LF Panel: AI, Labor And Commodification of Education For The Techno Fascists

7/13/26 LF Panel: AI, Labor And Commodification of Education For The Techno Fascists
July 13 @ 5:30 pm pm pst/7:30 pm cst/8:30 pm est
Zoom event (Note: Location change to Zoom)

For decades, google and other tech companies have been given free reign to introduce their technology into public education. Education programs, testing, tracking and the collection of massive data from students, teachers and staff in education has been institutionalized by politicians both Democrats and Republicans.

There is now an ongoing drive to use AI in all levels of education to eliminate teachers and staff from K-12, Community Colleges, CSU and the UC system. The education unions have also partnered with these tech companies to train faculty on how to use AI tools. Will this partnership benefit the students, faculty and public is one of the questions that will be addressed by this panel.

Initial Speakers:

John Klyczek – Joliet Junior College Lecturer and author of School World Order: The Technocratic Globalization Of Corporatized Education
Andy Libson – Teacher, STOP AI
George Wright – Retired Professor Chico State & Skyline College
Kathy Carroll – Fired Lawyer Whistleblower and Lawyer from Commission On Teacher Credentials

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/2754101

Excess Screen Time May Cause Lower White Matter Integrity in Preschool Children’s Brains | The Swaddle

Association of screen time with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder symptoms and their development: the mediating role of brain structure - PMC

2,

How AI quietly undermines the joy and effort of learning: a call for rebalancing education in the digital age - PMC

1

Research on the Effectiveness of Technology for Learning | Edutopia


Screen Usage Linked to Differences in Brain Structure in Young Children - Research Horizons


Breaking News: Randi Says AFT Will No Longer Accept Funding from Gates Foundation for Innovation Fund
By dianeravitch
March 10, 2014 //
62
This exclusive news appeared this morning on politico.com’s education site. When Randi spoke at the Network for Public Education conference in Austin, she told the audience for the Common Core panel that she would ask the AFT executive board for permission to do exactly what is described here. She understands that many members of the AFT do not trust the Gates Foundation, do not like Bill Gates’ public statements such as encouraging larger class sizes, or his unwavering commitment to measuring teacher quality by student test scores, despite the lack of evidence for its efficacy. I welcome this change and thank Randi and the AFT for severing ties with the Gates Foundation. Gates and Pearson have bought most of American education. Those who represent teachers should be free of their influence.

By Caitlin Emma

With help from Stephanie Simon

EXCLUSIVE: AFT SHUNS GATES FUNDING: The American Federation of Teachers ended a five-year relationship with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation after rank-and-file union members expressed deep distrust of the foundation’s approach to education reform. AFT President Randi Weingarten told Morning Education the union will no longer accept Gates money for its Innovation Fund, which was founded in 2009 and has received up to $1 million a year in Gates grants ever since. The Innovation Fund has sponsored AFT efforts to help teachers implement the Common Core standards – a Gates priority – among other initiatives.

– Weingarten said she didn’t believe Gates funding influenced the Innovation Fund’s direction, but still had to sever the relationship. “I got convinced by the level of distrust I was seeing – not simply on Twitter, but in listening to members and local leaders – that it was important to find a way to replace Gates funding,” she said. Weingarten plans to ask members to vote this summer on a dues hike of 5 cents per month, which she said would raise $500,000 a year for the Innovation Fund.

– The Innovation Fund isn’t the only AFT initiative funded by the Gates Foundation. Since 2010, the union has received more than $10 million. The AFT’s executive council hasn’t formally voted to reject Gates funding for other projects, but Weingarten said she would be very cautious about taking such grants. “I don’t want to say ‘never never ever ever,'” she said, but “this is a matter of making common bond with our members and really listening to the level of distrust they have in the philanthropies and the people on high who are not listening to them.”

– Vicki Phillips, who runs the Gates Foundation’s education division, said her team is “disappointed by Randi’s decision.” She called the AFT “an important thought partner” for the foundation. “We continue to applaud the work of the Innovation Fund grantees to engage teachers in improving teaching and learning in their local communities,” Phillips said.

Supporting Techno Fascist Union Busters For $23 Million
AFT Pres Weingarten Meets With Techno Fascist & Union Buster Sam Altman To Push AI

Microsoft Pledges $4 Billion Toward A.I. Education
Microsoft said it would provide cash, artificial intelligence tools and computing services to schools, colleges and nonprofit groups.

