InFocus featuring Richard Parr on AI in schools

From the 22 News Plus Studio, this is 22 News In Focus with Patrick Berry. Hello everyone and welcome to this edition of In Focus. I'm your host Patrick Berry. Artificial intelligence is everywhere. It's on your cell phone, it's on your computer, it's also in our local schools. I am very happy today to be joined by Richard Parr. He's the Vice President of Mass Inc. Polling Group. And recently, Rich, you guys did a study to get the reactions of parents about their thoughts of AI being introduced into our schools. Give me the overarching thought process behind this poll. Yeah, so this is a poll that we did with our client Education Trust in Massachusetts, which is a nonprofit that's really focused on centering the parents' voices in the education debate. So we hear from school districts all the time, we hear from the teachers all the time, but what do parents really think about things? So every twice a year for the past six years, starting back during COVID, we've been doing polls of parents. So you have to have a parent in the K-12 public schools in order to qualify to take this poll. And we do them twice a year. And this year in the fall, we did a survey about artificial intelligence and other technology issues in the schools. But AI is everywhere. I mean, it literally is now everywhere, from your car, if you've got a car that's been built in the last few years, to, like I said, cell phones, it's everywhere. How do you keep it out of your schools? I don't think you can, can you? Yeah, I mean, one of the most interesting findings I found in this survey was that parents are really kind of in the dark as to about how AI is being used in the schools, could be used in the schools. I think 51% of the parents in the survey said they didn't know whether AI was being used in their children's classrooms right now. And smaller numbers, but still significant, about a third or so, maybe a little higher, were telling us that they weren't sure whether their school even had a policy about AI. Like, is AI okay? Can the students use it? Can the teachers use it, right? So this is like a new thing for a lot of schools, for a lot of parents, and they're trying to figure it out for themselves. They're trying to figure out how their kids are using it, but they're also trying to figure out how their schools are using it. And you bring up that last comment, how the schools are using it. This project didn't get into that. This is just about the parents' reaction, the parents' thoughts on how artificial intelligence is being, or proposed to be used in schools. Yeah, well, we did ask parents about various things that schools could use AI for, which is not to say that they are necessarily using them in those ways, and we got some feedback on kind of what would be more acceptable to some parents. What would parents be comfortable with versus what they'd be uncomfortable with? Are they, I guess, in that comfortable versus uncomfortable, is it more uncomfortable? Did the percentages show more uncomfortable than comfortable? Yeah, it really depends on the use, and what I would say that the big dividing line that I found is grading, assessments, like judging how your kid is doing in school. Parents were okay with AI being used to help kids who have IEP plans, individualized education plans, helping multilingual language learners, so maybe there's some translation uses of AI that could help the students communicate with their parents, communicate with their teachers. They were okay with helping to brainstorm lesson plans, or tutoring programs, or things like that. But where they were less comfortable was if AI is being used to make grades, to assess student performance, to give feedback to students on assignments and things like that. That's where they really want that human teacher touch to still be present. It's funny, I didn't even think of that aspect of AI. I'm still thinking of a student hands in their homework, and here I am making the gesture of paper homework, which doesn't happen anymore, but a student hands in their homework, and a teacher, a human being, will still pour through each of individual students' homework, but that might not be the case. Well, I think that now we're seeing that, first off, AI is being used to help sniff out AI in the students' homework, because one of the things that we found in this survey is we asked parents, are your children using AI for their schoolwork? And 59% of them said that yes, in some respect, that their kids have been using AI. It's higher, highest among the high school kids and lower among the grade school kids, which I think makes sense. And we're talking about things like checking the grammar in their essay, or maybe help with a math problem, or coming up with ideas for an essay or something like that. Those are the most common uses of AI by students. So the students aren't using AI to do the homework, they're using AI as an assist. You would hope. The grammar. Right. And again, this is what parents know that their kids are doing. So there's always going to be a little bit of a gap there. But what the parents are perceiving is that the majority of them are saying, yeah, my kid has used this in some way, shape, or form. And what they're a little bit less aware of is whether or not the schools, in turn, are using it in some way to teach, or to grade, or even just to do administrative stuff Were you generally shocked at the results, or were the results sort of what you expected? I think, well, there's a lot in the survey where parents are very up in the air, very divided. So, for example, we like to start our surveys with sort of an open-ended question. So we're not giving anybody any