The nation's first A.I. high school just graduated its first class to have spent all four years there. The most striking thing a New York Times writer found when she visited wasn't the chatbots.

It was first graders on a ladybug rug building "sturdy homes" out of Magna-Tiles, and warm teachers who hadn't been sidelined by any of it. Seckinger High in Gwinnett County, Georgia, markets itself as the country's first A.I.-themed school. The students joke about the branding. Graduates told the Times the technology showed up about where you'd expect (robotics, the dedicated A.I. pathway) and not much else; in language arts, teachers had them write essays by hand to keep ChatGPT out of it.

That gap between the marketing and the classroom is showing up well beyond Buford. New York City recently paused a planned A.I.-focused high school after parent protests. Underneath all of it is a fight about what actually drove a decade of falling test scores. Jared Cooney Horvath's self-published "The Digital Delusion" pins the decline on ed tech. It's selling 5,000-plus copies a month, earned him a Senate hearing, and got a Weingarten citation as a "leading researcher." Critics say the book mistakes correlation for cause. "He's making a causation that doesn't exist," ISTE+ASCD CEO Richard Culatta told NBC News, arguing it has "caused far more wasted time arguing about the wrong thing." The OECD's own data cuts against the cleanest version of the case: students who used devices one to five hours a day at school outscored those who used none at all. As University of Texas economist Peter Bergman put it, a single explanation rarely accounts for a national trend.

When one district actually counted the minutes, the picture got more textured. A Cambridge Public Schools audit this spring found kindergartners on Chromebooks about 17 minutes a day, 98.9 percent of it instructional, and high schoolers at 71 minutes in a 6½-hour day, roughly two-thirds of that instructional. Securly, which analyzed device use across 380 districts, found the same shape on YouTube specifically: most kids watch five to nine minutes a day during school hours, and the hours-long binges that make headlines trace back to roughly the top 1 percent.

The report didn't recommend cutting screens. It recommended tightening the edges: no tablets at lunch and recess, no screens handed out as a reward for finishing early. Superintendent David Murphy said the work "requires a scalpel more so than a chainsaw."

Which may be why the schools worth watching aren't picking a side so much as picking their spots. The Times found a Seckinger senior in the engineering lab, building a carnival game with a laser gun, who was asked whether he'd used A.I. for any of it. "I'm just using the human mind," he said.

— Thomas

One more thing: several of us from Whiteboard Advisors will be at the Education Writers Association National Seminar in Baltimore next week (June 2–5). If you're going to be there, drop me a note. I'd love to meet up.

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