▶ 0:14:54Chair Cassidy: The senate health committee on education and american family will come to order. Before coming to the senate, I spent decades working with young people as a teacher, a coach, and mentor. I've been in classrooms, locker rooms, communities, it is always the same. You help students reach their potential and prepare for the future. That is why today's hearing is so important.
▶ 0:15:20Chair Cassidy: Artificial intelligence is changing the world, our kids are growing up and what are they like it or not, ai is going to be part of their education, their careers in their daily lives. The question isn't whether it is coming. Ai is here. The real question is whether we are going to help students use it the right way. I always told my players that talent is important, but you have to have skin in the game. The same is true in education.
▶ 0:15:52Chair Cassidy: Technology can be a valuable tool but it will never replace a great teacher, a strong mentor, or the hard work that learning requires. Ai has the potential to help students learn at their own pace, give teachers more time to focus on teaching and open doors for students who may need extra support. Those are opportunities we should take very seriously. But we also need to be honest about the challenges. How do we protect student privacy?
▶ 0:16:24Chair Cassidy: How do we make sure ai is giving accurate information? How do we prevent students from becoming dependent on technology, instead of developing critical thinking skills? How do we ensure that rural america is not left behind? How do we make sure ai strengthens education, instead of weakening it? Our job is not to chase every new trend.
▶ 0:16:51Chair Cassidy: Our job is to figure out what works, what does not work, and what is best for students, parents and teachers. The students in the classroom today will enter a workforce that looks very different from the one many of us grew up in. We have the responsibility to make sure they are prepared, not just to use ai, but to compete, innovate, and lead in a world where a eyewear -- ai will be everywhere.
▶ 0:17:20Chair Cassidy: Two weeks ago, the ranking member and I wrote a letter to the government accountability office, asking them to begin an investigation into the effects of ai on k-12 education. I'm proud to report that they have responded and planned to start working on that study very soon. I look forward to hearing from our witnesses today, about how we can encourage innovation while protecting students and preserving the values that make education successful in the first place. Thank you to our witnesses.
▶ 0:17:52Chair Cassidy: I look forward to your testimony. With that I will refer to my ranking member, senator blunt rochester, for her opening statement.
▶ 0:17:59Sen. Blunt Rochester: Thank you Mr. chairman, and thank you to you and your team for partnering with us on a hearing that I think is vitally important for our country. I also want to thank the witnesses for being here as well.
▶ 0:18:13Sen. Blunt Rochester: Before I get into my formal remarks, I do want to begin by acknowledging today's announcement that the department of education is attempting to follow through with secretary mcmahon's plan to shut down the department, by transferring some of the core functions, like the function of protecting civil rights and students with disabilities to other agencies, without the approval of congress.
▶ 0:18:41Sen. Blunt Rochester: While I strongly oppose those actions, I will continue to call on our chairman, chairman cassidy to bring secretary mcmahon before our committee, to discuss these moves, to also be held accountable, and to make sure that our american education system is strong and protects our children. The hearing today, I think is one that is very timely. We find ourselves in a moment of great uncertainty.
▶ 0:19:12Sen. Blunt Rochester: You could call it a tale of two virtual realities. Some people think we are going to have a star trek moment, some folks are worried we are going to have the terminator. Artificial intelligence seems to be everywhere. Our schools, classrooms, our students' homes. As ai reaches all parts of our lives, there are unanswered questions about its impact.
▶ 0:19:43Sen. Blunt Rochester: And the stakes are getting even higher alongside them. That is why I am glad we are holding this hearing, and why I was so pleased to work with the chairman and senator kaine, to request that investigation by the government accountability office, on the current state of ai in k-12 education.
▶ 0:20:05Sen. Blunt Rochester: I believe we should be gathering as much accurate information as possible, to make informed decisions that will keep our students safe, and help them succeed as well as support our educators. I come to this topic both as a ranking member of the subcommittee, but also as a grandmother. I have a granddaughter who is now three years old, and will be educated and is being educated in an ai age.
▶ 0:20:34Sen. Blunt Rochester: That means she is growing up in a new way. When she graduates from high school in 2039, I want her to be able to be creative and have critical thinking skills to succeed. I want her to be interested in learning, and understand that not all questions can be answered instantaneously.
▶ 0:20:58Sen. Blunt Rochester: I want her to have the understanding of what it means to go to work, to start a business, and what careers are out there in this rapidly changing economy. Alongside my dreams for my granddaughter and for all students in this country, I also have concerns. The impact of ai on cognitive development and learning is not well understood.
▶ 0:21:24Sen. Blunt Rochester: Some experts are sounding the alarm that cognitive skills are being negatively affected. The guidelines about what safe and ethical ai should look like in the classroom is not well defined and varies greatly from place to place. Reports show that 84% of high school students are using generative ai for school work. Similarly, reports find that 85% of teachers are using ai in their work.
▶ 0:21:53Sen. Blunt Rochester: I know teachers are looking for professional development opportunities and clear guidance to support safe and effective use of ai. Schools, districts, states across this country are trying to craft responsible guidance and identify ai tools that will support student learning, while protecting civil rights, mental health and data privacy.
▶ 0:22:17Sen. Blunt Rochester: My home state of delaware is doing amazing work on this front, and I look forward to hearing from secretary cindy marten on how our state is leading on this issue. Importantly, all of us here want to know what we as congress can do, to support the work. I hope that this hearing helps us better understand the challenges and the opportunities that ai presents in education. With that, I yield back.
▶ 0:22:46Chair Tuberville: Thank you senator. First I would like to introduce josh jones. A leader in the ai space, Mr. jones is the ceo of quanthub, a birmingham based company that builds ai, data literacy curriculums for schools. He has partnered with my state department of education and a number of businesses throughout alabama to prepare for the age of ai.
▶ 0:23:16Chair Tuberville: His partnership with our state department of education is a huge reason why alabama citizens have some of the best numbers in the nation. Quanthub is training educators, administrators, and our future workforce. They also created the data scholars program that supplies 100 high school undergraduate students with paid data and ai enter ships.
▶ 0:23:43Chair Tuberville: Quanthub is creating opportunities for students to earn credentials in ai literacy before they even get their diploma. Mr. jones has a proven track record of tackling the world of ai headfirst. Mr. jones, your opening statement please?
▶ 0:23:59Mr. Jones: Members of the subcommittee, thank you for this opportunity to testify today. I am the ceo at quanthub, and we are in alabama based company that builds ai and data literacy curricula for schools, universities and employers. Our mission is to empower talent with digital agility. I'm also honored to be joined today by our state superintendent of education, as well as my colleague Dr. brown.
▶ 0:24:31Mr. Jones: For the past four years, we have partnered with the alabama department of education on what I believe is one of the most ambitious statewide efforts in the country, to prepare k-12 and postsecondary learners for an ai driven economy. Alabama is not a state most people would associate with leading edge tech education and that is part of why what has happened there matters.
▶ 0:24:52Mr. Jones: In its recent state of the -- report, the national data science for everyone initiative ranked alabama third in the nation in student enrollment in data science and related courses, only behind california and virginia. We placed over 100 high school students in a pilot program into paid ai and data internships throughout the state. Teachers and administrators have earned thousands of professional development hours.
▶ 0:25:20Mr. Jones: We were ranked number one in the country, and terms of the most professional develop at hours. Students are earning industry recognized credentials in ai and data literacy. Integrating this kind of training into the state educational framework is about preparing students for the future of work while keeping alabama competitive in a rapidly evolving digital economy. I would like to share three lessons from this work that I believe are relevant to federal policy.
