At 9 p.m. on a Tuesday night in the Bronx, a seventh grade math teacher sits at her kitchen table with a stack of exit tickets. She isn’t assigning grades. She’s figuring out which of her 24 students missed the same thing today, and why, so tomorrow starts better.
That’s expert work, done alone, unpaid, at the end of a 14-hour day.
I did that job for six years in the South Bronx. My first year, I was not terrible, but I just didn’t know yet how much of the job happens after the bell. Despite the warnings.
Schools Chancellor Kamar Samuels and Mayor Mamdani have announced that generative AI is banned for students from 2-K through eighth grade, with narrow room in high school for AI literacy and career programs. Teachers can still use approved tools to plan and handle operations, not grading, IEPs, or behavior tracking. Multilingual learners and students with disabilities get exceptions.
Back in March, Samuels presented his draft guidance with a color-coded chart, green, yellow, red, that never answered the real question: what happens to a child’s data and thinking. The chancellor admitted in May the city missed the mark, then banned the category instead of fixing it. Easier, but far less useful, because “AI” isn’t one thing. A chatbot and a scoring engine are as different as a slot machine and a stethoscope, and a rule at the word “AI” can’t tell them apart. It just sweeps.
For four years, NYC Reads and NYC Solves have asked teachers to set aside materials built over entire careers for a shared, rigorous curriculum. Right call, and the hardest ask there is, since curriculum doesn’t implement itself. That gap closes after the bell. Ban the tools built for that work and the mandate stays while the support disappears. Nobody set out to undercut this. Effect is what students live with.
Last year in District 11, nearly 6,000 middle schoolers and 180 teachers used a tool my company built to score daily work and point to the next lesson. Students whose teachers used it outperformed peers by up to 16%, and District 11 gained roughly 11 points on the state test against a comparable district. Some of that is surely stronger teachers using better tools. It deserves scrutiny, not less of this.
None of it required a fight. In July, my team showed the city, point by point, that Kiddom already met every requirement in its guidance. It also answered the exact privacy questions parents were raising. Neither got a reply. The specificity everyone says is missing already exists.
Here’s what I’d build instead: write the rule at the level of function, not the label, since student-facing and teacher-facing are different animals. Make evidence the price of entry, and any company in front of New York’s kids should publish its results. Most will fail. That’s the point. Put a date on it and reach a decision.
A democracy holds together when leaders learn the subject, then teach it to the people they serve. Skip the first and you get bad policy. Skip the second and even a good call looks like it fell from the sky.
Mamdani has shown he can do that: a three-minute video explained a pied-à-terre tax to millions. Nobody’s made that video about a scoring engine, or why it’s nothing like a chatbot. That’s the real failure, more than the ban. New York knows how to teach. It just hasn’t.
Manjee, a former NYC public school math teacher, is the co-founder and chief academic officer at Kiddom.