American Schools Were Deeply Unprepared for ChatGPT, Public Records Show

404 Media: “Soon after ChatGPT was released, I [Jason Keobler] filed 60 public records requests with states and school districts around the country to get a sense of how they were thinking about the technology. Because of the way public records work, it often took years to get anything back. I got busy, and there were thousands of pages of records, so I never did anything with them. After seeing a New York Magazine article about ChatGPT in schools, though, I decided to take a look back at the records. What’s clear is that most of them had no idea what was coming, and that in some cases, they vastly underestimated the impact it would have. This article was primarily reported using public records requests. We are making it available to all readers as a public service. FOIA reporting can be expensive, please consider subscribing to 404 Media to support this work. Or send us a one time donation via our tip jar here. In February 2023, a brief national scandal erupted: Several students at a high school in Florida were accused of using a tool called “ChatGPT” to write their essays. The tool was four months old at the time, and it already seemed like a technology that, at the very least, students would try to cheat with. That scandal now feels incredibly quaint. Immediately after that story broke, I filed 60 public records requests with state departments of education and a few major local school districts to learn more about how—and if—they were training teachers to think about ChatGPT and generative AI. Over the last few years, I have gotten back thousands of pages of documents from all over the country that show, at least in the early days, a total crapshoot: Some states claimed that they had not thought about ChatGPT at all, while other state departments of education brought in consulting firms to give trainings to teachers and principals about how to use ChatGPT in the classroom. Some of the trainings were given by explicitly pro-AI organizations and authors, and organizations backed by tech companies. The documents, taken in their totality, show that American public schools were wildly unprepared for students’ widespread adoption of ChatGPT, which has since become one of the biggest struggles in American education….”