▶ 0:25:47Mr. Jones: First, we must refresh our standards and curriculum at the speed of technology. The traditional curriculum refresh rate is typically five to 10 years and yet in the age of ai, that is generations. We have built a human in the loop system that uses ai agents for curriculum generation, but it always validates with instructional designers, faculty, and subject matter experts before anyone reaches the student.
▶ 0:26:19Mr. Jones: -- to about 10 hours of instructional validation. That is a 20 times improvement without compromising rigor, efficacy or accuracy. In the interest of sharing these advancements with the education community, we published our process in the journal of applied instructional design. Federal investments should reward speed and update cadence, not just initial development, hours or page counts.
▶ 0:26:46Mr. Jones: The human side is where this work succeeds or fails. For years, data and analytics courses have lived on the fringes as obscure electives. The breakthrough in alabama was building modular content that maps directly to state standards for math, science, social studies. Teachers integrate a unit into one they already teach. That requires heavy investment in teacher training, instructional coaching and integration support.
▶ 0:27:17Mr. Jones: Curricula is a small piece of the puzzle. You cannot build a workforce from inside a school building alone. Our program works because we built bridges to employers, civic leaders, nonprofits, and higher education partners and match students to real payrolls.
▶ 0:27:37Mr. Jones: We then put these in terms in jobs, meaningful jobs related to data and ai so that these students can build real-world skills and getting job offers as soon as they complete their internship. Our data scholars program works. We've seen more than 50 employers host our scholars now and in work-based learning I would suggest recruiting employers of that scale is the hardest part.
▶ 0:28:06Mr. Jones: Which makes the number itself a strong signal that this talent is in demand. It also gives us a continuous feedback loop, that keeps the curriculum aligned with what these employers need. The micro credentials at our scholars are directly aligned with the alabama talent marketplace where a credential is not just a certificate, it plugs into the system that the employer's use, to find workers.
▶ 0:28:28Mr. Jones: The pilot for the internship program was funded by a state innovation agency called innovate alabama, that has been recognized as a model for rural talent retention. This matters enormously in a country where small towns are losing people to large metros. 100 placements with unlimited funding tells us this model scales. It can be replicated in any city.
▶ 0:28:55Mr. Jones: In closing, I offer three recommendations for consideration. One, fun curriculum infrastructure that can be updated continuously, not just developed ones. Refresh rates should happen at semesters. Weight teacher training as heavily as federal workforce grants. Expand support for paid work-based learning and ai and data starting in high school. The alabama model is replicable.
▶ 0:29:27Mr. Jones: It works because we treated this as a workforce problem, educator problem, and a curriculum problem, not just technology. Thank you.
▶ 0:29:36Chair Tuberville: Thank you very much. Our next witness is Ms. erin mote. Founder -- cofounder of innovateedu, an organization that prioritizes innovation in education, and empowering students through the use of technology in the classroom. She is also the founder of -- leader of the edsafe ai alliance. Ms.
▶ 0:30:01Chair Tuberville: Mote has a storied career of adapting technology for students and continuously finding solutions to keep our students ahead of the game. She brings extensive experience in education and technology, and securing our national digital infrastructure. Through the edsafe alliance, she has partnered with multiple school districts to bridge the gap of ai with students and teachers. -- will howe -- Ms.
▶ 0:30:29Chair Tuberville: Mote gave real solutions to adopt ai and not run from it. Ms. mote.
▶ 0:30:37Ms. Mote: Chairman, ranking member, distinguished members, thank you for convening this hearing. I am the ceo of innovateedu, a nonprofit organization dedicated to ensuring technology serves as a powerful tool for access and opportunity for all students.
▶ 0:31:01Ms. Mote: I come before this committee, not only as a charter school founder but also as a technologist who has spent more than two decades working at the intersection of technology and policy. Yet perhaps my most important role is a deeply personal one. I am the mother of two school-aged children.
▶ 0:31:20Ms. Mote: Each day, I see firsthand how these technologies impact real kids at the kitchen table, and in classrooms, which fuels my urgency to ensure there are -- that our national digital infrastructure is secure, safe and built to serve the next generation. To navigate this landscape, we must reject a pervasive false dichotomy. Safety is not counter to innovation. Safety is not a drag on progress.
▶ 0:31:51Ms. Mote: Safety is a necessary condition for the effective use of ai in education. The very guardrail that makes meaningful sustainable innovation possible. Without it, we mistake rapid tool adoption for progress. Generative ai is an arrival technology, like the internet or electricity. It is reshaping how students, educators and our society live, work and relate to each other.
▶ 0:32:18Ms. Mote: Data shows roughly 85% of teachers and 84% of students are already using generative ai in their classrooms. But this transition did not follow a linear path. As a result, school districts and families are experiencing severe operational fatigue. More than half of schools have failed to provide any professional development on the safe use of ai.
▶ 0:32:48Ms. Mote: Our schools urgently need federal leadership, structured support and dedicated funding. A consumer large leg which model is engineered for platform retention and user satisfaction. To keep users engaged, it defaults to a dangerous form of algorithmic sycophancy. It does not teach, it indulges, it validates incorrect premises in hand delivers answers, often bypassing the struggle required for cognitive development.
▶ 0:33:18Ms. Mote: Learning is an active process. True purpose built ed tech scaffolds development. Much like the ai driven math accelerators being used in birmingham to bridge educational gaps. When we substitute this with consumer grade systems, we trigger what researchers call cognitive surrender.
▶ 0:33:42Ms. Mote: What human psychology sees in this incessantly agreeable tech, when a chatbot intentionally gave incorrect answers, users accepted the error 80% of the time. We are actively policing yes bots in front of vulnerable youth, conditioning a generation to surrender critical discernment.
▶ 0:34:08Ms. Mote: Moreover today, the average school district access is nearly 3000 digital tools a year, creating a fragmented unmanageable landscape for teachers, families and students. We must transition to evidence-based purchasing anchored in five quality indicators. Ensuring tools are safe and operable, usable, inclusive and evidence-based.
▶ 0:34:33Ms. Mote: Meeting a baseline level of evidence, tier four within the federal framework, must be a nonnegotiable ticket to enter america's classrooms. When less than half of purpose built tech tools meet this standard, only 2% of consumer tools do. We must shift our focus to a new roi, return on instruction. We must replace the blunt outdated metric of screen time with screen value.
▶ 0:35:01Ms. Mote: Counting minutes does not tell us of an interaction is meaningful. For instance, screen-based reading is six to eight times less effective for reading retention than reading books. Yet ferree coding, that requires 1000 at-bats to achieve fluency.
▶ 0:35:22Ms. Mote: Blanket bans or hourly limits can disproportionately harm the children with disabilities who rely on digital tools for mandated accommodations. We cannot rely on digital avoidance. Congress must ensure that ai is built for our children's safety, learning and healthy development , while also building tech literacy and digital responsibility. To protect our students without stifling innovation or widening the digital divide, congress must approach a waterfall approach to safety.
▶ 0:35:55Ms. Mote: This means applying heavy-handed safety controls to high risk applications at the top, such as public consumer platforms and relationship stimulating chatbots, while easing regulatory burdens on lower risk purpose driven educational tools.
▶ 0:36:09Ms. Mote: The federal government must enact immediate structural policy changes, reconstitute and fully staff the office of education technology -- protect e-write. We cannot afford a path of wait and see -- a passive wait and see approach.
