Teach It or Ban It: New Jersey Schools Face a Reckoning on AI

Ask a South Jersey parent what keeps them up at night about their kid’s education and, until recently, you’d have heard the usual answers: test scores, screen time, whether the phone in the backpack was doing more harm than good. This fall, there’s a new one on the list, and it’s the same question sitting on the desk of every superintendent in the state. What do you do about artificial intelligence — teach students to use it, or treat it like contraband?

That’s not my framing. It’s the actual choice New Jersey’s public schools are wrestling with as the new year approaches. Ban the tools, and you risk sending kids into a workforce that will expect them to use AI the way an earlier generation was expected to use a spreadsheet. Embrace it, and you invite a thousand thorny problems — cheating, over-reliance, students outsourcing the very thinking that school is supposed to build. Reasonable educators land on opposite sides of this, and both are trying to do right by the same kids.

Trenton nudges — with money attached

The New Jersey Department of Education is funding a grant program that hands out $25,000 awards to as many as ten districts to build artificial intelligence tools and curriculum into their Career and Technical Education programs. It’s not a fortune — $25,000 doesn’t rewire a district — but it’s a signal, and signals from the state Department of Education tend to shape what shows up in classrooms a year or two later. You can already see what “teaching it well” looks like when a program commits. Up in Mercer County, the College of New Jersey teamed with Mercer County Technical Schools to launch an AI-and-robotics dual-enrollment pathway. In Newark, an initiative called the EdgeConneX Education Program won district approval to pilot AI and digital-infrastructure training inside specialized schools.

The local angle

South Jersey’s county vocational and technical schools — the ones in Camden, Burlington and Gloucester Counties that quietly train the electricians, nurses and machinists this region runs on — are exactly the kind of programs these state grants are designed for. If I’m a parent in Washington Township or a school-board member in Deptford, I’m asking a simple question at the next public meeting: are we applying for this money, and if not, why not? The districts that move early get the funding, the curriculum and the partnerships. The ones that wait get to explain to families why the district one town over is offering something they aren’t.

A calculator didn’t ruin math, but handing one to a kid who never learned to add would have. The schools that get this right won’t ban AI or surrender to it — they’ll teach students to use it and still do the hard thinking themselves.Ethan Brooks

That’s a harder curriculum to write. It’s also the only one worth writing. And in South Jersey, the districts that start writing it now are the ones whose graduates will be glad they did.

Based on reporting from the New Jersey School Boards Association, TCNJ News, and EdgeConneX.