prompting. We're just saying, what do you think? We gave them a definition of AI, and then said, what do you think about the use of this in education? And about a third of parents were like, I think this could be a good thing. About a third of parents were like, no, this is going to be bad. And then the other third were mixed or neutral, right? They could see the benefits, they could see the pitfalls, right? And I think that that's indicative of kind of where we are culturally around AI, about schools, and in general. It's like, there are people who see the pros of it and the cons, but there's a lot of people who are kind of trying to process both in the middle and are not quite sure where they're going to land. So that didn't super surprise me. What did surprise me a little bit was some of the things that people thought AI would be useful for. So we asked people, there are different aspects of learning. We want kids to learn how to read, we want them to write, to do math, to do critical thinking. For a lot of those things, people thought that AI would be negative or neutral. The things that they actually thought were digital literacy and kind of judging information source. And I found that super interesting because that's actually the opposite of what I was thinking of. When I think of AI, I think of like deep fakes. I think of like being able to not tell whether the information you're seeing on your screen is good or bad or true or real or not real, right? But some parents think that AI might end up being useful in that way, which I thought was super interesting. So sometimes people answer questions in a way you don't expect when you do. Right, right. We're up on our first commercial break, but plenty more to talk about when it comes to artificial intelligence in our schools. Stay with us. We're back in a moment. This is 22 News In Focus with Patrick Berry. This is 22 News In Focus with Patrick Berry. Welcome back, everyone, to this edition of In Focus. Sitting across the desk from me today from Mass Inc. Polling is Richard Parr. They have recently issued the data from a study that was conducted in 2025 about artificial intelligence use in our local school systems. Rich, thank you for joining me. I appreciate it. Just kind of backtracking a second. This poll was done in conjunction with the one you and I talked about last time, which was cell phones in schools, correct? Yeah, exactly. It's actually the exact same poll, exact same people. We just had some questions about banning cell phones from schools in that poll, and we decided when we got the data back, oh, wow, this is like super interesting, and it's a little bit different than the rest of the poll. Let's put that out early as a teaser of sorts, and then we put out the rest of this, I think, I forget when we did this. Late last month was when we did the release event on this. So for this client, we always do a big release event where we had a person from the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education to react to the findings and talk about what is the state doing, what is the state telling school districts to do about AI, and then we had a whole panel of a superintendent, a parent advocate, and somebody actually from the business community talking about how they're all reacting to AI and what are they seeing about AI right now. I have to imagine, well, maybe not, an underlying concern about student privacy. Yes, definitely. Was that part of the results? Was the parents concerned about student privacy? There was definitely a concern about that. We asked people some, you know, we kind of raised some specific issues, and what we found was that a majority of people, kind of in the 70s actually, 70% were at least somewhat concerned that students' data could be used to feed these AIs because, of course, AI is trained basically on the information that it's collecting, right, whether it be from the internet or from these student essays and things like that. So that was a concern. Another concern was that AI has biases, right, because it's being trained on stuff on the internet. What if those biases create a misperception and then your student writes an essay or something and it gets, the evaluation of that essay is biased by the way that the AI is biased? That could be a potential concern as well. So there's all kinds of things that could go wrong with this, and in general, we found more parents were concerned about the problems than were comfortable with the uses that we were putting forward for them to the potential uses of AI in the school. And again, those would be things like helping teachers develop lesson plans or do some administrative work, even all the way towards like grading assignments. Through any of the release party, for lack of a better description, from the parent groups, the superintendents, the representatives from DESE, I guess the parent groups, they may have been participants in the poll, but the superintendents and the representatives from DESE were not. Were those two groups, were they shocked at the findings? Were they understanding of what the parents' concerns were? And did they have any sort of, I guess maybe it was too soon to tell, but a game plan of going forward with AI? Yeah, well, so the state does have guidance for school districts. That was one of the things that they presented on at our event. So the good news is that there are people at the state level who are thinking about this. And then the superintendent, the superintendent we had was the superintendent of the Chelsea Public Schools back east, was talking a little bit about just sort of like the on-the-ground experience of this. I think one of the things that came up when we were briefing