▶ 0:36:41Ms. Mote: We must build ecosystems that aggressively target genuine harms while keeping human values, ethics and critical judgment at the center of the american classroom. Thank you, and I look forward to your questions.
▶ 0:36:54R.M. Blunt Rochester: It is my honor to introduce secretary cindy marten, secretary of education in delaware. She has more than 35 years of education in -- 35 years of experience in education leadership. She holds a masters of art in teaching and learning from the university of california, san diego. Secretary marten began her.
▶ 0:37:24R.M. Blunt Rochester: Career as a teacher -- began her career as a teacher. In the years since she has been involved at every level, serving as principal, superintendent, and as deputy secretary of the united states department of education, where she oversaw k-12 initiatives, including the office of education technology.
▶ 0:37:47R.M. Blunt Rochester: She has done remarkable work, from greatly improving literacy outcomes at the school district level, to leading efforts to close opportunity gaps at the federal level. I am grateful that she has brought her knowledge and expertise to delaware, where she is now leading on education reform in our state. Madam secretary, thank you for being with us. I will turn it over to you for your testimony.
▶ 0:38:15Sec. Marten: Thank you very much, chairman and ranking member. It is an honor to be here today, before this subcommittee to address this important topic. I've spent more than three decades as a teacher, a principal, a superintendent, and deputy secretary at the U.S. department of education. And today I probably serve as delaware's secretary of education, where our focus is to start with students. Build for impact.
▶ 0:38:47Sec. Marten: One thing has always remained true. Our responsibility is not to prepare students for the world we grew up in, but to prepare for students for the world they are entering. That is why we are approaching artificial intelligence with both urgency and care. I want to start with something a delaware student recently told us. The students that ai should be a collaborator and a tool, not something that does the work for us. I think that is exactly right.
▶ 0:39:19Sec. Marten: This conversation is not about technology, it's about learning, critical thinking and helping students develop the very skills they need to enter the world, where ai is going to be a part of nearly every single profession. The reality is ai is already in our schools. Students are using it. Families are asking about it. Our educators are left navigating it. The question is not whether ai is going to impact education.
▶ 0:39:50Sec. Marten: The real question is whether we will shape its use. Thoughtfully, responsibly. Our answer in delaware is yes. Our work supports a goal in our strategic plan, that 75% of our districts and charter schools will use ai tools, to support educators and students, while they maintain full compliance with data security, privacy and human in the loop requirements. Under the governor's leadership, delaware has chosen to lead.
▶ 0:40:23Sec. Marten: We are investing in ai literacy and building what we believe is one of the nation's first statewide ai efforts, focused on k-12 education. Delaware released statewide guidance to support effective use of generative ai in schools. That guidance is grounded in four priorities. Protect student data, and ethical use, remote equity and enhance teaching and learning.
▶ 0:40:52Sec. Marten: These priorities are consistent with the national guidance and toolkits that were published by the federal office of ed tech. We are also listening closely to our students. -- not just let the ai do the thinking for us, straight from our students.
▶ 0:41:13Sec. Marten: Another student emphasized that ai generated information has to be checked because many models hallucinate. Students raise concern about data privacy. What strikes me is that students are not asking us to slow down innovation. They are asking us to lead, and lead responsibly. They are asking us to do what good educators have always done.
▶ 0:41:41Sec. Marten: Teach them how to think, not what to think. That is why delaware has taken the next step through our ai insurance lab. It is not to slow innovation, it is to ensure that innovation is worthy of the trust that students, families and educators place in our schools. The lab creates this process for evaluating ai tools before schools adopt them at scale. Delaware recently completed a statewide scan of ai use and what we found was encouraging.
▶ 0:42:13Sec. Marten: It reinforced the need for this independent review -- teachers can get the time back into the human work that only teachers can do. Districts and charters still have unanswered questions. They want to know about privacy protections, integrations and how tools actually perform in real settings.
▶ 0:42:41Sec. Marten: That is why our lab does not simply review the vendor claims. Vision has to come before vendor. Trained educators, technical experts and doe staff are testing tools used in our classrooms.
▶ 0:42:58Sec. Marten: We are evaluating tools against national frameworks and our own state guidance and we are looking to make sure our tools are protecting students and whether the outputs are accurate and appropriate and whether there is bias showing up or not, and how accessibility is working to lead towards better teaching, learning outcomes. This is practical implementation work, it is not technology for its own sake. A safe tool is not automatically a useful tool.
▶ 0:43:28Sec. Marten: We need to help educators and families understand the tools and earn greater public trust, and we need to support our educators. We want students to develop judgment, creativity and critical thinking that no technology will replace.
▶ 0:43:43Sec. Marten: We keep students at the center, lead with strong guardrails and judge ai by outcomes, rather than hype, I believe ai can expand opportunities while preserving what matters most about education, human relationships, human judgment and human learning. Thank you, and I look forward to your questions.
▶ 0:44:03Chair Tuberville: Thank you very much. We will start a round of questions with senator banks.
▶ 0:44:09Sen. Banks: Thank you. What an important subject and topic, to host this subcommittee on. I'm encouraged by the audience. Those of you who came to participate and listen. It is such an important conversation. Ms. mote, like you, I have three daughters in public schools. They are in a great district with great teachers, administrators.
▶ 0:44:36Sen. Banks: I think they are trying to figure this out, but I don't think they have yet. I don't think any school has figured out yet, where we are going with this, and I think we agree we have to be flexible. I do think secretary marten, the answers to a lot of these questions are going to come from indiana and delaware, much more than the bureaucrats or anyone in washington. The partnership that we have with you and those at the state level is very important.
▶ 0:45:08Sen. Banks: Just to start, if all of you could be a little more specific about -- what are the ai skills today, that our schools should be teaching students? If you could sum that up in a sustained way?
▶ 0:45:26Sen. Banks: I will defer to each of you, how do we measure that our students are being taught effectively in this new age, and adapting to these ai skills? Secretary, if you could start with what they are teaching in delaware about the use of ai and adding to a more constructive and productive learning environment.
▶ 0:45:53Sec. Marten: Thank you for that question. Skill bases for the students and educators, ai literacy, the educators have to have a skill set and then you are asking specifically about student skills. How do we use the tools that are part of the teaching and learning.
▶ 0:46:14Sec. Marten: Teachers have standards and things they are required to teach and content that must be learned by the end of the year and as they are teaching, how can he too will be used to enhance critical thinking? As they are creating work, working together, doing research, are these tools allowing them to personalize their learning, to make it more related to their own background and their own interests and make the learning more meaningful for them?
▶ 0:46:41Sec. Marten: This skill base ends up being how do you pick up this tool and what do you use it for? You could go -- I won't say the name of a store but any tool store, get a tool, how will you use this to create this paper you're going to write? The skills have to do with literacy and math and they have to be connected to science as well.
▶ 0:47:05Sec. Marten: Each of these tools end up being something that if a student knows how to use it, they will be able to produce a stronger product and they will be able to evaluate critically the information that the tool is producing. You can't just accept the answer as it is being produced.
▶ 0:47:21Sen. Banks: That is great. Ms. mote, can you talk more about the specific skills teachers should be teaching kids?
▶ 0:47:27Ms. Mote: We need to be thinking about ai literacy as foundational across all subjects. It is important that we are able to interrogate the inputs and the outputs of this technology, in history and biology and computer science. When I think about what I want to cultivate in my own children, I want them to be critical consumers of this technology. I want them to grow the skill of discernment.
