What Ohio Made Mandatory

On July 1, a provision buried inside Ohio's operating budget quietly reshaped the country's argument about AI in schools.¹ House Bill 96, signed into law last summer, made Ohio the first state in the United States to require every public school district, community school, and STEM school to have a written policy on artificial intelligence by that date.² Roughly six hundred districts had to file something. The Department of Education and Workforce had published a model policy earlier in the spring, and districts were free to adopt it verbatim, edit it, or write their own from scratch.³

What Ohio did was mandate the folder. What Ohio declined to do was tell anyone what the folder should contain.

The Cincinnati Enquirer went out in June and asked twelve of the largest districts in its region what they had chosen.⁴ Cincinnati Public Schools had adopted their policy back in September, framing it as guiding principles rather than prescriptive rules. Lakota and CPS both said oversight would fall to existing administrators and technology services. A Columbus official warned publicly against handcuffing the district with anything too rigid. Meanwhile Columbus City Schools' March policy gave individual teachers final authority over whether their students could use AI at all, and required students to disclose it when they did.⁵

Read the twelve policies side by side and they add up to a hundred different Ohios. Some ban unapproved tools. Some publish an approved-vendors list. Some hand teachers the reins. Some cite the state's model almost word for word. Some are three pages, some are twenty. From the state's dashboard, the picture is uniform. Six hundred boxes ticked. In the classrooms, the picture is a mosaic.

A Policy Is A Declaration, Not A Measurement

The most useful thing about a good policy is that it makes a commitment public. The most limiting thing about a policy is that it is a declaration, not a measurement. It tells you what the district intends. It does not tell you what actually happens on a Tuesday in fourth period, when a ninth grader opens Claude on her school laptop and asks it to walk her through the topic sentence she has been staring at for eleven minutes.

Ohio's July 1 deadline gave the state real information about intent at scale. What it did not give the state, or any of its districts, is a window into practice. A district can adopt the strongest policy in the country and still be entirely in the dark about whether its students, in the actual doing of the work, are learning.

The gap between the two is where the next round of school-AI coverage will spend the coming year.

The Substrate The Deadline Cannot See

The layer underneath a policy is the layer we spend our days thinking about at Koan. A teacher's syllabus can say "AI use is permitted for outlining, not for drafting." The line on the syllabus is a policy. The evidence of whether the line is being observed lives inside the writing itself, in the pauses between sentences, in the specific verbs that survived the revision and the ones that got quietly replaced, in the moment a student asked for a hint and the moment she chose not to.

None of that is visible to a district office by default. None of it will appear on a compliance report to the state. And yet all of it is exactly what a well-designed policy is trying, at a great distance, to influence.

What a school actually needs, alongside its written policy, is a way to see the substrate underneath it. Not to police students, but to understand whether the tools the district has approved are being used the way the district said it wanted them used. Not to replace the teacher's judgment, but to give the teacher, the family, and the district a shared and honest picture of what is actually happening inside a piece of work.

Fall 2026 In Ohio

Six hundred Ohio districts will open the school year with a policy on file. Some of them will be thoughtful. Some of them will be careless. Almost none of them will have the instrumentation to know which of the two they turned out to be. That instrumentation, the ability to see a student's real process rather than her polished output, is the piece the deadline could not create. It is the piece the fall will now demand.

Ohio just proved that a state can force every school in it to declare a position on AI in less than a year. It has not yet proved that a declaration on paper meaningfully changes what happens in the room. The next question, and the harder one, belongs to any school willing to look under its own policy.

If every district in the country adopted an AI policy tomorrow, would we know any more than we do today about what our students are actually learning?