all of our panelists about the poll was how you define AI for people or asking people what they mean by AI can be really important, right? Because how experienced people are with it in their own lives can affect how they feel about how their kids will use it. Well, I have to imagine kind of like my own personal belief. When I hear AI, I think of a negative connotation that deepfakes misinformation. So that might answer that point of parents' perception of what AI is. Yeah. So we did a focus group as a companion to this poll. We often like to do that when we're on a new topic, like AI is such a brand new thing. We wanted to understand just to listen to people like, how are you talking about this? And that would form some of the questions to ask people in the survey. And what we found in the focus group was really interesting that there were some parents who use AI in their jobs now and we're a little bit more comfortable with it because of that. And they also sort of felt that regardless of how they felt about it, it was important to expose kids to because this is the way of the world. This is something that they're all going to have to deal with at one point or another. There are other parents who are less familiar with AI or weren't using it for their jobs. And they had a little bit more of a negative view. They were skeptical of it. They were nervous about it. Some people raised the environmental impacts of AI. Data centers are generating a huge demand for electricity that needs to be met. There was also an interesting gender divide in the focus groups that came through into the survey as well, which is to say that men are a little bit more comfortable about AI being used in schools, a little bit more comfortable about it having a positive effect on kids' learning. And women were a little bit less comfortable with that and a little bit less willing to see it in the schools, a little bit more worried about some of the impacts on learning. When I think about it, I also think you think about what the fundamental goal is of a school. It's teaching children to think critically, analyze problems, solve problems. Is there a fear that instituting AI will eliminate basically the fundamental goal of education? I think that there's a risk that if people use it too much, that it could be a problem. You know, the woman who presented at our event from the state actually had used the analogy of an electric bicycle, right? So you have these electric bicycles now, and there's a mode on the electric bicycle where you keep pedaling, but it gives you a little push. So maybe you're coming up that hill, need a little bit of help, and so you use the electric bicycle to help you get up the hill. That's a good use of AI, right? We're using it as a tool to help with the learning and that the student can use it, but they're still having to put the thought into the essay or the math problem, whatever. Some of those electric bicycles also have a little throttle, and you can turn the throttle and then not have to pedal at all. And then the bike is doing all the work. And that's the thing that we, I think, want to avoid with AI in schools. We do not want the AI to be able to be used in a way where the student has to put zero thought into the entire process. And that makes perfect sense because, I mean, if a student is only using AI, then they're not learning, right? They're just, they're learning how to create prompts to get information to submit to get a good grade. Exactly. There's really no... Again, kind of coming back to my original question about the fundamentals of learning of what school is all about. Yeah. And this is something that is impacting so many industries right now. I mean, in the survey business, we're seeing the potential of AI being used by respondents to help them answer surveys. And then on the other side, there are people using AI to help write survey questions. There are people who are using AI to sniff out the AI in the responses, which is just such a fascinating cat and mouse game. I should say we're, we don't really do a lot of that at my work, but I mean, it is, it is, I've gone to conferences and conventions and events, and I've seen these tools that are out there. And it's like the new thing that everyone is pushing. And I would imagine if it's happening in the survey industry, it's happening in the educational industry as well. Absolutely. We are up on our second commercial break. So stay with us. We're back in just a minute. Welcome back everyone to today's edition of InFocus. We're having an important conversation about artificial intelligence in our schools. Sitting across the desk from me, from the Mass Inc polling group is Richard Parr. He's one of their vice presidents. Rich, thank you so much for joining me today. As we're having this conversation, my kids are well out of school. Not far out of college, but out of our community schools. As a parent, I would think my student using AI, my child using AI would be considered cheating. Right? You know, we, you mentioned early on in this conversation that sometimes AI could be used for grammar checks, you know, whatever it might be. Even that I think is, you know, it's cheating. You know, oh, it's easy to just like, if you and I are using, you know, a Microsoft tool or whatever, it's going to pop up, you know, this word is spelled incorrectly. Okay, well, I may never know how to spell that word correctly. I'm just going to hit the change, right? I would think AI in our schools flat out is cheating. Was that one of the questions and one of the concerns that was part of this poll? It was. Yeah, we did ask that question and you would be in the minority actually. Really? Yes, really. Like only 19% of parents said that using AI for school work would be cheating all of the time. Right? So, you know, there's a lot of nuance on these things. So if I'd asked the question as a binary, like yes or no, is it cheating? I bet you we would see more people who would say yes, but we found 19% said that it's always cheating. 