▶ 0:47:55Ms. Mote: Frankly, that means working in multifunctional teams with humans, but also with ai as a teammate. Increasingly, I think that is what workplaces are demanding, that ai is a tool in the teammate in the work they are doing. , to discuss, discern -- to discuss, discern, and be in discourse with each other.
▶ 0:48:14Chair Tuberville: Mr. jones, is there a way we can measure that?
▶ 0:48:18Mr. Jones: Absolutely. The foundations of ai, where is it, where did it come from? The basic ethics of when should I be using ai, when is that ok? Tool selection. In the early days, we had one vendor but now you have so many different leading vendors. Understanding their strengths and weaknesses, when will I use one tool versus another?
▶ 0:48:46Mr. Jones: I suggest we don't call it this but a healthy cynicism around not just assuming everything ai tells you is correct. How do we teach students to understand that this is basically an informed opinion that you need to judge with your own research. And we go well beyond that. But to your question about how do we test this, something we've been hesitant or very hesitant to do is expose learners directly to large language models, due to the predictive nature.
▶ 0:49:15Mr. Jones: Everything we do in teaching, we use ai on the backend to accelerate curriculum creation, but it always has validation by subject matter experts, so students are getting a fixed version of the educational material. When we talk about testing them, how do you test when if you put a prompt into an ai, three times and get four different answers. How do you test that from a rigorous standpoint and accreditation standpoint?
▶ 0:49:43Mr. Jones: We created controlled environments with simulations where we leverage the best of both technologies. As we teach prompting, we are not just teaching tactical say this word or this, because that is changing so fast. How do you teach those critical thinking skills? What should I be using, what are the strengths and weaknesses, those sorts of things. Those are things that we can definitely test.
▶ 0:50:13Sen. Banks: Thank you, my time has expired.
▶ 0:50:16R.M. Blunt Rochester: I am so excited about this conversation, and apparently so is america because the line is out the door and around the corner to get into this room. We have a lot of young people in the audience as well. Raise your hand if you are under 40. The whole audience -- ok. This is what happens.
▶ 0:50:46R.M. Blunt Rochester: I don't know if this is a large learning model glitch or what but thank you. It really demonstrates just how timely this hearing is. How important these issues are. Mr. jones, I was thinking recently, the university of delaware has an ai literacy test, that you can take. I took the test myself to see how much do I know, do I know about the ethical issues, how to protect myself?
▶ 0:51:14R.M. Blunt Rochester: I even had these models argue a prompt. I put in the same prompt into all three, a couple different ones, and got different answers. Then I have to say critically, well what is right? To me, I'm glad that you mentioned not relying just on what comes out. And also change management.
▶ 0:51:46R.M. Blunt Rochester: We've done a lot of things in the past using technology. It was change management that was necessary to make people prepared and accepting and be able to use appropriately. My first question I want to ask is to secretary marten. I would love to hear some of the things you think have been the most exciting that you are seeing right now, in delaware. And then what have been the biggest challenges, that you have faced?
▶ 0:52:16R.M. Blunt Rochester: Lastly, how can we at the federal level support you? My colleague just shared a lot of incredible things happening at the state level, almost as laboratories for us to figure out what we need to do next. But are there things that only we could do? So one, anything exciting, two, some challenges and three, what should we in congress be focused on?
▶ 0:52:42Sec. Marten: Thank you for the question. I'm very excited about what I see in delaware, having had the opportunity to lead at the federal level in the guidance and toolkits and materials we were able to publish. I am now in a position to implement that strong guidance that came out of the office of education technology, that included playbooks and vendor guidance and teacher guidance. What I see in delaware is so much optimism that comes with a lot of responsibility.
▶ 0:53:13Sec. Marten: What is exciting to me is this tremendous potential. Delaware has been working on this before I came on as secretary of education, and they see the promise in being able to reduce administrative burden for teachers, being able to give teachers more time with students, taking some things off of their already very busy plate. I see the promise, I'm excited about opportunities for accessibility for students.
▶ 0:53:45Sec. Marten: Tools that help them access whether it is an auditory deficit or visual processing. And the ability to give feedback. As students are learning real immediate feedback, not waiting until the end of the year to know, but instantaneous feedback for teaching and learning.
▶ 0:54:09Sec. Marten: All of that excitement happens because it is the strengthening accessibility and -- that's exciting. Anything that has to do with differentiation, translation, that is good. The challenges are real though, this technology is evolving faster than systems are being made to adapt.
▶ 0:54:30Sec. Marten: I'm seeing challenges around privacy, security, procurement, the bias built into the models, the governance that needs to happen with limited capacity and the district's ability to create this guidance quickly and act on it. So that they can enable innovation.
▶ 0:54:50Sec. Marten: Being able to make complex decisions and be supported with federal guidance at the state level, so district leaders have clear evidence based paths forward.
▶ 0:55:03R.M. Blunt Rochester: Mr. chairman, if you would indulge for that second question. What can and should we be doing at this level?
▶ 0:55:12Ms. Mote: One thing we need to understand is what works for whom and under what conditions. Right now there are currently no high-quality studies on the long-term effects of ai on student learning, equity or social or emotional development.
▶ 0:55:31Ms. Mote: The federal government is uniquely positioned to help us understand what we know and what we don't know, so that we can empower states and educators, families and communities to make decisions about ai with knowledge and facts. There is a place where the federal government, working together to understand the mental health aspects, the education aspects and the learning aspects, can really help lead communities and states with evidence to guide their decisions.
▶ 0:56:01Chair Tuberville: And Mr. jones?
▶ 0:56:03Mr. Jones: At quanthub, we are focused on the refresh rates of curricula. The technology is advancing on a next financial curve, and what we are seeing now with these models, building other models. The pace of change is increasing faster and faster. From an educational standpoint, how do we deliver a curriculum that is built, knowing it is only going to last for six months?
▶ 0:56:29Mr. Jones: That refresh rate, I would suggest when you are thinking about funding -- both -- all sorts of teacher training, educator training, all the way down to the students. Everything you are funding, you have to realize that time factor is something we've never seen before and it's going to continue to increase.
▶ 0:56:47R.M. Blunt Rochester: I will yield back my time, but if we go into another round of questions I have a lot more. For all the young people here watching, please reach out to our offices, send us your thoughts. You can do it through our websites, you can mail it to us. We want to hear from you. Thank you so much for being here.
▶ 0:57:10Chair Tuberville: They can use ai, right?
▶ 0:57:13R.M. Blunt Rochester: Exactly. >> thank you Mr. chairman. I was actually involved in ai at the state government level, prior to becoming a U.S. senator.
▶ 0:57:28R.M. Blunt Rochester: Before chatgpt was even introduced in 2022, we had already used in ai tool, to recommend 5 million words for elimination out of the state regulatory code, of 17 million words, using that ai tool with human collaboration. This is so new because most people didn't really understand what ai was even though it existed, until we had this release in november of 2022.
▶ 0:57:57R.M. Blunt Rochester: Since that time, we created -- in ohio we created an ai toolkit for trusted resources, for parents, educators, students to look at. And you are correct Mr. jones, this stuff needs to be updated constantly, because things change so quickly.
▶ 0:58:18R.M. Blunt Rochester: The conversations I've had with educators, and as a parent, educators tell me that they've used it and they feel more knowledgeable about the progress of students on an individual level than ever before. I talked to one language arts teacher, who told me that over the course of the day, she has like 140 students. She knows exactly where each one of them are, in their development of language skills.
