In October, Kelly Clancy’s son received an assignment in sixth grade at a middle school in Brooklyn, New York, to create a science experiment and then ask Google Gemini, an artificial intelligence chatbot, for feedback, she said.

Clancy, who has three children in New York City public schools, told the teacher that the bot “is something that just teaches kids that they can have machines do the thinking for them”, instead of suggesting: “Let’s talk to your partners. What about the science experiment could you improve?”

Clancy also founded Parents for AI Caution in Educational Spaces, a group pushing the city to institute a two-year moratorium on using AI in its public schools.

The New Yorkers are among a growing number of parents and child development experts across the country raising concerns about AI in schools.

In Bend, Oregon, more than 1,100 parents signed a petition in February urging the local school district to remove generative AI from students’ devices. In April, Fairplay, a national children’s advocacy group, released a statement calling for a five-year moratorium on “student-facing generative AI products” from preschool to 12th grade.

While big tech and the Trump administration have pushed teachers to use AI and claimed it helps students learn and gives them the skills needed to succeed in a world in which the technology is ubiquitous, some parents and child development experts argue that there is little evidence that AI helps children and may even harm their cognitive development.

“There is this overwhelming sense that ed tech companies are deciding what kids learn, and teachers are just being put into this position of tech support instead of driving the decisions about what is best for kids in terms of learning,” said Clancy, an academic editor.

In March, Melania Trump, the first lady, convened a White House summit on educational technology. She walked into a room alongside a robot and advocated for a world in which children could learn from a “humanoid educator named ‘Plato’”.

Meanwhile, Microsoft, OpenAI and Anthropic have provided millions of dollars for AI training to the American Federation of Teachers, the country’s second-largest teachers’ union, the Associated Press reported.

Forty per cent of K-12 teachers said their students use AI in the classroom at least once per week, according to a recent survey from National Public Radio and Ipsos.

MagicSchool, an AI platform for education, has contracts with districts across the country, including in Atlanta, Denver, New York City and Seattle, and offers a character chatbot that interacts with students and one that provides writing feedback, among other tools.

In New York City, “educators are using MagicSchool tools to strengthen engagement, differentiation and instructional efficiency while maintaining strong instructional practices and community trust,” the company stated.

“One of the interesting things about generative-AI systems is that you can say, ‘Take this historical moment and provide a correlate in my life today,’” which, “can be a way to take something that is hard to understand and put it into a frame in which a young person can find more ways to get into that content”, said Amanda Bickerstaff, CEO of AI for Education, which offers AI literacy training to educators.

But neuroscience and education experts argue that rather than help students learn, AI can cause “cognitive off-loading”, meaning using an external aid to avoid mental effort.

A study published in 2025 in the journal Societies found that people ages 17 to 25 “exhibited higher dependence on AI tools and lower critical thinking scores compared to older participants”.

Stanford University reported in March that there is little evidence on how AI impacts K-12 education and that it’s unclear whether AI is “helping students complete tasks or helping them develop durable learning and skills”.

AI “was never designed to be a learning tool”, said Jared Cooney Horvath, a neuroscientist who has linked the recent nationwide decrease in test scores to increased screen time. “The tool an expert uses to make his or her life easier is not the tool a novice could use to learn how to become an expert. When they use the same tool, they don’t learn anything.”

Advocates for AI in education argue that the tools are effective at helping students with learning disabilities.

A student with dyslexia who struggles to read could use AI to translate text to speech, better absorb the information, then write a paper, said Bickerstaff.

Horvath points out, however, that such digital tools have been available for decades and do not require generative AI.

“AI is now being confused with tech writ large without remembering that AI is basically brand new,” Horvath said. “Anything that has worked, worked before AI, and now the question is, did AI make it better? And the answer seems to be a resounding, no.”

Natalie Houston, a therapist and parent of four in Oregon, agrees that AI is not helping students. After discovering that third graders in the Bend-La Pine Schools district had started using MagicSchool’s AI tools, she and more than 1,000 other parents signed a letter calling on the district to remove the tools from students’ devices.

After the parents expressed concerns about students forming a bond with MagicSchool’s chatbot, Raina, the company removed the persona in favor of “a neutral AI learning assistant. This change removes anthropomorphic elements,” it announced.

“The concerns Bend La-Pine parents are voicing about how chatbots are normalizing unhealthy relationships during critical brain development are valid,” a MagicSchool spokesperson told Oregon Public Broadcasting in February.

The school board also adopted a resolution in April stating that the district would “develop standards of use for educational technology … including a list of educational technology applications approved for use at each grade [level]” and remove “non-evidence-based technology and applications” from students’ devices.

Other groups are urging schools to limit AI, too. Even though the American Federation of Teachers accepted millions from big tech, the organization called in May for removing any student-facing AI tools from elementary schools, among other recommendations.

This month, more than half of New York City council members issued a public letter to Mayor Zohran Mamdani and New York City public schools chancellor Kamar Samuels calling for a two-year moratorium on AI use in schools – except for education on the “risks in employing the technology”.

The city has also scrapped its plan to open an AI-focused high school after public outcry.

“The prior administration hit the gas on AI without genuine family engagement,” a New York City public schools spokesperson stated in an email to the Guardian. “That is not the approach Chancellor Samuels will be taking. Earlier this year, New York City Public Schools took the first step to put initial guardrails in place while developing a policy to protect our students in partnership with families and communities. We will be sharing more soon.”

Bickerstaff doesn’t think elementary school students should use generative AI bots, but thinks a complete moratorium is a bad idea.

Instead, students should undergo training about how AI tools work and their limitations because they will then “engage more critically rather than simply turning or deferring to the tools”, Bickerstaff said.

She argues that students need to learn how to use AI because companies will expect employees “to come in with Gen AI literacy”.

“There is no way to stop student use,” Bickerstaff said.

Houston, the Bend, Oregon parent, pointed out that AI is “designed to be intuitive and easily learned”, so schools do not need to teach students how to use it and should instead focus on building “foundational academic skills”, she said.

Clancy, the Brooklyn parent, said that after raising the concern about the Google Gemini usage, teachers have not used AI in her son’s classes.

She predicts that the city will approve the moratorium.

Clancy said she then plans to “give parents in other cities across the country the tools that they need to advocate with their own school districts”.