SAN ANTONIO — SAN ANTONIO (AP) — On a sweltering Saturday in San Antonio, dozens of teachers traded a day off for a glimpse of the future. The theme of today’s workshop: enriching teaching with artificial intelligence.
After marveling at AI’s instant grading of homework and turning lesson plans into podcasts or online storybooks, a high school English teacher raised a concern that was on many minds: “Are we going to be replaced by AI?”
That remains to be seen. But to keep the country’s 4 million teachers relevant and helping students use technology wisely, teachers unions have forged an unlikely partnership with the world’s biggest tech companies. The two groups don’t always agree but say they share a common goal: training America’s future workforce.
Microsoft, OpenAI and Anthropic are providing millions of dollars for AI training to the American Federation of Teachers, the nation’s second-largest teachers union. In return, tech companies have the opportunity to enter schools and win over students in the race for AI dominance.
AFT President Randi Weingarten said skepticism guided her negotiations, but the tech industry has something schools lack: deep pockets.
“No one else is helping us in this area. That’s why we felt we needed to work with the biggest companies in the world,” Weingarten said. “We went to them, they didn’t come to us.”
Weingarten first met with Microsoft CEO Brad Smith in 2023 to discuss a partnership. She then approached OpenAI to take an “agnostic” approach that means any company’s AI tools could be used in a training session.
Under the deal announced in July, Microsoft is contributing $12.5 million to AFT over five years. OpenAI is providing $8 million in funding and $2 million in technical resources, and Anthropic offered $500,000.
With this money, AFT plans to build an AI training center in New York that will offer virtual and in-person workshops for teachers. The objective is to open at least two additional centers and train 400,000 teachers over the next five years.
The National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers union, announced its own partnership with Microsoft last month. The company provided a $325,000 grant to help the NEA develop AI training in the form of “microcredentials” — online training courses open to the union’s 3 million members, said Daaiyah Bilal, NEA’s senior director of education policy. The goal is to train at least 10,000 members this school year.
“We have adapted our partnership in a very surgical way,” Bilal said. “We are very aware of what a technology company can gain by releasing information about the products it develops. »
The two unions set similar conditions: Educators, not private funders, would design and lead training courses that include AI tools from multiple companies. Unions own the intellectual property of the training courses, which cover security and privacy issues as well as AI skills.
The Trump administration has encouraged private investment, recently creating an AI education task force as part of an effort to achieve “global dominance in artificial intelligence.” The federal government has urged tech companies and other organizations to foot the bill. So far, more than 100 companies have signed up.
Tech companies see opportunities in education beyond teacher training. Microsoft has unveiled a $4 billion initiative to train, research and offer its AI tools to teachers and students. It includes the AFT grant and a program that will give all school districts and community colleges in Washington, Microsoft’s home state, free access to Microsoft CoPilot tools. Google says it will spend $1 billion on AI education and skills training programs, including free access to its Gemini for Education platform for U.S. high schools.
Several recent studies have shown that the use of AI in schools is growing rapidly, but training and guidance are lagging behind.
The industry offers resources that can help quickly scale AI mastering efforts. But educators need to make sure any partnership focuses on what’s best for teachers and students, said Robin Lake, director of the Center for Reinventing Public Education.
“These are private initiatives and they are run by companies that have vested interests,” Lake said.
Microsoft CEO Brad Smith agrees that teachers should have a “good dose of skepticism” about the role of tech companies.
“While it is easy to see the benefits right now, we must always be aware of the potential for unintended consequences,” Smith said in an interview, highlighting concerns such as AI’s possible impact on critical thinking. “We have to be careful. It’s still early.”
At the San Antonio AFT training, approximately 50 educators showed up for the three-hour workshop for teachers in the Northside Independent School District. It is the largest in the city, employing around 7,000 teachers.
The day started with a pep talk.
“We all know, when we talk about AI, teachers say, ‘No, I don’t do that,'” coach Kathleen Torregrossa told the room. “But we are preparing children for the future. This is our main task. And AI, like it or not, is part of our world.”
Participants generated lesson plans using ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, Microsoft CoPilot, and two AI tools designed for schools, Khanmingo and Colorín Colorado.
Gabriela Aguirre, a bilingual first-grade teacher, repeatedly used the word “incredible” to describe what she saw.
“It can save you a lot of time,” she said, and add a visual touch to lessons. She left with the intention of using AI tools to create illustrated flashcards in English and Spanish to teach vocabulary.
“With all the video games, cell phones to compete against, kids always say, ‘I’m bored.’ Everything is boring,” Aguirre said. “If you can find ways to engage them with new technology, you just have to do it.”
Middle school teacher Celeste Simone said there was no going back to the way she taught before.
As a teacher of English learners, Simone can now ask AI tools to generate images alongside vocabulary words and create illustrated storybooks using students’ names as characters. She can take a difficult-to-read passage and ask a chatbot to translate it into Spanish, Pashto, or other languages. And she can ask the AI to rewrite difficult passages at any grade level to match her students’ reading level. All this in seconds.
“I can give my students access to things that never existed before,” Simone said. “As a teacher, once you use it and see how useful it is, I don’t think I can go back to the way I did things before. »
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