Cleveland Bets on Classroom AI as New York Hits Pause

Cleveland’s school board voted unanimously on June 23 to put artificial intelligence into classrooms, copying Ohio’s state template almost line for line. The CMSD AI policy sells literacy. It also blocks ChatGPT on student devices and tells kids not to turn in machine-written work as their own.

On September 2, New York City put about 600,000 younger students on the other side of that wager, freezing student-facing generative AI from 2-K through eighth grade for the 2026-27 year. A 30-month study of 26,811 Chinese secondary students is the closest thing either city has to a scoreboard.

Cleveland Copied the State Script and Blocked ChatGPT

The Cleveland Metropolitan School District board passed the rules eight days before Ohio required every traditional public district, community school, and STEM school to adopt a policy by July 1. Entire sections match the Ohio model policy for districts released by the Department of Education and Workforce on December 30, 2025.

The model says AI implementation should be human-centered and should empower students, educators, and communities. CMSD kept that posture. The adopted text also repeats the state’s core limit: it is a tool to support learning and teaching, not a substitute for student effort or the role of the educator.

Unapproved tools are blocked on the district Wi-Fi. Shawn Braxton, executive director of IT customer excellence, said ChatGPT is among the platforms blocked on student devices, and that any approved tool requires a data deal so student records stay with the district and the vendor. “Any tool that we use, we have an agreement with the developer to make sure our data is protected and that it remains our data,” he said, as the district was revising its draft for the board.

The policy also stands up a workgroup of staff, faculty, and students, plus people from local colleges and businesses, to keep feeding the board as the tools change. That group, not the June vote, is where the district left itself room to move.

After 410 Layoffs, AI Is Being Asked to Tutor

Braxton did not pitch chatbots as a replacement for teachers. He pitched them as extra hands. “I look at it as an opportunity to be able to take the technology that we’re now having the ability to use and really do some of the things that we can’t do because we don’t have enough people to do one-on-one instruction with a student,” he said. Teachers, he added, can assign tools at a student’s reading level so one kid can move without holding the class.

That staffing pinch is not abstract in Cleveland this year. Enrollment fell from 70,000 students in 2004 to 34,000 in 2025. In December 2025 the board approved closing or merging 29 of 88 schools, leaving 59. In the spring it cut 410 employees. Students started 2026-27 inside that smaller map.

CMSD AT THE START OF THE YEAR

• Enrollment: 34,000 students in 2025, down from 70,000 in 2004.
• Buildings: 29 schools closed or merged, 88 down to 59.
• Staff: 410 employees cut before the new year opened.
• Network: ChatGPT blocked on student devices; other tools need a data agreement.

Braxton argued the tools the district has deployed help students work through a process rather than handing them answers. “I think the misconception is that some of these AI tools are set up to reduce students’ ability to think,” he said. The China study, and the way Cleveland students already talk about the software, test that claim harder than a Wi-Fi filter can.

The Homework Gain Comes With a 20% Exam Drop

David Strömberg of Stockholm University, with Victor Lei and Yanhui Wu of the University of Hong Kong, tracked 26,811 students in grades 7 through 12 in a central China county for 30 months, from September 2022 through June 2025. By the end, about 80 percent reported using generative AI, mostly general tools such as Doubao and DeepSeek, not school-built tutors. Homework got faster and cleaner. Closed-book tests did not.

THE 30-MONTH LEARNING PENALTY

Among students who never used AI, high homework scores still lined up with high exam scores. Among AI users that link flipped. Kids with the shiniest homework were more likely to tank the test. The researchers split the users by time. After six months, about four in five AI students finished assignments in under 50 minutes, faster than the fastest non-users, with very high homework marks and much worse exams, a pattern that matches outsourcing. The remaining one in five spent about as long as non-users and posted similar exam scores.

The hit was broad and uneven: about 27% in social-science subjects, about 22% in STEM, 17% in English, and 9% in Chinese, with larger losses for younger students, boys, and kids who had been high performers. A separate randomized trial cited in the same paper found a generative tool that handed out answers cut closed-book math exam scores by 17%. A Center for Democracy and Technology survey found more than 70% of parents and teachers already worry that student AI use may weaken academic skills.

Cleveland’s policy forbids turning in AI work as original. It does not, on its face, require timed in-class checks, logged homework minutes, or a tutor that refuses to finish the worksheet. That is the gap the 4-in-5 pattern lives in.

New York’s Freeze Covers Two-Thirds of the System

Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani and Schools Chancellor Kamar H. Samuels announced a one-year moratorium for 2-K through eighth grade on September 2, effective for 2026-27, covering nearly 600,000 public school students, about two-thirds of enrollment. Companion chatbots are barred in every grade. The city said it will discontinue or disable the AI components of more than 38 previously allowed programs. City schools are scheduled to open September 10.

Children need teachers and human connection in order to learn and grow. They need to develop skills alongside their peers, build relationships with educators and wrestle with tough problems on their own. The tech industry wants us to believe that A.I.-powered early education is not only inevitable, but necessary. We do not see it that way.

Zohran Kwame Mamdani, Mayor of New York City, September 2, 2026, announcement

Samuels, speaking as chancellor and as a parent, said the job is to protect what makes learning work. Students “learn best when they are wrestling with hard problems, when they’re getting it wrong, when they’re trying again and finally getting it right,” he said. “No app, chatbot, or algorithm can replicate that productive struggle for a child.”