Trevor Griffey, a lecturer in labor studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, also warned that tech firms could use A.I. deals with schools and the teachers’ union as marketing opportunities to make students lifetime chatbot customers.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/08/technology/chatgpt-teachers-openai-microsoft.html?searchResultPosition=1

By Natasha Singer
Natasha Singer covers tech in schools.
Published July 8, 2025
Updated July 9, 2025
The tech industry’s campaign to embed artificial intelligence chatbots in classrooms is accelerating.

The American Federation of Teachers, the second-largest U.S. teachers’ union, said on Tuesday that it would start an A.I. training hub for educators with $23 million in funding from three leading chatbot makers: Microsoft, OpenAI and Anthropic.

The union said it planned to open the National Academy for A.I. Instruction in New York City, starting with hands-on workshops for teachers this fall on how to use A.I. tools for tasks like generating lesson plans.

Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said the A.I. academy was inspired by other unions, like the United Brotherhood of Carpenters, that have worked with industry partners to set up high-tech training centers.

The New York hub will be “an innovative new training space where school staff and teachers will learn not just about how A.I. works, but how to use it wisely, safely and ethically,” Ms. Weingarten said in an interview. “It will be a place where tech developers and educators can talk with each other, not past each other.”

The industry funding is part of a drive by U.S. tech companies to reshape education with generative A.I. chatbots. These tools, like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Copilot, can produce humanlike essays, research summaries and class quizzes.
ImageAn overhead view of a round table ringed with open laptops used by active hands.
The A.I. workshop with Microsoft, for about 200 New York City teachers, provided a taste of what the national training center might offer. Credit...Ahmed Gaber for The New York Times
In February, California State University, the largest U.S. university system, said it would provide ChatGPT for some 460,000 students. This spring, Miami-Dade County Public Schools, the third-largest U.S. school district, began rolling out Google’s Gemini A.I. for more than 100,000 high schoolers.

The Trump administration, which recently froze nearly $7 billion in funding for schools, has called on industry to pony up for A.I. education. Last week, the White House urged American companies and nonprofit groups to provide A.I. grants, technology and training materials for schools, teachers and students. Since then, dozens of companies have signed on, including Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia and OpenAI.

Some tech executives hope A.I. will become the fourth R.

“Reading and writing and arithmetic and learning how to use A.I.,” said Chris Lehane, OpenAI’s chief global affairs officer. “You’re going to have to learn those skills over time, and I do think our education system is the best place to be able to do that.”

But some researchers have warned that generative A.I. tools are so new in schools that there is little evidence of concrete educational benefit — and significant concern about risk.

Chatbots can produce plausible-sounding misinformation, which could mislead students. A recent study by law school professors found that three popular A.I. tools made “significant” errors summarizing a law casebook and posed an “unacceptable risk of harm” to learning.

Outsourcing tasks like research and writing to A.I. chatbots may also hinder critical thinking, a recent study from Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon University found.

“I do think that there is a risk,” said Brad Smith, the president of Microsoft, noting that he frequently cited the critical thinking study to employees. He added that more rigorous academic research on the effects of generative A.I. was needed. “The lesson of social media is don’t dismiss problems or concerns.”
Image
A large room of people working at computers around tables. In the center, an adult stands next to a seated participant as they confer.
The session was held by the United Federation of Teachers, whose Manhattan headquarters will be the site of the new national hub. Credit...Ahmed Gaber for The New York Times
Union experts have also raised alarms about the industry’s practices. Some tech companies have trained their A.I. models on swaths of texts scraped from the internet, without compensating writers and other creators, or outsourced the labeling of training data to low-paid workers.

(The New York Times has sued OpenAI and its partner, Microsoft, over copyright infringement of news content. Both companies have denied wrongdoing.)

Trevor Griffey, a lecturer in labor studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, also warned that tech firms could use A.I. deals with schools and the teachers’ union as marketing opportunities to make students lifetime chatbot customers.

“It’s a long-game investment by companies to turn young people into consumers who identify with a particular brand,” said Dr. Griffey, a vice president of University Council-A.F.T. Local 1474, a union representing University of California librarians and lecturers.


Ms. Weingarten said that she was aware of the concerns and that her union, which represents 1.8 million members, had developed A.I. school use guidelines to address some of them.

One of her main goals is to ensure that teachers have some input on how A.I. tools are developed for educational use, she said. In 2023, she began discussing the idea with Microsoft’s Mr. Smith.

The union’s partnership with Microsoft formally began last summer with an A.I. symposium in Chicago where teachers learned chatbot basics and gave the company feedback on potential classroom uses. After Ms. Weingarten met last year with Sam Altman, OpenAI’s chief executive, the union also began working with OpenAI.

