What your school board must know to create today’s AI policies
Artificial intelligence (AI) is a technology every public school board member needs to understand. It has risks, it has benefits and — most importantly — it’s here, and your students, staff and community are already using it.
AI horror stories are legion, and, in classrooms at both secondary and college levels, instructors struggle to identify and create consequences for unethical AI-generated work. But if this is all you know about AI, you and your board are missing an opportunity to unlock productivity and creativity tools to benefit you, your students and your community.
So, where to begin? And how do board members craft reasonable policies for AI use in local education? This was the heart of the discussion in a recent webinar, “Navigating AI in the Classroom: Policy and Ethical Considerations for K-12 Education.” Bringing together school board representatives and policy experts, the webinar covered where AI is now, what’s coming next and how school board members can be best prepared to handle AI’s many issues and possibilities.
Watch the full 30-minute discussion here, and read on for some of the highlights.
What is the scope of AI?
Chances are, you already use AI in daily life. It drives home device systems like Google Nest and Amazon Alexa, for example, and gives Siri a voice on iPhones. But there are several iterations of AI (so far), and AI’s potential continues to evolve.
In the webinar, Davelyn Smeltzer, Senior Director of Policy Services for the Pennsylvania School Boards Association, describes the types:
- Artificial narrow intelligence is based on predetermined issues, like Alexa answering a question about the weather. (It’s also known as “weak AI.”)
- Generative AI creates new content based on information it has or is learning from its environment. It has, according to some, passed the Turing test, in which its responses are indistinguishable from humans’.
- Artificial or super intelligence indicates that AI has become self-aware — the stuff of much science fiction of the last century. We’re not there yet, but, as Smeltzer notes, we’re “on the precipice.”
She adds, “And so you can see that AI is not going away. It is just continuing. And as schools, we're going to have to take a look at this and learn how to deal with it.”
In addition to staying informed themselves, boards also are well served by educating their communities about the benefits and risks of AI. The Diligent Institute offers an AI Ethics & Board Oversight Certification for additional insight into the intersection of AI and board responsibility.
Create an AI governance framework
In this guide to safe and transparent AI governance in public education, learn how to streamline your AI policies and more.
I'd like the guideHow do school boards begin to tackle AI?
Board members may feel unprepared to address AI use in policy, but responsible AI governance absolutely falls under the board’s purview. The good news is, boards do not need to work on policies from scratch. Federal laws already offer guidance, many states have laws and state associations can provide model policies.
At the federal level, legislation such as the Americans with Disabilities Act, Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act spell out data protections and individual rights that can dovetail with reasonable AI use.
Smeltzer shares an example at the state level: “The Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission has a prohibition on using AI to make determinations regarding employment, recruitment, hiring, retention, promotion, transfer, evaluation, demotion or dismissal — so any employment decisions. We have a statement in there about prohibiting the use of generative AI in making final determinations on student assessments and evaluations.”
“Really, you can't remove the humans from the loop,” she says. “These need to be human decisions.”
Your board likely has existing policies governing the acceptable use of computers and network resources, staff and student conduct, copyright protection and more — these already detail much of what can be acceptable or unacceptable in classroom and staff use.
How can boards use AI now?
AI is more than a weather reporter or essay helper, and boards can already take advantage of its use. Dottie Schindlinger, Executive Director of the Diligent Institute, talks about one way her team has explored AI as a helpful tool for boards:
“We're testing heavily how we can help our customers use generative AI in smart ways to help them do their jobs better and do board work better. For example, let's say you have a very, very long, lengthy board book. Your board clerk can take that board book and create an AI-generated one-page summary of the whole board book. They then have the ability to read and edit it.
“It’s not absolving you of reading your board materials, but once you've read all your board materials, it’s giving you a handy one-page summary to help jog your memory about the things that you just read. It can also generate what is called ‘insights,’ which are a list of questions or areas that it recommends that board members consider probing in the meeting.”
Next steps for boards working with AI policies
Boards must not only develop reasonable AI use policies, but also be prepared to update as needed — a responsibility that becomes time-sensitive with the rapid evolution of today’s technology tools. A board management solution like Diligent Community can be particularly useful here.
Sarah Gutierrez, Policy Implementation Manager at Diligent, says, “With Policy Publisher and our new program Diligent Community, you have this ability to revise your policies quickly, to share quickly with people, to get the right information at the right time for the right people, so that you're evaluating it quickly. If AI is moving quickly in the time that we've had this session, you may be wanting to revise those policies quickly as things change and make sure that something isn't out of date. So having some way to share information, collaborate on policies, collaborate on procedures — that's going to be key as well.”
Want more tips and insights from Diligent’s experts? Watch the full webinar.
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