High school is the exception, and it is narrow. Up to 50,000 general-education high schoolers, about 5% of the system, may enter five pilots, at a maximum of five classes per school, under a trained teacher, on vetted tools: Quill for close reading, no more than 15 minutes a week; Edia for math coaching, no more than 20 minutes a week; Brisk Teaching for teacher-built practice, 10 to 20 minutes once or twice a week; Playlab on no more than two assignments per marking period; and Intel AI-Ready Schools for one period a week on semester-long projects. Every high schooler also gets two 45-minute AI literacy modules a year on what the tools are, bias, risk, and jobs.

Teachers may still use AI for planning and operations if the tools meet city safety rules. Exceptions cover assistive technology for students with disabilities, multilingual learners, and career programs such as computer science. Screen time is capped too: restricted 1:1 devices in second grade and below, 30 minutes a day in grades 3 through 5, 45 minutes in grades 6 through 8. A Technology in Schools Coalition is supposed to publish recommendations after the year.

Cleveland’s document does not split K-8 from high school that way. A 10th grader and a fifth grader live under the same literacy-and-integrity frame, plus whatever a teacher permits and IT has approved.

A Study Buddy That Does the Work

Amara Owens, then a rising 10th grader at the Cleveland School of the Arts, had already sorted her classmates’ habits into buckets before the board voted.

If I can put them into categories: I would say there’s like AI as a friend, there’s the artistic AI, where you can generate like AI art or music, and then there’s AI study buddy, which can do your homework for you, oh and then there’s definitely AI slop too.

Amara Owens, student, Cleveland School of the Arts

Chris Serio, an English teacher at Garrett Morgan High School, said that over two years he had watched AI use explode on assignments, and that a professional-development session made clear the complaint was not just English. “We saw that every single subject, one of the things that we all independently complained about was AI and a need for a regulation of it or a tool to track it,” he said. He still found the board policy thin on the media-literacy gaps his students already have.

“If we’re going to use AI, they should have to prove some sort of competency test or assessment,” Serio said. “I’m using AI to further my research, because that’s what we should be doing it for, and instead it’s being used for summaries and basic comprehension and things that the kids should already know and can’t do.”

The district’s own English curriculum, Savvas, already ships an AI draft-feedback tool. Serio said it is buggy in practice and flags student writing as plagiarism even when he sat with the student and knows the sentences are theirs. Owens, who dislikes the environmental and social costs, still assumes graduates will need the skill. She asked the question the June text does not answer: “Are they going to be implementing AI into the classrooms or are they just saying if a teacher wants to use it they can?”

A school Wi-Fi block does not follow a phone home. High-school AI events are already on the local calendar; TECH CORPS is staffing a November 7 hackathon in Cleveland for students to work with the same class of tools CMSD keeps off its network. The literacy bet is happening in the city either way. The policy mainly decides which logo is allowed on a district laptop.

What CMSD’s Policy Bans

The June document is a use policy, not a curriculum. It tells staff and students that approved AI may support brainstorming or feedback, that machine-made work must not replace student work, and that unapproved apps stay off the network, while leaving day-to-day permission with teachers and IT.

WHAT THE JUNE POLICY FORBIDS

• Fake authorship: Students may not misrepresent AI-generated content as their own and must cite AI help the way they would any source.
• Replacement work: AI-enabled tools may support brainstorming or feedback, but AI-generated work must not replace student work.
• Unapproved apps: Tools not cleared by CMSD IT are blocked on district Wi-Fi, including ChatGPT on student devices.
• Data leakage: Vendors have to agree that student and staff data stays with the district and is not sold or handed to outsiders.
• Bullying and other abuse: Using AI for academic dishonesty or cyberbullying is listed as unethical and prohibited.

Victor Lee, a Stanford researcher who studies AI in K-12 schools, said it is useful that Ohio is pushing every district to write something, because nationally only around a quarter of districts have policies even though students and staff are already using the tools. He said Ohio’s sample hits ethics, privacy, and procurement, and that Cleveland’s version is not only an anti-cheating memo. He also wanted a sharper definition of AI literacy for students versus staff. A policy packet, he said, will not produce those skills unless teachers get training to teach them.

Ohio Required a Document, Not a Lesson Plan

House Bill 96, in the 2025 state budget, created Section 3301.24 of the Ohio Revised Code, effective September 30, 2025. The statute told the Department of Education and Workforce to write a model by December 31, 2025, and told districts they could adopt that model or write their own. It did not tell them what to put in it. Ohio School Boards Association guidance later made the same point: the law does not lock in specific classroom rules.

Director Stephen D. Dackin, releasing the template, said Ohio wants students ready for a world shaped by AI and also wants the tools used in a way that keeps academic integrity. “While we are supportive of schools using AI to strengthen instruction and expand learning opportunities, it is also incredibly important that these tools are used responsibly, and in a way that maintains academic integrity,” Dackin said.

HOW OHIO GOT TO A STATEWIDE RULE

1. February 2024: InnovateOhio and the AI Education Project launch an AI toolkit for schools and families.
2. November 2024: The Ohio AI in Education Coalition, convened when now-Senator Jon Husted was lieutenant governor, publishes a strategy calling for local workgroups, policies, and teacher training.
3. June 2025: House Bill 96 writes those duties into law, with a model due by December 31, 2025, and local policies due by July 1, 2026.
4. December 30, 2025: Dackin releases the model policy.
5. June 23, 2026: CMSD adopts its version on a unanimous vote.
6. July 1, 2026: The statewide adoption deadline arrives.
7. September 2, 2026: New York City announces its one-year freeze for younger students.

Cleveland did what the statute asked. It now has to live with the harder half of Dackin’s sentence, the integrity half, inside a year when homework can look better while learning gets worse, and when the famous chatbot is blocked at school and still open in a pocket. Owens is still waiting to hear whether AI is coming into her classes or staying optional for teachers who want it. The workgroup is where that answer is supposed to show up.