▶ 0:58:49R.M. Blunt Rochester: She can follow it along and reach those students on an individualized basis, to help them learn and reach them where they are. I see a lot of heads nodding. I also believe it can be an egalitarian technology, and the sense that every 2 -- every student will have access to a tutor. If you are going to ask me to help you with your pre-calc homework, I would not be very good at it.
▶ 0:59:20R.M. Blunt Rochester: But ai tools can help. Those are the virtuous things. Of course we don't know about what the harm may be. Just like with social media tools that we know have become harmful. It is a constant process, and creating awareness around this is very important. We will start with Mr. jones and then go down the line.
▶ 0:59:49R.M. Blunt Rochester: Parents that are concerned about this, what should they be asking their local school leadership, about ai? To feel comfortable that it is being used appropriately in schools.
▶ 1:00:03Mr. Jones: They don't address it, they stick their heads in the sand and hope it goes away. The worst thing you can do is have a syllabus or not clearly defined rules. In university settings and a class, green light, yellow light, red light situation. We will use ai in these situations, but here is a situation where you would not use it. In some cases, it can help you do things much better but in other cases, you should set it aside.
▶ 1:00:33Mr. Jones: Having your educators addressing that up front, not saying it is the great people, but also not using it everywhere. Being methodical about where you want to incorporate it into our classes, how we want to use it, start by teaching those ethical skills upfront, and being thoughtful in your approach. Several armstrong -- seton-la
▶ 1:00:57Salle -- Sen. Armstrong: Ms. mote?
▶ 1:01:02Ms. Mote: The most important thing educators can do is actually say this is what this tool is being used for, this is how I am using it in my human centered relationship with your students. And really address that fear straight on.
▶ 1:01:18Ms. Mote: Edsafe ai and the common sense union released 10 questions for parents, at parent teacher conferences, to have those conversations with their educator, about how the educator is using that tool in the classroom, and what it looks like for that experience. Transparency is the most important thing that we can be doing right now, in our education ecosystems.
▶ 1:01:42Sen. Armstrong: Secretary marten ?
▶ 1:01:47Sec. Marten: I noticed in your examples, you kept the human in the loop. That teacher you referenced wanted to use the tool to get to know her students more. That is the promise. Parents can ask the same hard questions that a teacher is asking. Is this helping me teach better? A parent is asking, is this helping my student learn more? Healthy concern is good.
▶ 1:02:14Sec. Marten: The questions my colleague just mentioned should be in plain language, so parents can walk into a conference, a school, and ask the key questions. What tool are you using, what data on my statement -- on my student is being used? What biases may exist? How are adults monitoring these tools, or are these tools on auto with no adult looking at it?
▶ 1:02:43Sec. Marten: Most importantly, how is this tool improving learning outcomes for students? If it is not, don't use it.
▶ 1:02:48Sen. Armstrong: And if I could, I know the ranking member and I have the race act that we sponsor, that would require states to send a statewide standard -- set a statewide standard for the use of ai in the classroom. We want it at the state level.
▶ 1:03:07Sen. Armstrong: How important, do you believe it is, for states to have a standard that local schools can use as a reference point for all of those issues, safety, security, using it in the most appropriate way?
▶ 1:03:24Sec. Marten: It is critically important. At the district level, the level of expertise needed, not every district -- may be larger ones will have a whole team that can procure properly and put guardrails in place, but not everybody. The state can play a critical role, which is what federal guidance suggested.
▶ 1:03:52Sec. Marten: We have a student saying we are so glad you have guardrails because we want our teachers using these tools. When the steak can put that guidance out, so not every district has to re-create the safety and the guardrails and the standards. These are known quantities.
▶ 1:04:08Sen. Armstrong: A state standard, trusted resources, constantly updated. That is the starting point. Thank you Mr. chairman.
▶ 1:04:20R.M. Blunt Rochester: I think we are on round two of my questions. I want to pick up where Ms. mote left off on privacy and data breaches. In 2025, 52 percent of U.S. school districts experienced a cybersecurity incident.
▶ 1:04:42R.M. Blunt Rochester: The year prior, a data breach at the company power school exposed the data of 62 million students, and 9.5 million teachers. The largest breach of children's educational data in U.S. history. My first question is to secretary marten. How do you deal with a challenge like this at a state level?
▶ 1:05:06Sec. Marten: That leads to the other question about how important it is to have a statewide safety guardrail. In delaware we work with dti to make sure this is a state-level approach. That the security and cybersecurity in particular, there is a knowledge base out here about what to do. This can happen with strong state guidance.
▶ 1:05:32Sec. Marten: But more than guidance, it is actually enforcement, to make sure every tool -- I use the analogy of a superhighway. It has to be safe. You don't get to come into delaware and bring a product to our schools unless it meets minimum safety requirements.
▶ 1:05:54Sec. Marten: For ai and education, making sure that these tools from a cyber perspective and student cyber -- student privacy perspective are completely guardrailed before they hit the road.
▶ 1:06:05R.M. Blunt Rochester: For all the witnesses, do you think that educational privacy laws cover enough ground, or do you think we should update them? I will start with Mr. jones. If you have an opinion.
▶ 1:06:19Mr. Jones: I don't have an opinion.
▶ 1:06:22R.M. Blunt Rochester: Ms. mote?
▶ 1:06:24Ms. Mote: Thank you so much. Currently, the number of privacy laws are doing a good job in educational settings. The challenge is and have consumer grade schools -- consumer grade tools enter our classrooms that are not subject to those laws or restrictions. In particular I am especially concerned with chatbots and companions, and the use of them by young people. We have seen that there is foreseeable harm.
▶ 1:06:56Ms. Mote: Much like social media, infinite scrolling, the consumer passive nature. When those technologies come into our classrooms, without the guardrails for their use, it can put student mental health at risk.
▶ 1:07:10R.M. Blunt Rochester: Secretary marten? Do we need to update any of our privacy laws regarding education?
▶ 1:07:18Sec. Marten: Because of what my colleague said about the chatbots and some of the ways students are interacting with the technology, we have learned there is -- the answer is yes. These tools are getting more access to more information about our students that we may not even be aware of. This is why when we are putting our tools through the insurance lab, we are uncovering not the vendor claim but what actually happens.
▶ 1:07:48Sec. Marten: What information was just harvested or learned in interaction between the student and the tool that is living in the system that we did not know has the right protections?
▶ 1:07:57R.M. Blunt Rochester: I will shift to ai and the connection to civil rights. We know that the office for civil rights has seen the lowest number of cases resolved over the past decade, this year. With the news we just got today from the secretary of education, Ms.
▶ 1:08:22R.M. Blunt Rochester: Mote, what do conversations around civil rights and ai in education look like among advocates and parents? Can you give us some real examples of what is actually happening in the civil rights space?
▶ 1:08:39Ms. Mote: About 70% of parents share the worries of advocacy groups like the national parents union, aclu, the center for democracy and technology. Around four specific types of harms. Bias in detection tools, particularly for grading. Discriminatory predictive analysis. Looking at a tool and because you say the word y'all, you are put into a lower cognitive category.
▶ 1:09:10Ms. Mote: Student privacy and surveillance, how that data is being used. And this fear around a digital divide. That our rural students and students in under resourced schools are not going to have access to these tools, like other well resourced schools will. I think a number of things are being done right now. Ai literacy for parents, many of these groups are doing incredible work with schools and state governments to empower parents. Florida is an excellent example of a state who is taking leadership.