14% said it's not cheating at all. They were fine with it. And then the rest of people, 65% or two thirds of parents were basically in the middle and saying, yeah, sometimes it depends. It depends on the use, right? So you, you know, maybe checking grammar isn't cheating, but if you have AI write your entire essay for you or come up with the, you know, the outline of the essay and then you have to fill it in, that's a problem, right? So, so I think there is, I think parents are grappling with a lot of the nuances of this. There's such a new concept. It's very clear that people are thinking it through as they're going and, you know, and, and trying to figure out what's acceptable and not acceptable. And of course, if your kid is using it, and again, 59% of parents in this survey told us that their, their, their children were in some way using AI some of the time. Well, I mean, that suggests that, would you want to really think that your child is a cheater? You know, that's, that's right. Right. Well, no one wants to say that, but, but we, again, I, I, I, I think of AI as eliminating the creativity of, of a, of a person. It could be you or I in our, in our, in our day jobs. I mean, how many times have we heard CEOs of companies are caught in a, you know, giving a speech or issuing a memo or an email or something that's been traced back to, to AI information? You know, I just, I get my own personal belief, my own personal beliefs. Let's talk a little bit more about the parent, parental side of, of this. What, what interesting details did you get from the poll that, that, that we haven't shared yet from the parent side? Yeah. So, you know, one of the things that we asked was we wanted to understand kind of what, how involved do parents want to be in the discussions around AI in their community school? Or do they want just as the school department or school district to issue an edict of here's what it's going to do? Yeah. Well, first off, that would help a lot because as we mentioned earlier, there's a lot of the policy stuff they don't even know. They don't know if their school has an AI policy for the students. They don't know if it has a, a policy around, you know, the student data and AI, they don't know if the it's being used at all. So there's a lot, there's a lot of very opacity around what's going on with AI right now. But when we ask people, you know, how involved do you think that, that you would want to be, what we tended to find was that people kind of go up to the line of parents should actively participate in the discussions about AI in their school districts. 35% of parents were, were there. That was the plurality. Only 11% of parents think that parents should be the deciding factor, right? So parents should not have a, parents should not be the ones overruling teachers or school district, but they do want to have involved. They want to have, they want to be consulted. They want to be informed. They want to have be part of the discussion. So if there's a school committee meeting or PTO meeting or something, they want AI to be part of that, part of that debate. And they want to be able to have their say about it. But I think they stopped short of saying like, I'm going to sign a waiver and say that Sally or Billy can't use the AI school because I think they're worried also that AI might confer an unfair advantage on certain students. If some people have access to it at home or have a computer at home that can do these things and they don't, then that could be a problem too. I, again, I think a successful student upon graduation of high school can all be brought back to parental involvement from day one. So the more success, the more involvement a parent is, the more successful the child will be. So I agree with that, that there should be some, some level of parental involvement just because it's, it's, it's shown, the data has shown that parental involvement in even long before AI, parental involvement in schooling creates a better and more successful child. Yeah, I, I would agree. And I think that's the other thing that the parents need to think about is like how, you know, try to keep an eye on how your kids are using them. Right. I mean, like there are these chat, getting a beyond just the education thing that there, there's been some concerns and studies about these chatbots and serve the kids are talking to all the time. And some of them are almost using them as like a surrogate friend or something. Exactly. Those chatbots are designed to agree with you over and over again. They're there, they're there. That's the feedback mechanism of that particular software and you know, that can create a bad situation for kids. So being aware of what your kids are doing online, being aware of what your kids are doing on AI is probably important, not only for their schooling, but for their mental health and wellbeing also. Absolutely. Uh, Richard, I can't thank you enough for joining me today to have this conversation. Uh, website again is massing polling.com. That's that's our website. That's where we put up all of our, uh, studies that we do for all of our different clients. And of course they also put them out on the world as well, but you can go and find all of the data on this study, uh, up there and, uh, and a bunch of other stuff that we do. Fantastic. Good seeing you. Thanks for coming in. This is 22 news in focus with Patrick Berry.