Generative artificial intelligence has started to transform the way teachers work, from how they are hired and evaluated to how they develop lesson plans and assess student work. But only a handful of districts have started to address those changes in contracts.
Most public school teachers are unionized. Their contracts spell out, often in detail, the conditions of their work. AI has the potential to change many of these duties.
Eventually, those agreements will likely need to address AI use directly—potentially outlining, for example, whether teachers are expected to abide by a district AI policy, what AI tools they use, and whether they’re sheltered from harmful uses of AI in the workplace. Relatively few districts have established clear and comprehensive policies on AI issues for teachers, which can make for a difficult road in contracts.
Contract negotiations in districts like Ithaca, N.Y., and Orange County, Fla., have faltered this summer in part over language on fundamental issues, such as whether AI tools could take teachers’ jobs, override professional judgment, or evaluate teacher effectiveness.
Experts say the picture of just what contract language should prescribe or prohibit is only starting to emerge.
“Teachers have always had to deal with the implications and the challenges of technology in the classroom,” said Robbie Torney, the senior AI director for the nonprofit Common Sense Media, who studies teachers’ AI integration. “But there just isn’t clarity or guidance about the fact that some of these potential pitfalls might exist, so unfortunately some of these issues might not actually even be on teachers’ radar.”
Few districts have clear AI policies
The National Council of Teacher Quality, which maintains a database of teacher contracts and tracks trends in the 148 largest school systems in the country, plans to begin analyzing AI-related contract language in the next year. Its review will be focused on the technology’s use for recruiting and retaining teachers, as well as boosting instructional capacity.
“We will see more protection being put in place to guard against the misuse of AI, particularly in ways that could damage teachers—either their reputations or their actual work with kids,” said Heather Peske, NCTQ president. “My sense is that the conversations with teachers about AI have so far been much more focused on students’ use of AI than they have been focused on AI in relationship to teachers.”
It may, initially, be just a handful of contracts. Little more than 1 in 10 school districts have set policies on how teachers should use AI, according to a recent RAND Corp. study, and even fewer have policies on how the technology can be used for hiring, training, and evaluating educators. That makes it more likely that teachers and administrators will have to cope with AI-related workplace emergencies on the fly.
Those districts that have taken steps towards integrating AI language into teacher contracts have often done so in reaction to a bad experience. St. Tammany Parish, La. last year adopted one of the nation’s first contracts dealing with nonconsensual digital manipulation and deepfakes, in part in response to a teacher who was recorded without her knowledge or consent by someone at school. The resulting material was altered and distributed on social media.
While 47 states have laws addressing deepfakes, many of these focus on material representing sexual abuse or exploitation of minors rather than nonconsensual recording and replication of adults.
“We knew we needed protections,” said Brant Osborn, the president of the St. Tammany Federation of Teachers and School Employees. “Once we were at the table, we considered other things we’d seen, and tried to imagine the future and what other terrible things could happen.”
St. Tammany’s contract language lays out both teacher privacy protections and student discipline procedures for using a teacher’s likeness, “including but not limited to digital manipulation of images, video recordings, and sound recordings for the purposes of producing memes, GIFs, videos, and other forms of digital media without the permission or knowledge of the teacher.”
The district hasn’t had deepfake issues since the contract was adopted. But, Osborn said, the union and district still tend to make changes to other AI policies and contracts only as problems come up. One that they’re eyeing is how teachers’ intellectual property rights could change in the the age of AI scraping.
“These teachers are just selling their stuff. They’re not worried about it—you know, they say, it’s their property, they’re just going to do it,” Osborn said, referring to St. Tammany teachers who sell classroom materials they’ve developed on platforms like Teachers Pay Teachers.
But the contract language on academic freedom and intellectual property was adopted before the public launch of the internet. “We inherited that language from the very first [negotiated contract]–back in 1992—so we probably need to spruce that up.”
The NEA and AFT plan to roll out more guidance
Both of the nation’s largest teachers’ unions have adopted initial guidelines for teachers on using AI. They are still in the early stages of translating those into formal models for workplaces.
“If we don’t figure out how to harness [AI in contracts] and how to have educators lead it, what’s going to happen is it’s not just going to be about some job loss. It’s really going to be about the machine, basically taking over from human beings,” said Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, which held a symposium on AI teacher workforce and contract issues in July.
She suggested future teacher strikes could be focused on issues like intellectual property, employee data privacy, and algorithmic bias.
At its annual convention in July, the National Education Association voted to develop model collective bargaining language on AI in schools, which would include the topics of employee job protections, data collection, district policies on ethical AI use, and professional development for staff on AI literacy, including ways to prevent bias and ethical and data privacy risks associated with the technology.
Teacher contract negotiations in Ithaca, N.Y., broke down this summer in part because the teachers’ union asked for language barring the district from using generative AI to replace teacher or staff positions; the debate also came up at rallies and sit-ins in the district. But the district has been reluctant to set limits on a rapidly evolving technology.
“We don’t want to artificially hamstring future boards, future educators, future parents who may actually want to talk about the greater value that could be seen by AI,” said Robert Van Keuren, Ithaca’s chief investigative officer, during negotiations with the union in May. “We’re at a point now where we know it’s going to be big, but we don’t know how big—and it really isn’t up to us.”
Adam Aguilera, a middle-grades English/language arts teacher in the Evergreen public schools in Washington, and member of a statewide education task force on AI, said most educators and administrators are still coming to understand the ways AI will change their existing work policies.
“School districts are implementing these kinds of AI tools, not only for instruction and curriculum, but also for surveillance and camera systems in buildings and school districts,” he said. “We talk about some of the concerns we see in the development of the technology, in terms of not only protecting themselves, but also protecting their students.”
Aguilera, who helped run AI training for more than 300 of his district’s teachers this summer, said training on the technology should be the highest priority for teacher contracts.
Osborn agreed, and said teachers and administrators need to think more broadly about how AI is changing teaching and learning.
“This is a crisis, I think an emerging crisis in education,” he said. “It’s not just how do we stop cheating … It’s how do we prevent AI from harming the students that are in our care?”
The Rockdale 84 district in Illinois has taken a collaborative approach to managing workplace AI issues. While the 2024-28 contract does not place specific limits on AI, it establishes a four-person committee of union and district representatives who will advise the school board both on both the adoption of any AI tools and the training teachers need to use them effectively.
“It is mutually understood,” the agreement notes, “that such technologies should be approached as an opportunity to improve work and education outcomes while respecting the rights and professionalism of teachers.”