▶ 1:09:43Ms. Mote: Consequential decision-making, this is thinking about how we keep a human in the loop so that it is not the ai making a decision about whether you get a loan, get into college, financial aid, the result of your insurance claim. But that there is always a human on that decision. Florida has led the way in network.
▶ 1:10:11R.M. Blunt Rochester: Thank you, and I yelled back and maybe come back for round three.
▶ 1:10:16Chair Tuberville: Thank you very much. Senator armstrong.
▶ 1:10:20Sen. Armstrong: Thank you all for being here. A fascinating topic. I want to go back to the round one questions from senator blunt rochester. For this committee, understanding exactly what we can do from a federal perspective is critical. This is a fascinating topic that we could talk for days on.
▶ 1:10:47Sen. Armstrong: I know a lot of states and local communities are taking a lot of groups like Mr. jones' group. My question goes back to -- the response I heard for the question of what can we do at the federal level, I think was research, maybe something on best practices, and perhaps maybe something on radical safety standards.
▶ 1:11:19Sen. Armstrong: I just want to make sure that as we come through this listening session, we are hearing specifically what should we be doing at the federal level?
▶ 1:11:31Mr. Jones: I may tie back to the question I passed on with policy. One of the things as an entrepreneur, when we go into other states, whether it is privacy policies or ai regulations, we have to be mindful of 50 different sets of privacy policies or regulatory practices. As a small business, that creates a significant burden that instead of innovating or improving, we are spending money on legal or other efforts.
▶ 1:12:02Mr. Jones: Not to take too strong of a stance but I would suggest anything you could do to allow for entrepreneurship, allow for opportunities for exploration in this area. The second thing, going back to this idea of refresh rates.
▶ 1:12:16Mr. Jones: Don't think in terms of we just did something so we will check back in five years, but looking at a semester by semester approach, refreshing, analyzing, what is working, yielding real outcomes, moving at a faster cadence because I can guarantee you our competitors are.
▶ 1:12:34Sen. Armstrong: I am hearing that as don't think you can keep up with it, with the law, particularly at the congressional level. But put the money into research. I'm not trying to put words into your mouth.
▶ 1:12:51Mr. Jones: I would suggest, and terms of whether you are passing policy or funding different initiatives and opportunities, shorten your cadence on when you look for results and when you reanalyze and spend more in those areas. Innovation happens in small companies so don't get distracted by the hyper scalars and the multibillion dollar companies. A lot can be accomplished through small business as well.
▶ 1:13:22Sen. Armstrong: Thank you. Ms. mote?
▶ 1:13:24Ms. Mote: I want to name some existing federal programs we need to make sure we are investing in. We need to prepare educators. They are the front-line deliverers of literacy and how our students are going to be interacting with this technology in a human centered way. Fully funding title two and title four dollars is critical. Those are professional development dollars, that can be used for educators to get necessary training.
▶ 1:13:56Ms. Mote: Barely half of schools have done professional development for our educators at this point, since 2022. I would also name that this congress must protect the rate technology money. This is vital connectivity dollars that support rural communities, in making sure that young people have access to the internet in schools. This is critical money, to ensure that we are not widening the digital divide.
▶ 1:14:25Ms. Mote: I want to go back to the c1 the fcc has a cybersecurity pilot that is so oversubscribed that they can't keep up with the work which means our education system needs more resources to protect our students and educators data. Converse needs to make that investment.
▶ 1:14:48Sen. Armstrong: Secretary martin?
▶ 1:14:50Sec. Marten: I will double-click on the investment and educators. A tool is no good if the person using the tool is not know how to use it. Professional development matters. This is implementation support, let's say we get the safest tool and it has the right guard rails, if somebody doesn't know how to use it to improve instruction, we need real implementation support.
▶ 1:15:18Sec. Marten: We need real time for educators to learn together using real student cases with the very students in front of them and I'm not talking about like an asynchronous model that comes with the tool that you go on two hours and think you have been trained, the implementation can't be an afterthought. Think professional learning can't be a tiny line item after you purchase a big platform.
▶ 1:15:44Sec. Marten: Teacher agency and voice and time to learn the tools and the safety, the risks and the benefits of the tool needs to happen so we invest in implementation, coaching, collaboration. I think that professional learning ends up being really important investment that needs to be made.
▶ 1:16:01Sec. Marten: We need federal support for research and voluntary best practice frameworks so we are not re-creating every district hasher re-create the best practice frameworks, there is a good knowledgebase out there and we can actually not take away local decision-making, help states and districts make informed decisions without replacing the local decision-making but get the knowledgebase out there so states can lead.
▶ 1:16:27Sen. Armstrong: Thank you I yield back. >> senator kaine?
▶ 1:16:33Senator Kaine: Thank you, Mr. chair, and senator blunt rochester for having this hearing. Think who was the most and everybody in the room, think who was the most influential teacher you ever had in your life. And think about that person. There is competition in my mind for that person.
▶ 1:17:00Senator Kaine: A high school teacher who because I was an introvert thought it would be good for me to participate in the extracurricular of speech and debate because that might make me more confident a communicator. It was not anything I was graded on but it was someone who noticed something about me without this extracurricular would be helpful.
▶ 1:17:22Senator Kaine: It was the shop teacher in middle school and I was not that great at shop, who used to love to go camping and take kids with him because he didn't have kids of his own and he would invite shop students, do you want to go camping this weekend? That was not what my family did and it turned me into a lifelong outdoors person without joe mckenzie inviting me to go camping but that was not part of class.
▶ 1:17:52Senator Kaine: It is not something that ai could do. Ai wouldn't notice somebody that though introverted might gain confidence in doing public speaking. Ai would not notice here is somebody who might really like to do outdoors stuff. But I think the foundational relationship between a child and the teacher is not something that ai is going to re-create, not something ai could substitute for.
▶ 1:18:25Senator Kaine: Ms. mote coming you right that ai could offload administrative functions, which is a really good point. I think that could be really helpful. There are certainly benefits ai can provide. My wife is a member of the richmond school board and they are grappling with this issue of how to appropriately bring ai into the classroom.
▶ 1:18:56Senator Kaine: Here's a question I want to ask maybe all of you. A lot of school boards consultants will be coming to them like you've got to do something on ai and we've got the best program in the world, what should educators, particularly superintendents and school boards be looking at as they assess whether to adopt ai tools or not? Give them some guidance and maybe some warning. Secretary marten.
▶ 1:19:25Sec. Marten: They are grappling with that and there is a lot of pressure to do the right thing and that is why I mentioned there needs to be a vision before there is an answer, what is your district's educational vision? What outcomes are you committed to? Then you go and find some tools. You also have to put the guard rails.
▶ 1:19:48Sec. Marten: I mentioned the document we produced, the empowering education leaders toolkit and we put three clear steps, a roadmap, a playbook, if you will . Mitigate risk, build strategy, and guide and evaluate the use over time and these three things have modules and that is clear guidance for school board trying to navigate this.
▶ 1:20:13Sec. Marten: It is not what we published at the federal level and it shows you exactly how to implement this roadmap for safe, ethical, equitable ai.
▶ 1:20:21Sen. Kaine: I want to make sure Ms. mote and Mr. jones have an opportunity as well.
