🛝 Everyone's Using AI. Nobody's Ready For It

Welcome to Playground Post, a bi-weekly newsletter that keeps education innovators ahead of what's next.

This week's reality check: States are spending millions to put AI tutors in front of students, who use them for about three minutes a week. Nearly three-quarters of districts still have no AI plan at all. And the teachers who'd have to make any of it work are burnt out, 57% of them.

Data Gem

1.2 million teenagers in the US now feel disconnected from both school and work, according to the Annie E. Casey Foundation's 2026 KIDS COUNT Data Book.

States Are Betting Millions on AI Tutors

States are spending millions to put AI tutors in classrooms. 

A new Stanford study found students barely touch them.

Researchers with Stanford's SCALE Initiative tracked AI tutoring across two school districts, both using an AI literacy platform alongside human tutors. Even with class time set aside for it, only 61% of students in one district and 53% in the other ever used the tool.

The ones who did used it for almost no time at all.

Average weekly use was 2.18 minutes in one district and 5.23 minutes in the other. The platform's own maker says students need 30 minutes a week to see measurable reading gains.

Pairing the AI tutor with a human tutor barely helped, adding one minute of weekly use in one district and 4.4 in the other.

There was also a quieter finding about who used the tools. 

The students who used the AI tutor were more likely to be higher-achieving and less likely to receive special education services. 

The technology reached the students who needed it least, but none of this has slowed the spending.

Arizona put 170,000 students, 16% of its public school enrollment, on Khan Academy's Khanmigo for $1.5 million. 

Iowa committed $3 million to an AI reading tutor called Amira. 

Maryland is running a two-year Khanmigo pilot, Virginia is launching its own under a new state law, and Indiana found that actual usage of its AI tutors came in well below what schools had requested.

For education innovators, the Stanford data redraws the AI-tutoring market around the problem nobody priced in: getting students to actually use the thing. Engagement and usage-orchestration layers that drive students toward the 30-minute threshold the tools require. The tutor that goes unused is the most expensive one a district can buy.

Teachers Are Using AI. Their Districts Never Wrote the Rules

Teachers have adopted AI faster than their districts can govern it.

In a recent EdWeek Research Center survey, 61% of teachers said they use AI-driven tools in the classroom. 

In a companion survey of administrators and teachers, 73% said their district has no districtwide AI initiative at all.

So the rules are being written one classroom at a time.

Without district guidance on which tools are allowed, teachers and students default to general-purpose platforms like ChatGPT and Claude rather than tools built for schools. Those consumer apps carry age restrictions that can block students outright, said Matt Alonzo, a math and computer science teacher in St. Louis.

The result, he said, is that schools are "really creating a barrier for students who don't have access to use AI in the way that we would like."

The unevenness compounds from there. Michael Martin, a high school principal in Ohio, said that without a focused integration process, teachers end up using AI "in different ways and all at different levels of understanding."

His real worry isn't access. It's quality.

"Every kid has access to AI," Martin said, "but do they have access to really high-quality AI literacy, high-quality instruction?"

Victor Lee, a Stanford education professor, sees the same divide that opened up around home internet and devices during the pandemic, when some students learned to use a new technology as an academic tool and others never did.

For education innovators, the 73% is the size of the governance gap. District AI-policy platforms that turn a state's vague mandate into classroom-ready rules about which tools are allowed at which grade levels. Approved-tool catalogs that give teachers a vetted alternative to the consumer apps students can't legally use. The technology is already in the building. The instructions aren't.

Fewer Teachers Want to Quit. But 57% Are Still Burnt Out

The good news for superintendents is that teachers are planning to stay. The bad news is how they feel about it.

A new RAND Corporation survey of K-12 teachers found that 57% feel burnt out this school year. 

Teachers reported higher job-related stress and more symptoms of depression than similar working adults, a gap that has held steady for five years.

And yet most aren't leaving. 

Forty-four percent say they'll teach until they're eligible for retirement, and another 23% plan to stay as long as they're able.

Asked what fuels their stress, teachers pointed first to managing student behavior, at 52%. Low salary followed at 33%, then hours worked outside their contract and administrative work outside teaching, tied at 32%.

Three of the top four stressors aren't about pay. They're about workload and behavior, the daily texture of the job.

This tracks with what earlier surveys found. 

A 2025 Walton Family Foundation and Gallup survey named the same culprits: student behavior, growing workloads, and inadequate compensation.

For education innovators, the burnout data points at a workforce that's staying in place but running on empty, which is its own kind of risk. Administrative-task automation that claws back the hours teachers lose to paperwork outside teaching. Behavior-support tools that address the single biggest stressor on the list.

⚡️More Quick Hits

This week in education:

• About 1 in 5 recent college graduates feels overqualified for their job — NACE and ZipRecruiter data show a similar share applied for roles beneath their skill level and more than half see their current job as a stepping stone, pointing to a persistent underemployment gap

• One district's math proficiency jumped from 11% to 67% after switching to integrated math — about 16% of districts now blend algebra and geometry rather than teaching them in separate years, an approach gaining slow but measurable favor

• The "science of reading" rests on a federal research panel that's now 25 years old — at least 34 states have passed reading laws referencing the 2000 National Reading Panel, and lawmakers are now calling for an update that could trigger a new wave of curriculum purchasing

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