly.
But other experts and educators are skeptical the federal government will be able to actualize the policy goals of the order, given that so much funding and expertise have been cut from the departments tasked with carrying out this work.
If you're talking about how to successfully make these connections from the federal level to the field, I think a lot of that expertise is now gone.
The executive order calls for the secretaries of education and agriculture, as well as the director of the National Science Foundation, to prioritize discretionary grant funds and existing programs for teacher training. The Education Department is tasked with supporting professional development both for teachers of computer science and AI-focused classes, as well as for all educators to integrate the fundamentals of AI into all subjects.
The order also directs the agriculture secretary and the NSF director to leverage existing programs to create teacher-training opportunities to help teachers “effectively integrate AI-based tools” into their classrooms.
“As Artificial Intelligence (AI) reshapes every industrial sector, it is vitally important that the next generation of students is prepared to leverage this technology in all aspects of their professional lives,” Education Secretary Linda McMahon said in a statement. “The Trump Administration will lead the way in training our educators to foster early and responsible AI education in our classrooms to keep up American leadership in the global economy.”
But it is a tall order given that most teachers have yet to receive any professional development on AI, as the EdWeek Research Center has found in surveys of teachers. In an October 2024 EdWeek Research Center survey, 58 percent of teachers said they had not received any professional development on using generative AI in the classroom, and 68 percent said they are not currently using AI tools in their classrooms.
School districts need help wading through the flood of AI products
Schools are in desperate need of support to train teachers on the rapidly changing technology that is cropping up seemingly everywhere, said Dusty Strickland, the assistant principal at North Murray High School in Chatsworth, Ga.
“My teachers who are doing everything they can to make sure our kids know the standards that they have to know, they don’t have time to dig into just [AI],” he said. “It’s a very fast-moving train, so how can we make sure our teachers can get on it?”
Right now, teachers at Murray High School can volunteer to participate in training from the district’s technology specialists on using the AI technology already embedded in the tools and programs the district uses, Strickland said. And then teachers who participate in the voluntary training often share what they learn with peers.
Strickland said he would like to see the federal government provide schools with more money for AI training for teachers, as well as resources to help administrators like him determine which professional development programs and AI tools are high-quality.
“A lot of people are popping up saying, ‘hi, I’m an expert,’ but I don’t know how to [have them] prove that [they’re] an expert in such a new field,” he said.
While Amendola, the teacher in Georgia, is optimistic about the executive order, she is wary of how much influence ed-tech companies will have on the federal AI task force to be established by the executive order and its responsibilities.
Nationwide, districts have been slow to adopt guidelines and provide training around AI because the technology is evolving so quickly and because of a lack of expertise. As a result, educators’ exposure to AI has come mostly from ed-tech companies that are “shoving their products out there for districts to use,” Amendola said.
That is why she emphasizes that the federal task force should rely on organizations whose primary goal isn’t to sell AI-related products and services.
Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, panned the executive order in a statement, saying it opens up schools to “unaccountable tech companies” and “unproven software.”
“While AI can be a helpful and important tool for educators and students in classrooms, we’ve instead seen systems that produce disinformation, impinge on privacy, and tell inaccurate accounts of history,” Weingarten said.
Instead, Weingarten said, the administration should be “investing in classrooms and instruction designed by educators who work directly with students and who have the knowledge and expertise to meet their needs.”
The executive order doesn’t address data privacy or bias in AI
The aims of the executive order are largely bipartisan in nature. There’s broad support for giving schools more resources for harnessing this powerful technology.
But there are also significant omissions in the directive and potential hurdles to converting policy into reality, say some experts.
One concern is that money that could have been diverted to supporting the goals of the executive order—as well as many people with expertise in the subject—are being cut from the federal government, said Bernadette Adams, the former senior policy adviser at the U.S. Department of Education’s office of educational technology and an expert in AI. The entire staff at the OET, including Adams, was dismissed as part of the Education Department’s recent staff cuts. The Education Department now has about half the number of staff as it did when Trump took office.
From researchers at the National Center for Education Research to specialists from outside industries who took temporary roles in the government, “those people were also pushed out and dismissed,” said Adams. “So, if you’re talking about how to successfully make these connections from the federal level to the field, I think a lot of that expertise is now gone.”
It’s not just the elimination of the office of educational technology and other people who previously provided AI expertise that will hurt efforts. There are also significant gaps in the directive, said Adams. Most notably absent is any mention of student data privacy or bias in AI—two major issues experts frequently raise about the safety and efficacy of AI.
Finally, Adams said, the executive order focuses on AI as a labor and workforce issue: training today’s students for future jobs. Both Democratic and Republican administrations have had a tendency to view AI this way, and that’s a missed opportunity, she said.
“I feel like the executive order as it’s written, and maybe as the work goes forward people will consider this, but it does sideline, in my view, teaching and learning, which is the heart of education,” she said. “I think there’s real educational opportunities that go untapped when AI is framed only as a content area or a career path.”
