For decades, students of color and those from low-income communities have faced persistent achievement gaps in our education system. Despite countless reform efforts, these students continue to encounter barriers to accessing high-quality, personalized instruction that builds critical thinking and problem-solving skills. Now, the emergence of generative AI represents an unprecedented opportunity to transform this inequitable system into one that truly serves all students.

The traditional one-size-fits-all approach to education has consistently fallen short, particularly for underserved communities. While measuring learning outcomes remains essential, our current assessment methods often fail to capture true mastery and ignore the experiences of students in low-income communities. More importantly, these methods frequently miss the mark in developing the critical skills students need for economic mobility in today’s rapidly-evolving world.

For thousands of schools ready to embrace change, AI-enabled tools can help realize the vision of hands-on, student-centered learning that educators have long sought. Take, for example, a unit in CommonLit‘s sixth-grade curriculum called “Our Changing Oceans,” currently used by millions of students. Instead of reading a textbook and answering multiple-choice questions, students imagine they work for an advertising team hired to create a commercial for an ocean conservation group. Students are introduced to new concepts but also given the agency to choose content that is of interest to them. Critically, students are assessed on their improvements not just in reading and writing but also in the science concepts and basic computational thinking practices (the ability to ask questions and solve problems with a computer) that are necessary in our digital world.

To be fair, teachers, administrators, and families at hundreds of schools across the country have been adopting these practices for years. But legacy constraints, such as how we organize our school day into the “one teacher, 30 students” classroom model, lack of access to high-quality instructional materials with aligned professional learning, ineffective assessments, insufficient technology, and general fear of the unknown, have made scaling such reforms challenging.

Read the full article about embracing AI in education by Amber Oliver at CRPE.