Give Our Kids the Tutor Every Wealthy Child Already Has

Public-school parents are being asked to accept a double standard that would have been unthinkable a generation ago. Children in private schools and in many countries overseas are already using artificial intelligence as a personal tutor. Our public school kids are being told to wait. That is not caution. It is a political choice, and it is costing children who cannot buy their way around it.

The promise is not science fiction. Well-designed AI-based tutoring systems can do what a crowded classroom cannot: meet a child where he or she actually is. A student who is lost in fractions can drill fractions until they click. A student who has already mastered the material can move ahead instead of sitting through another review for the middle of the pack. The system can slow down or speed up. It can return to the exact skill that broke down yesterday. For decades, researchers have known that individualized instruction beats one-size-fits-all lectures. The old problem was cost. You cannot put a human tutor beside every desk. AI does not solve every educational problem, and it should not replace parents or good teachers. It does, however, make personalized practice available at a scale no district budget has ever managed.

That is why families with money are already using it. That is why students abroad, in places that lack powerful unions looking to block it, are not waiting for another American task force. Meanwhile, political pressure here is slowing access—and in some places stripping it away. Large teachers unions have called for bans on student-facing AI in elementary grades, screen-free early classrooms, and tight limits that treat a math tutor like a social-media app. Some big districts have imposed moratoriums. Officials talk about “guardrails” and “more study.” Fine. Guardrails against cheating, pornography, and sloppy homework are reasonable. A multi-year freeze while other people’s children pull ahead is not.

We should be outraged. This is another case of elected officials putting their own interests, and the interests of their donors, ahead of average families. Teachers unions are political machines. They bargain for members. They donate. They lobby. They do not send their kids to the same schools as the rest of us, and they do not live with the consequences when a working-class child falls two years behind in reading. When a tool threatens the old industrial model of the classroom—one adult talking, thirty kids listening at the same pace—the instinct is delay, restrict, and control. The child who needed extra help last Tuesday does not get a seat at that table.

The hypocrisy is impossible to miss. There was no “prudent pause” when officials shut schools, imposed vaccine mandates on children, let boys compete in girls’ sports, or pushed gender-fluid lessons into classrooms. Those policies were rushed through with moral certainty. Dissenters were treated as cranks. Parents who objected were told to sit down. Now the technology exists for each student to have something closer to a personal tutor, and suddenly we need years of study. The pattern is not “protect the children.” The pattern is “protect the program.”Enough is enough. Families did not elect school boards and legislators to run a protection racket for adult institutions. We elected them to give children a fair shot. If private-school kids and students in competing countries will grow up fluent with these tools, public-school kids who are denied them will not “keep pace.” They will start behind and stay behind.

Take the technology seriously. Ban the garbage. Require transparency from vendors. Keep teachers in the loop. Then get the technology into the hands of the students who need them. Control of classrooms, communities, and families does not belong to unions and distant officials who discovered prudence only when a tool threatened their leverage. It belongs to the people raising the children who have to live with the results.