The U.S. Department of Education’s (Department’s) Office of Educational Technology today released Empowering Education Leaders : A Toolkit for Safe, Ethical, and Equitable AI Integration, a new resource designed to support school leaders as they make plans to leverage artificial intelligence’s (AI’s) benefits for teaching and student learning while managing its risks. Responding directly to President Biden’s October 2023 Executive Order on the Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence, this toolkit provides actionable guidance for state and local education leaders to develop a strategy for AI use that is safe, secure, and trustworthy while enhancing student learning outcomes.
Building on the Department’s 2023 report, Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Teaching and Learning: Insights and Recommendations (“AI Report”), this toolkit is designed to help educational leaders make critical decisions about incorporating AI-enabled tools and applications into teaching and the instructional core. Through listening sessions with over 200 educators and AI subject matter experts, and at many public events in the past year, the Department heard that AI is here to stay, AI will keep changing, and safely integrating AI in educational settings will require informed leadership at multiple levels across the education system. Thus, the toolkit sets forth and expands upon the material in the AI Report, connecting broad ideas about AI to the establishment of school and district use policies that will guide its effective implementation.
This toolkit is organized into three distinct sections, each containing modules that can be accessed and revisited in any order depending on an educational leader’s unique needs and priorities:
- Mitigating Risk: Safeguarding Student Privacy, Safety, and Civil Rights. The use of AI in schools must protect students’ safety, rights, and privacy to realize the promise of helping every student achieve their own American dream. This toolkit provides educational leaders with specific recommended risk mitigation practices to ensure that AI is used in schools in a way that safeguards and respects students’ rights and safety. Awareness of applicable federal laws, rules, and regulations is an essential first step when planning for the use of AI in schools. Educational leaders are invited to learn about privacy and data security requirements, how civil rights, accessibility, and equity can be impacted by AI, and to consider the opportunities and risks associated with the use of AI.
- Building a Strategy for AI Integration in the Instructional Core School districts should use the knowledge they have gained from past advances in educational technology to build a clear and coherent strategy for integrating AI into the instructional core – the connection between students, teachers, academic content, and high-quality instructional tasks. That strategy should be informed by multiple sources of evidence on the use of AI for educators and students. Educational leaders should have multiple resources to consider in examining the evidence supporting AI-enabled tools.
- Maximizing Opportunity: Guiding the Effective Use and Evaluation of AI Exploring the multiple uses and applications of AI and building a coherent strategy are important early steps, but educational leaders must also be active in guiding the effective use of AI to enhance teaching and student learning, whether AI-enabled tools are designed and applied to enhance educator productivity or academic instruction. Once educational leaders have a clear strategy in place for the use of AI, they are ready to focus on guiding, shaping, and continually evaluating the use of AI in their learning community.
The Department is committed to supporting innovative advances in educational technology (edtech) to improve teaching and learning across the nation’s education systems and to support educators as they incorporate emerging technology into their learning communities