▶ 1:20:31Ms. Mote: Thank you. I thing we have to ask this very important question, what is this tool's return on instruction? What will this do for a student, what will this do for an educator and if it is about productivity or motivation or engagement, does that mean that that educator is going to have the thing they want the most? Time back to make sure that all students are safe, known, and loved. For me it was Ms.
▶ 1:21:00Ms. Mote: Teng in fifth grade who changed the way a thought about myself as a leader.
▶ 1:21:07Sen. Kaine: Mr. jones.
▶ 1:21:08Mr. Jones: We have developed curriculum teaching administrators and principals. We start on basic data literacy, helping them understand how to evaluate the data in front of them. One of the things we teach as quickly as possible for those who start using ai, there's a tendency to trust everything it spits out which can create serious problems if you are evaluating performance and you are trusting the ai math.
▶ 1:21:35Mr. Jones: As I mentioned earlier, this healthy cynicism of evaluating the results is going to be one of the critical skills and the tool selection, we try not to teach a specific tool, but rather abstract one layer and what are the capabilities and how do you understand that it is a marketplace each with strengths and weaknesses and chances are you may use one tool for one purpose and another tool for another purpose. I would say try not to get locked into one system so your hands are tied.
▶ 1:22:06Sen. Kaine: Let me just say as I handed back to the chair, I'm going to ask a question for the record to get each of you a chance to share best practices like if you know of a school or jurisdiction that is doing best practices implementing ai tools for training teachers and others to be really good at ai, I'm going to ask you to give us some examples because I think sometimes we talk about the problems but we don't hold up the examples that if others knew about the good examples they
▶ 1:22:37Sen. Kaine: Could re-create those examples and the last thing I will say on ai and this point about steering you wrong, I never asked my phone to summarize email communications, but now if I have a chain of emails with somebody, there's an ai summary at the top and the number of times the summary is wrong, so-and-so, your friends have agreed they do want to get together and I can read the emails and they said they didn't want to go and they want to do it next weekend.
▶ 1:23:04Sen. Kaine: The number of times the summary is incorrect has made me quite wary. This is nonmalicious inaccuracy. There is also malicious inaccuracy. Thanks. >> thanks. Senator? >> thank you, Mr. chairman. I don't think there is anyway to overhyped the damage ai has already done to our kids' ability to succeed.
▶ 1:23:30Sen. Kaine: I'm a parent of an incoming 12th grader and ninth grader and I've seen already that how at scale kids have outsourced critical thinking, have outsourced friendship, have even outsourced moral advice to ai, completely unregulated interactions between machines and young children. Something we would have never thought of allowing just decades ago. All your testimony was compelling. But Ms.
▶ 1:23:57Sen. Kaine: Mote, I thought yours was especially compelling given your talk about this idea of cognitive surrender that can happen. Let me maybe ask this question about cognitive surrender first. I like that you are talking about ai as a tool for teachers, not just unleashing it on kids as guinea pigs.
▶ 1:24:22Sen. Kaine: But the ai companies have a veneer of social benefit, but an underlying motivation of addiction and profit expansion. This is from a chilling new york times exposé this weekend regarding the unleashing of deepfakes without any controls on the american public. One observer at a major tech company said these companies would burn everything to the ground as long as they are making a profit.
▶ 1:24:50Sen. Kaine: So let's say we are successful in just having this pointed at teachers as a tool but if the ai companies are only interested in selling more and having teachers use it more, how do you protect against teachers being sucked into some kind of algorithmic, addictive product like kids are?
▶ 1:25:13Sen. Kaine: If the intent is not social benefit, but the products being used for more and more and more, how do you make sure that teachers are not being sucked in like kids are being sucked in?
▶ 1:25:24Ms. Mote: Thank you for the question. I want to give full credit to professors at wharton who came up with the study around cognitive surrender. This idea that we are offloading tasks and offloading the discernment that senator kaine talked about when he looked at those ai summaries, so there are two things that I think are important, senator murphy, when we think about students versus teachers. The first is what neuroscience tells us.
▶ 1:25:52Ms. Mote: There is a really big difference in putting this technology in front of a brain that is developing and is doing that offloading, frankly in a way where those neural pathways are still developing. The difference between senator kaine's experience and that of a young person has that senator kaine has the ability to read what his friends are saying, knows their preferences, and has those neural pathways really concrete.
▶ 1:26:18Ms. Mote: I think there is a different set of risk with young people then frankly with folks who are over the age of 25. If I had the rules, I would say it is rental car rules because that is where you know the brain has jelled in terms of the neural pathways. But we need to invest in professional development for educators.
▶ 1:26:39Ms. Mote: Here is what we know about actual effective uses of ai, when ai amplifies human potential, learning can go up about 4.5 percentage points. When the ai is providing that diagnostic and giving a hand with that judgment, students grow 10 percentage points with the same tool.
▶ 1:27:08Ms. Mote: So it really is how is ai supporting that human centered knowledge transfer? That is what we need to be focusing on in education.
▶ 1:27:16Sen. Murphy: I think it might be naïve to suggest that an adult is magically immune to these incredibly strong brain warm like algorithms. I agree with you that they are more influential on children. We require a teacher to go through licensing before they are in a classroom, we require most complicated technologies to go through an approval process before they are handed out to the american public.
▶ 1:27:43Sen. Murphy: What do you think about an idea to make sure that ai technology that is being handed to a teacher go through some expert approval process first to make sure that it's actual function is to supplement the teacher's' instruction rather than its primary function is to try to spin you into higher usage and higher pay rates for the company that owns it?
▶ 1:28:05Ms. Mote: Thank you, we are developing a learning sciences benchmark with arizona state university to measure consumer grade ai tools and the impact they have on learning and cognition to give educators and decision-makers in idea of how a tool stacks up.
▶ 1:28:22Ms. Mote: For me, the work that delaware is doing, utah is doing, even vermont is doing in creating sandboxes at the state level to test these tools, to build evidence, and to make that evidence digestible to educators is a huge improvement on how we are going to make sure that all schools have access to information about what works for whom and under what conditions.
▶ 1:28:47Sen. Murphy: You are nodding your head, secretary marten.
▶ 1:28:51Sec. Marten: I'm very much nodding head because you are asking to interrupt an algorithmic cycle and the only one that can interrupt that is the human, we can see it for what it is, realize we are being taken down a rabbit hole and stop it, but that is at the individual level. You are asking at a systemic level, we want that cycle interrupted and it has to do with what is being demanded as the outcome of public education.
▶ 1:29:18Sec. Marten: What do we want our students leaving knowing and being able to do so would teacher is going down a rabbit hole that is not producing the outcome of student learning. We want critical thinking, we want kids to be able to design and defend their point of view and perspective on something. No tool, you are in some rabbit hole trying to figure out the actual, not the problem you're trying to solve which is student learning. Did students learn, was I teaching and did students learn?
▶ 1:29:46Sen. Murphy: I appreciate I'm over time, but I imagine a project interested first and return to investors are for instance going to point you to the purchase of other products that they make that might have nothing to do with student outcomes, but are certainly aligned with the profit returns. I just want to make sure we really think through what the underlying motivations are of the people making the software before we just assume that their motivations are to the benefit of our kids.
▶ 1:30:16Sen. Murphy: Thank you, Mr. chairman.
▶ 1:30:17Chair Tuberville: Thank you, senator murphy. I just got a few questions. Mr. jones, you are uniquely positioned to understand which ai skills pay off her students at which grade level. Which ai literacy skills should students develop before graduation?