Side-by-side photos of Sam Altman and Randi Weingarten. He is standing with this hands folded in front of him. She is standing while holding and speaking into a microphone.
Sam Altman, chief executive of OpenAI, and Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, met with each other last year.Credit...Jason Henry for The New York Times, Eric Lee/The New York Times
The union’s new training hub will be in the downtown Manhattan headquarters of the United Federation of Teachers, which represents nearly 200,000 New York City teachers and other school employees.


Microsoft will provide $12.5 million for the A.I. training effort over the next five years, and OpenAI will contribute $8 million in funding and $2 million in technical resources. Anthropic will add $500,000 for the first year of the effort.

On Monday, some 200 New York City teachers taking an A.I. workshop at their union headquarters got a glimpse of what the new national effort might look like. A presenter from Microsoft opened by showing an A.I. explainer video featuring Minecraft, the popular game owned by Microsoft.
Image
An illuminated screen with a bar labeled “Khan Academy.”
Khanmigo, an A.I. tool for schools, helped the teachers at the workshop generate emails and lesson plans. Credit...Ahmed Gaber for The New York Times
Next, the teachers tried generating emails and lesson plans using Khanmigo, an A.I. tool for schools for which Microsoft has provided support. Then they experimented with Copilot for similar tasks.

During the workshop, Peter Bass, a first-grade teacher in Manhattan who is an A.I. newbie, asked a chatbot to generate “an effective letter to parents on attendance.” He read the polite but firm email that resulted aloud — to laughter from teachers in the room.


Peter Bass, a Manhattan teacher, reads a chatbot’s response to a request for “an effective letter to parents on attendance.”
“I’m very old school,” Mr. Bass said, noting that he typically drafted his own letters to “students individually, based on who they are.” Now, though, he said he was intrigued to see if he could streamline his process with A.I.

“If I could find a way of microwaving it a little,” Mr. Bass said, “it could be useful.”

A room full of people are seated at tables while someone presents from a podium.
Microsoft helped lead an artificial intelligence training workshop, featuring the company’s Copilot chatbot, for teachers in Manhattan on Monday.Credit...Ahmed Gaber for The New York Times
By Natasha Singer
Natasha Singer covers tech in schools.
July 9, 2025
Microsoft said on Wednesday that it planned to give more than $4 billion in cash and technology services to train millions of people to use artificial intelligence, amid an intensifying Silicon Valley crusade to embed chatbots into classrooms.

Microsoft, the maker of the Copilot chatbot, said the resources would go to schools, community colleges, technical colleges and nonprofits. The company is also starting a new training program, Microsoft Elevate Academy, to “deliver A.I. education and skilling at scale” and help 20 million people earn certificates in A.I.

“Microsoft will serve as an advocate to ensure that students in every school across the country have access to A.I. education,” Brad Smith, the president of Microsoft, said in an interview on Sunday.

Brad Smith wearing a blue suit and red tie standing next to a chair.
Brad Smith, the president of Microsoft, said the company wanted to make sure students had access to A.I. education.Credit...Eric Lee/The New York Times
Microsoft did not immediately specify how much of the more than $4 billion the company planned to dispense as grants and how much of it would be in the form of Microsoft A.I. services and cloud computing credits.

The announcement comes as tech companies are racing to train millions of teachers and students on their new A.I. tools. Even so, researchers say it is too soon to tell whether the classroom chatbots will end up improving educational outcomes or eroding important skills like critical thinking.

On Tuesday, the American Federation of Teachers, a union representing 1.8 million members, said it was setting up a national A.I. training center for educators, with $23 million in funding from Microsoft and two other chatbot makers, OpenAI and Anthropic.

Last week, several dozen companies — including Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia and OpenAI — signed a White House pledge promising to provide schools with funding, technology and training materials for A.I. education. In 2023, Amazon announced a new company program, “A.I. Ready,” to provide free online Amazon A.I. skills courses for two million people.

Before Microsoft’s new A.I. training campaign, the tech giant worked for over a decade to boost computer science education in schools, including lobbying for new state education laws. Microsoft also funded nonprofit education groups like Code.org; its “Hour of Code” lessons have been used by tens of millions of schoolchildren around the globe.

Now that A.I. tools can generate computer code, tech companies that were once big coding boosters are pivoting to chatbots. As part of Microsoft’s announcement on Wednesday, the company said it was backing a new Code.org program called “Hour of A.I.”

“Coding changed the work of software developers, but it didn’t change every occupation and profession, or the work of every professional, the way A.I. probably will,” Mr. Smith said. “So we need to move faster for A.I. than we did for computer science.”