The 2025-26 school year is set to be the year AI becomes fully entrenched in our classrooms. While educators are embracing these new tools to keep students competitive, a critical question looms: have the rules protecting student privacy caught up?
According to a detailed report from Megan Morrone at Axios, the answer is a resounding no. The rapid adoption of AI in education is creating a potential privacy nightmare, exposing troves of personal data in ways few parents, teachers, or students understand. The piece highlights three major concerns we need to address now.
1. Your Child's Homework, AI's Training Data?
AI models are data-hungry, and student work is a rich source of information. The primary law meant to protect this data, the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), was signed in 1974 and is functionally toothless. Elizabeth Laird of the Center for Democracy and Technology notes that the penalty for violating FERPA has been enforced "exactly zero times. Literally never."
While most educational AI companies, like Khan Academy, state they don't train their main models on student work, there are significant loopholes:
Publicly Available Data: University research, often funded by mandates requiring it to be posted online, is considered fair game for AI companies to "scrape" and use for training.
The Bias Trade-off: Some experts, like Khan Academy's Kristen DiCerbo, point out that training on diverse student data could actually make AI models less biased, creating a difficult trade-off between privacy and equity.
2. The Wild West of "Off-the-Shelf" AI
Many teachers, eager to innovate, are experimenting with free, consumer-grade AI chatbots. The problem? Products designed for education, like ChatGPT Edu, have strong privacy policies, but the free public versions often do not.
"If AI tools are used outside our system, the data may not be protected under the school's policies," warns Melissa Loble of Instructure (the company behind Canvas).
This creates a dilemma. EdTech has always been a "bottom-up adoption industry," thriving on teachers finding and championing the tools that work best. But without district approval or formal guidance, teachers may be inadvertently exposing student conversations, essays, and personal reflections to data collection by Big Tech.
3. A Magnified Hacking Threat
Every new digital tool introduces new risks, and AI is no exception. A breach of an AI system could expose far more than just grades and attendance. It could leak behavioral data, personal writing samples, and private communications between students and AI tutors. The massive data breach at PowerSchool late last year serves as a stark reminder of these vulnerabilities.
Some companies are mitigating this by periodically deleting data; for example, Khan Academy deletes chats after a year. However, this creates another trade-off, as the power of a personalized AI tutor comes from its ability to remember and learn from past conversations. More data retention means better personalization but greater risk.
What's Next? Building a Digital Wall
The report notes that AI is "steamrolling into classrooms," and schools are struggling to keep up. In response to a "lost trust" with major AI providers, some EdTech companies like Brisk Teaching are taking a new approach. They use services like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure as a buffer, keeping student data separate from the AI model providers themselves.
This trend highlights a growing awareness that as we rush to adopt these powerful new technologies, we must be just as aggressive in building the safeguards to protect our most vulnerable users.
Disclaimer: This blog post was written with the assistance of an AI. The information and analysis are based on the article, "AI in education's potential privacy nightmare," written by Megan Morrone for Axios. https://www.axios.com/2025/08/14/ai-education-privacy
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