When my daughters' teachers switched to in-class handwritten exams, I first saw it as a clever way to AI-proof their education. But soon I started questioning whether that instinct was right or wrong.
As a parent, I appreciate the old-school blue book approach—it creates one of the few remaining spaces where students must think without machine assistance. Yet I also wonder if that's a necessary safeguard or just a quaint anachronism, given the exponential future our children are heading into.
Blue books can tell us whether a student can write without AI. But they don't answer the harder question: What is the purpose of public education when every child carries near-infinite knowledge and intelligence in their pocket? That's the question parents and educators across the country are grappling with, and they're getting no guidance or guardrails from the federal government.
The 2028 campaign will be the first true AI presidential election—and may be the last chance to enact human-centric federal regulations before it's too late. That means rules to protect children, preserve human agency and work, and safeguard the public from increasingly powerful models with destructive potential. It also means reauthorizing the Every Student Succeeds Act to reimagine America's education system for the AI economy. Any AI-era reauthorization should fully fund and hold schools accountable not only for grade-level reading, math, science, and history, but also for judgment, civic responsibility, original writing, strategic technology use, and the ability to collaborate with—and challenge—intelligent machines.
AI will make it easier than ever for students to produce answers. That makes it more important than ever for schools to teach them how to ask better questions. Anyone curious about the cost of inaction need only look at social media. Gen Z's addiction to TikTok and Instagram wasn't inevitable—it was the result of regulatory laissez faire that allowed our children's brains and attention spans to be used as corporate petri dishes. As a parent, I've watched that unfold, but the implications of regulatory inaction on AI are exponentially more dire.
This is a moment that calls for presidential and congressional leadership, because only the federal government can establish a human-centric national regulatory framework at the scale AI demands. As a member of the California State Board of Education in 2010, I voted to adopt the Common Core Standards. President Obama championed those standards to move American education beyond rote memorization and into the information age. I remember casting that vote thinking about my daughters, believing these new standards would prepare them for the digital future. But when I cast that vote, AI was science fiction. Now it's just science. Those standards represent the past. American children need new standards, new laws, new protections, and new leadership for tomorrow's challenges.
Thus far, both parties have been flat-footed on regulating AI. President Trump and Vice President JD Vance have treated AI safety as subordinate to speed, deregulation, and technological dominance—repealing comprehensive Biden-era safeguards. Democrats have yet to counter with a coherent policy framework that meets the enormity of the moment. On education, neither party has articulated a vision for the purpose of public education in the age of AI. Republicans focus on dismantling the Education Department and advancing private school choice. Democrats mostly defend a sclerotic bureaucracy producing the worst student outcomes in generations. That's a stark contrast to 24 straight years of strong bipartisan leadership on education under Clinton, Bush, and Obama.
The question isn't whether our children will use AI—they will. It's whether they will enter adulthood as passive consumers of machine-generated answers, or as free, capable, creative human beings with the judgment to use powerful tools without being used by them. Whether America's leaders recognize it yet or not, that is the next great moonshot for American public education.
