🛝 Most Famous AI Tutor in Education Became "a Non-Event."

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

This week's reality check: Sal Khan just admitted Khanmigo didn't work for most students. Gen Z anger toward AI rose 9 points in a year while excitement dropped by nearly half. And a school district in Washington is building its own AI tools for $200 a month, canceling $250,000 in vendor contracts. The AI promise in education isn't failing because the technology is bad. It's failing because the products weren't built for how students actually learn.

Data Gem

An American Enterprise Institute study of 262,000 Indiana high school students found varsity athletes had 20% fewer absences and were roughly one-third less likely to be chronically absent, even after controlling for poverty and race.

Sal Khan Built the Most Famous AI Tutor. He Just Admitted It Didn't Work.

In the summer of 2022, OpenAI leaders Sam Altman and Greg Brockman reached out to Sal Khan. They were months from releasing ChatGPT. They wanted Khan Academy to showcase what the technology could do for education.

Khan built Khanmigo. He gave a TED Talk in 2023 calling it "the biggest positive transformation that education has ever seen."

Three years later, he's recalibrating.

"For a lot of students, it was a non-event," Khan told Chalkbeat. "They just didn't use it much."

Khan offered an analogy. Imagine he walked into a classroom, sat in the back of the room, and waited for students to come ask questions.

"Some will; most won't."

That's been the experience with AI tutoring - the chatbot waited but the students didn't come.

Kristen Musall, a geometry teacher at Hobart High School in Indiana, gave Khanmigo a try when it first rolled out. Students found it frustrating. It sometimes made mistakes but also wouldn't give away the answer.

"If students don't engage with the material enough to know what they're looking for, then an AI like Khanmigo doesn't necessarily help," she said.

Musall no longer uses Khanmigo in her class. She says there's been more enthusiasm for the product among administrators than teachers.

Kristen DiCerbo, Khan Academy's chief learning officer, was initially hopeful AI would personalize instruction to students' needs. 

That hasn't happened.

"So far I am not seeing the revolution in education," she said.

The organization has since overhauled the product, embedding Khanmigo directly into practice problems rather than offering it as a standalone chatbot. 

A spokesperson said the change was made because "students were not seeking out Khanmigo's help as much as we had hoped."

Khan himself has shifted his framing. "I just view it as part of the solution; I don't view it as the end-all and be-all," he said. "AI is going to help. But I think our biggest lever is really investing in the human systems."

For education innovators, this is the most important product lesson of the year. Pull-based AI, chatbots waiting for students to ask, doesn't work. Students don't know what they don't know. They aren't great at asking questions. 

The opportunity is in push-based AI: tools embedded directly in the learning workflow that surface help at the moment of struggle, not tools that wait in a sidebar. And Khan's closing insight names the real product category: AI that amplifies human systems (teacher coaching, family communication, scheduling) rather than AI that tries to replace the teacher-student relationship.

Gen Z Is Turning Against AI

A new Gallup/Walton Family Foundation/GSV Ventures survey of more than 1,500 Gen Z members ages 14 to 29 found a sharp shift in sentiment.

Anger toward AI rose to 31%, up 9 percentage points from the prior year.

Excitement dropped to 22%, down from 36%.

Among K-12 students specifically, 74% said AI designed to complete tasks faster will make learning more difficult. 

That share rose to 83% among Gen Z adults.

The workplace fear is growing too. 48% now say AI's risks outweigh its benefits in the workplace, up from 37% last year.

But here's the complexity: Gen Z isn't quitting AI. 

Weekly usage grew slightly, to 51%. K-12 students' confidence they'll know how to use AI after high school rose from 44% to 56%. And schools reporting AI rules in place jumped from 51% to 74%.

"Gen Z isn't rejecting AI outright, but they are reassessing its role in their lives," said Stephanie Marken, senior partner at Gallup. "Their growing skepticism signals a need for more thoughtful integration of these tools in both school settings and the workplace."

For education innovators, the message is clear: the next generation of AI products can't lead with capability. They have to lead with trust. 

That means transparency features (showing students how and why AI reached its answer), governance tools that make school AI rules visible and enforceable, and AI literacy curriculum that treats students as informed participants rather than passive users. Products that feel imposed will face resistance. Products that feel governable will win.

School District Replaced $250K in EdTech. The Replacement Cost $200 a Month.

Peninsula School District in Washington has started building its own software using AI.

The tools cost $200 per month for Claude Code subscriptions. The district's private AI system, AI Studio, runs about $600 per month. 

Together, they're replacing vendor products the district has paid for with annual contracts.

The expected savings: $250,000 in canceled EdTech subscriptions by the 2026-27 school year.

The approach is called "vibe coding." 

District administrators with no computer science background use text prompts to guide AI into building applications.

Kris Hagel, the district's chief information officer, said they've already identified three or four subscriptions they won't renew.

"We've purchased [EdTech] over the years that we're now looking really critically at and saying, 'Hey, this is not really as complex as it looked like, and maybe we should take a look at what we can do internally and save money,'" Hagel said.

James Cantonwine, the district's director of research and assessment, spent a couple of months building LessonLens, an AI coaching app that lets teachers upload audio and video of themselves teaching and receive feedback based on instructional frameworks.

The district could never have afforded that from a vendor.

AI Studio has data privacy agreements with Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic. 

The agreements require all three providers to strip personally identifiable information from inputs. Hundreds of staff are now using the platform.

For education innovators, this is the story that should keep every EdTech SaaS company up at night. If a district employee with no coding background can build a working product in two months for $200 a month, the value proposition of a $50,000 annual contract has to be about something the district can't replicate: validated efficacy data, regulatory compliance, integrations across student information systems, and continuous product improvement informed by millions of users. Companies that can't articulate why their product is worth more than what a CIO can vibe-code in a weekend will lose contracts.

⚡️More Quick Hits

This week in education:

• 25 states introduced 53 AI education bills this session, but only 3 have become law — FutureEd tracked three dominant policy tracks (AI literacy requirements, privacy rules, and task forces), but the gap between legislative activity and enacted policy leaves districts governing AI without clear mandates

• After-school programs face funding crisis: 88% worried about sustainability — An Afterschool Alliance survey found 77% expect funding loss in 2025, with 14% already reducing staff and 12% serving fewer students, as the $1.3 billion 21st Century Community Learning Centers program faces possible elimination

• ADA digital accessibility deadline looms for every public school and university — Updated ADA Title II rules make WCAG 2.1 AA compliance a legal mandate for all websites, apps, LMS platforms, and documents, but most institutions haven't audited their digital properties

• LAUSD faces historic strike by 70,000+ employees impacting 400,000 students — Three unions moved toward an April 14 walkout over a $191 million district deficit, with a contract clause specifying that bargaining positions will not be replaced by "advanced technology"

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