Author: IBL News

IBL News | New York

Fixing the New York City public school system will be an enormous challenge for the mayor-elect, socialist Democrat Zohran Mamdani, as he announced plans to recruit more teachers, expand support for homeless students, and pledge free childcare for all babies and toddlers, The New York Times reported.

New York has the largest education system in the U.S., with 880,000 students enrolled, 1,500 schools, and an annual operating budget of $41 billion.

Zohran Mamdani has been candid about education, acknowledging that he is still learning about this unwieldy system and will rely on guidance from advisers and the teachers’ union, which endorsed him.

In this regard, given that Mamdani has to select a school’s chancellor by January, Michael Mulgrew, president of that union, the United Federation of Teachers, encouraged the new mayor to retain Melissa Aviles-Ramos, who has run the system since last fall. The union also has a strong relationship with Meisha Ross Porter, a former school chancellor who remains popular among education leaders.

New York City was once home to more than 1.1 million public school students, but that number has fallen due to a decrease in birth rates and as families have moved to cities where it is far more affordable to raise children.

Projections suggest that the system can lose tens of thousands of additional students in the coming years.

Another controversy is that New York schools allow students to use bathrooms that align with gender ideology. Additionally, the system introduced a Black studies curriculum and social studies lessons focused on race, culture, and sexuality.

In immigration, New York teachers have banded together to shield migrant children from ICE police.

“This is exactly the type of school system that the Trump administration would target,” wrote The Times.

In New York City, federal funding accounts for a relatively small portion — 6 percent — of the education budget. But even minor funding disruptions can create chaos for thousands of children and their families.

Regarding performance, for decades, New York, like many cities, has consistently underperformed in literacy.

More than half of Black and Latino children are not proficient on state tests. The percentage of students who struggle the most rose during the past 15 years.

IBL News | New York

OpenAI, Anthropic, and Microsoft are providing millions of dollars for AI training to the American Federation of Teachers, the country’s second-largest teachers union.

Their goal is to keep teachers relevant and help students use the technology wisely. The common goal is to train America’s future workforce.

“We are preparing kids for the future. That is our primary job. And AI, like it or not, is part of our world,” say teachers.

In exchange, the tech companies have an opportunity to make inroads into schools and win over students in the race for AI dominance.

“There is no one else who is helping us with this. That’s why we felt we needed to work with the largest corporations in the world,” AFT President Randi Weingarten said. “We went to them — they didn’t come to us.”

Under the arrangement 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 has offered $500,000.

With the funds, AFT plans to build an AI training hub in New York City that will offer virtual and in-person workshops for teachers. The goal is to open at least two more hubs and train 400,000 teachers over the next five years.

Meanwhile, the National Education Association, the country’s largest teachers union, announced its own partnership with Microsoft last month. The company has provided a $325,000 grant to help the NEA develop AI trainings in the form of “microcredentials” — online trainings open to the union’s 3 million members, said to Reuters Daaiyah Bilal, NEA’s senior director of education policy. The goal is to train at least 10,000 members this school year.

The unions own the intellectual property for the trainings, which cover safety and privacy concerns alongside 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 urged tech companies and other organizations to foot the bill. So far, more than 100 companies have signed up.

Beyond training teachers. Microsoft unveiled a $4 billion initiative to fund AI training and research, and to gift 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 commit $1 billion to AI education and job-training programs, including free access to its Gemini for Education platform for U.S. high schools.

In their sessions, teachers generate lesson plans using ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, Microsoft CoPilot, and two AI tools designed for schools, Khanmigo and Colorín Colorado.

They even find ways to engage bored learners with AI-graded classwork instantly, turning lesson plans into podcasts or online storybooks, or generating images and creating illustrated flashcards in English and Spanish to teach vocabulary.