▶ 1:30:35Mr. Jones: I would suggest, Mr. chairman, absolutely that they should develop what we refer to as ai literacy, these basics of understanding ethics, when to use it, when not to use it, tool selection, critical judgment, how do I evaluate the outputs of these tools? What can I trust were not trust, beginning to understand how ai is being used in different industries. Those would be the first areas I would recommend.
▶ 1:31:04Chair Tuberville: How can students be prepared for careers that will increasingly use ai?
▶ 1:31:11Mr. Jones: It is a shifting foundation. When I went to school I was told I needed to learn long division because I wouldn't be walking around with a calculator in my pocket. Turns out I am. Do we need to learn those skills? Or that we just have a calculator in our pocket?
▶ 1:31:40Mr. Jones: If it is too easy, students will forget it, if it is too hard, but that desirable difficulty where it really challenges them and I would suggest in terms of workforce development skills that those are rapidly changing so what we're doing is looking at an industry by industry basis and looking at how is ai changing agriculture in alabama?
▶ 1:32:02Mr. Jones: How is ai changing health care and in each of those it really is the next level of industry by industry. They want to launch an ai major or focus on the ai but that is highly technical field. What we need to be thinking about is whether you are a truck driver how is ai changing your industry?
▶ 1:32:32Mr. Jones: There will be specific skills for each industry.
▶ 1:32:38Chair Tuberville: Secretary marten, how can ai enhance rather than replace the role of teachers?
▶ 1:32:45Sec. Marten: It becomes such an important tool when a teacher has something to reduce administrative burden. Caps off master the con -- have students mastered the content?
▶ 1:33:11Sec. Marten: All that enable learning -- that enables the learning. When you teach something, how do you know students have learned it? Can you get real feedback? But also how they are interacting with the knowledge and defending their argument and creating an argument and practicing critical thinking.
▶ 1:33:29Chair Tuberville: Thank you. Ms. mote, for now the answer may we don't know yet, but what do we know about long-term cognitive impact of the use of this technology? I know we talked about it a little bit. What are your thoughts?
▶ 1:33:47Ms. Mote: I think it is very important to say there is a lot we don't know. In k-12 education, we have no causal studies on long-term impact on social or cognitive development. It is about practices, pedagogy, teacher moves. Both secretary marten and Mr.
▶ 1:34:16Ms. Mote: Jones have given good examples of educated hypotheses that we have about how we can build the skills that students need, the cognitive development, the literacy, but we need more focus on research so we can understand exactly what you said in your opening statement, what works for whom and under what conditions.
▶ 1:34:34Chair Tuberville: Ms. jones? Your thoughts?
▶ 1:34:42Mr. Jones: Could you repeat the question?
▶ 1:34:46Chair Tuberville: We don't know yet. But what do we know when it comes to the long-term cognitive impact use of this technology?
▶ 1:34:57Mr. Jones: As a father of three daughters watching them go to high school, college, and middle school, I've seen three different generations essentially even in that short span because of the way this is rapidly developed and it certainly concerns me the pace at which this technology is developing so I would be remiss if I didn't say I'm nervous, this is something we absolutely need to work toward addressing,
▶ 1:35:28Mr. Jones: I would certainly encourage studies sooner rather than later.
▶ 1:35:30Chair Tuberville: Thank you. Secretary marten, how does teacher professional development play into this process in your experience?
▶ 1:35:39Sec. Marten: I think the core argument for this will discussion today is actually teacher professional development. We want to know what works and what doesn't work, let's ask the teachers doing the work. They will tell you which tools are not going to improve student outcomes and learning.
▶ 1:35:58Sec. Marten: They will tell you which tools can actually help them and professional development so they understand the inherent risks so they don't use the tools in dangerous ways but you can use these tools absolutely to improve student outcomes when you were working with teachers.
▶ 1:36:16Sec. Marten: That is why we developed the assurance lab in delaware to test the tools in relation to the students we are teaching, the standards we are required to teach and are they producing outcomes or is it just a side project because it is a shiny new toy? We have to test the vendor claims.
▶ 1:36:34Sec. Marten: The vendors will claim let's have them test the tools and they will tell you if learning is enhanced and outcomes are improving. Give them the time and space and professional development to know how to test those tools well.
▶ 1:36:54Chair Tuberville: Thank you. I have one more question here and we will start with Mr. jones and everybody can answer if you like. Will ai narrow achievement gaps or widen them?
▶ 1:37:05Mr. Jones: I think it's a very pertinent question and I would suggest we face a risk of a greater digital divide than that with we saw with the access to internet. I think it is incredibly important that we make sure that as these technologies developed, we make sure all of our students, teachers, and administrators have access to evaluate and use these tools in an ethical manner but I would suggest those who are using a nursing outsized gains in productivity and efficiency.
▶ 1:37:33Mr. Jones: In the workforce, we see higher demand for those that come in ai fluent, so it is definitely something that will be impactful and I think it is of the utmost importance that we do educate our learners really for this changing environment.
▶ 1:37:46Chair Tuberville: Ms. mote thank you?
▶ 1:37:50Ms. Mote: I think that is the critical question of this hearing. What future do we want for our young people, for our schools, and for public education? I believe that if we fund our schools' digital defense, we find teacher training, and build research infrastructure, we can protect that sacred spark of human potential that senator blunt rochester talked about in her three-year-old granddaughter, I see in my robert and claire, and really
▶ 1:38:20Ms. Mote: Secure a prosperous future for all american children. It is up to us to bend the arc.
▶ 1:38:24Chair Tuberville: Thank you. Secretary marten?
▶ 1:38:28Sec. Marten: Will it close the learning divide or widen that? It depends how we use this. There is no silver bullet. There is no one tool that is the panacea or the magic way into closing the digital divide.
▶ 1:38:46Sec. Marten: If this is not done well, this is on us as leaders, to make sure that the tools are safe and ethical and used well and the teachers have proper training and are they being used across in our state in delaware and rural and every other part of the state, the tools that have the greatest promise, are they being put in the hands of the teachers so they can use them better? At the end of the day, no tool or curriculum teaches a child, the teacher teaches the child.
▶ 1:39:15Sec. Marten: When you equip that teacher with the knowledge and the skill to use these advanced tools, you can actually improve at a great rate the learning outcomes for students but it is in the hands of the educators, not the tool.
▶ 1:39:26Chair Tuberville: Thank you. This has been an excellent hearing and we went a little bit over time but I think everybody is interested in this. We would like to look into the future in 10 years and see where we are at, it's going to be interesting. A lot different than when I grew up in a lot of us grew up. It's going to be a challenge not just to the students, but also the teachers to get involved in this. We want to thank you all for getting involved -- for being here today.
▶ 1:39:53Chair Tuberville: The record will be open until 5:00 p.m. Today through wednesday, july 1. You will probably get questions on the record. Thank you to the witnesses for being here today. We have a letter here I would like to ask for unanimous consent, from the southern institute statement for the record, the rise in ai in education should mean stronger protections for parental rights.
▶ 1:40:19Chair Tuberville: I want to thank all of you for being here, I hope we got something out of this, we've got it on video. If you want to change her answers, now's the time to do it. But thanks for being here and thanks to all you young people for being here. This is your future. Grab a hold of it, run with that, but ai is not coming, it is already here. Learn as much as you can, but use it wisely. Thank you very much. The hearing is adjourned. Thank you.
▶ 1:40:47Chair Tuberville: [gavel] 2 [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. Visit ncicap.org]