Infrastructure Is Only the Beginning

Governments and school systems spent this week building policies, training programs, and national plans for AI. The harder work begins after the accounts are created and the guidance is published.

What Happened This Week

On June 24, the Los Angeles Unified School District, the second largest in the country, unanimously approved one of the nation's strictest student screen time policies.¹²

On June 24, Microsoft released the third edition of its annual AI in Education Report.³⁴

On July 1, Ohio becomes the first state in the country to require every public K-12 district, community school, and STEM school to have a formal policy on the use of artificial intelligence.⁵⁶

On July 1, ISTE and ASCD closed the first joint edition of their annual conference in Orlando.⁷⁸

On June 2, the University of Chicago told roughly thirty-seven thousand students, faculty, and staff that Claude will now sit inside their working lives the way electricity does.⁹¹⁰

On June 30, ahead of the first Global Dialogue on AI Governance, UNICEF's Office of Strategy and Evidence in Innocenti published a snapshot brief with a quietly unsettling shape.¹¹¹²

In late June, Google DeepMind and Fab Inc released the results of a preregistered randomized controlled trial run last fall in twelve junior secondary schools in the Port Loko District of Sierra Leone.¹³¹⁴

What These Stories Have in Common

Schools can provide devices, access, and rules without changing the quality of learning. The real challenge is designing daily interactions that keep students engaged in reasoning and give teachers useful evidence about progress.

Koan starts from a simple premise. The final answer is no longer a reliable measure of learning. Schools need to understand how students reached that answer and whether the work made them more capable.

What Schools Can Do

A strong implementation should connect policy to classroom practice. It should define what the AI is allowed to do, show teachers how students are using it, and measure whether students can transfer what they learned to work they complete independently.

AI infrastructure matters, but the learning experience built on top of it matters more.