Behind closed doors, my colleagues and I have been asking, “Will AI take over teaching?” ASCD’s March 2026 issue Literacy in the Age of AI on the whole promised a bright future partnering with AI. This sentiment echoes through most district levels. At the risk of being one more person to weigh in on the brave new world, I’m going to do it because I haven’t heard these thoughts anywhere yet.
Will AI take over teachers’ jobs? It already has.
It’s not the AI tutoring or worksheets at our fingertips. Long before AI entered the workplace, artificial intelligence began replacing education. There’s a reason why chatbots sound like teachers–I have relinquished so much humanity from my teaching in service of optimization. Kind and warm, but nevertheless, automated, systematic, customer service. I had to give the perfect PBIS responses. I had to deliver the curriculum exactly right. These behaviors were for good reasons. I wanted to meet the needs of a diverse range of students, feel the calm of a detailed plan, and save enough of my energy for my family. There’s an artificial sense of intelligence permeating the world. Harvard is fighting back by capping As. It might not work, but the idea that an A should be reserved for something exceptional is a beautiful ideal, far from the what-do-I-have-to-do-to-get-an-A that has contributed to the artificialization of intelligence.
Should AI replace teachers?
Let tech have what belongs to tech. AI can have the “what’s the theme of _____” lessons (like any author ever loved this reduction of their work). Tech can have the “there are five sentences in a paragraph” nonsense. Tech can have the “is my work correct?” I am happy to outsource everything about my job that is artificial.
Let teachers have what belongs to the teachers.
- Teach reading, which is to say, decoding and fluency and how books make sense. AI would reduce a book to a single sentence, for efficiency’s sake, for helpfulness.
- Teach having ideas…and ideas about ideas (here is a start for getting students having ideas). AI would skip thinking to get to what’s correct, to get to what’s agreeable, no mess, no winding path.
- Teach developing ideas until their shape is found, so students learn to say what they mean and others persist to understand them (love Socratic Seminars for this). AI would skip human connection altogether. It takes too long. Misunderstandings are too stressful.
Jason Reynolds says it best (as always).
Messy is good.
Slow is good.
Circuity is good.
Divergence is good.
At the risk of mixing my metaphors, my system needs a reboot🙃
