Six months ago, first lady Melania Trump walked into a White House education summit next to a faceless robot powered by artificial intelligence, which she said could one day give children personalized instruction.
“Imagine a humanoid educator named ‘Plato,’” she said. “Access to the classical studies is now instantaneous…humanity’s entire corpus of information is available in the comfort of your home.”
Weeks earlier, her guest at the State of the Union had been a 10-year-old from Alpha School, a fast-growing private school network where children learn reading and math from AI software for two hours a day, and spend the rest of their time on workshops and projects overseen by adults the school calls “guides” rather than teachers.
The Trump administration had chosen AI as the future of American schooling, and wanted everyone to know it. But they picked a bad year to ask Americans to trust the technology with their kids.
Earlier this month, top leaders at Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google DeepMind publicly urged for an AI development slowdown, warning that companies racing to build ever more powerful systems could lose control of them, threatening not only large swaths of infrastructure but even humanity itself. Trump responded by calling the panic a “hoax” and said the US would not “hinder or stifle” the industry, because “whoever wins AI wins.” This “let them cook” mantra has met nearly every AI fear this year, from job loss to data center construction.
Key takeaways
- Trump has made AI in classrooms a priority and Alpha Schools his showcase, but Republican-led states like Florida, Iowa, and Utah have passed limits on AI and screens in schools.
- Alpha says its students learn 2.6 times faster with two hours a day of AI instruction. No outside researcher has verified that, though studies may soon launch.
- Republican and Democratic voters want guardrails on classroom tech. Within the GOP fight a fight is brewing over parental choice, innovation, and whether publicly funded schools must prove they work.
Yet the public is not convinced, and parents perhaps least of all. Efforts to bring AI into classrooms have run into organized
by 18 percent but lowered monthly exam scores by 20 percent within six months.Alpha School is working to add more detail to that pile, and other studies will surely follow. It’s at least possible that some aspects of AI in education prove more promising with further study. But public skepticism will remain a major barrier, either way. On an issue where parties are still sorting themselves out, the White House and its allies are swimming against a growing anti-tech tide that extends far beyond just AI or even schools. That’s unlikely to change before 2028, and whoever wants the Republican nomination will have to say which parents they’re listening to.
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