By Chuck Gallagher | Business Ethics Keynote Speaker | AI Speaker and Author
TL;DR: A New York Times Learning Network feature on how teachers are responding to AI in the classroom shows a profession improvising in real time, with no shared rulebook and almost no ethics training. Chuck Gallagher, business ethics keynote speaker, argues that the AI-in-school crisis is not really a technology problem at all — it is a character problem dressed up in software, and schools that treat it as a tools issue will keep losing ground. The fix begins with naming the choices students and teachers are actually making, and the consequences attached to each one.
A high school senior told her English teacher last spring that she had used ChatGPT to write a paper, then turned it in as her own. The teacher asked why. The student shrugged and said everyone does it, and besides, the rubric did not say she could not. That exchange, captured in a recent New York Times Learning Network feature gathering teachers’ voices on how AI is reshaping classrooms, says more about the state of American education than any white paper on academic integrity I have read this year.
The piece pulls together teachers from middle schools, high schools, and community colleges describing the same scene from slightly different angles. Some have given up policing AI and are rebuilding assignments around oral defense and in-class writing. Others are leaning into it and teaching students to use the tools responsibly. A few are quietly furious. And almost none of them feel their districts have given them clear rules to work with.
As a business ethics keynote speaker, I have spent more than two decades arguing that almost every behavior we label a compliance problem started life as an ethics problem that no one wanted to name out loud. AI in the classroom is the cleanest example I have seen in years.
Why is AI in schools an ethics problem and not a tech problem?
The numbers tell you the scale. According to the Center for Democracy and Technology’s October 2025 report, 85 percent of teachers and 86 percent of students used AI during the 2024-25 school year. Sixty-nine percent of teachers said AI improved their teaching. In the same report, 70 percent worried it was eroding students’ critical thinking and research skills. More than half of students said using AI in class made them feel less connected to their teachers. Fewer than half of educators have received any training or guidance from their institutions.
Read those numbers together and you see the problem. Almost everyone is using a powerful tool. Almost no one has been taught how to use it well. And the institutions responsible for setting the rules are mostly silent. That is not a technology gap. That is an accountability gap, and accountability gaps are where ethical failure breeds.
The teachers quoted in the Times piece are doing what people of conscience always do when leadership goes missing. They are improvising. One English teacher in San Jose has stopped assigning take-home essays entirely. A history teacher described the return of blue books, those plain composition booklets that survived a generation of laptops and have suddenly come back into fashion because they are the only assessment a chatbot cannot touch. Sales of blue books are up sharply, according to reporting in The Wall Street Journal. Think about that. The technology of choice for the AI era is a stapled stack of lined paper.
What are students actually learning when cheating becomes the default?
The deeper damage shows up in something one writer for First Things called moral drift. Students are not just using AI to cut corners. A growing number feel no shame about it. They get caught and they shrug. They graduate and brag to their teachers about everything they pulled off without consequence. That is not a story about AI. That is a story about what happens when an entire cohort of young people learns, every day for four years, that the rules do not really apply and that the adults around them either cannot tell or will not bother.
I served federal time for embezzlement and tax evasion before I rebuilt my career. I know exactly what it feels like to make a small choice that seems harmless in the moment because everyone around you appears to be doing some version of the same thing. The defining feature of those choices, looking back, was not greed. It was the slow erosion of the inner voice that says this is not who I want to be. Every time a student turns in AI-written work and gets away with it, that voice gets a little quieter. By the time they reach the workforce, they will not even hear it.
This is the part I want school leaders to sit with. The question is not whether students will use AI. They already do. The question is whether the experience of using it teaches them that integrity is optional, or that it is the one thing that separates a professional from a fraud.
What should school leaders actually do?
Three things, none of them about software. First, write a policy and mean it. Saying nothing is itself a policy, and it is the worst one available. Tell teachers and students which uses of AI are encouraged, which are permitted with disclosure, and which are flatly off-limits. Then enforce it the way you would enforce any other ethics standard.
Second, train the teachers. The CDT data shows fewer than half have received any institutional guidance. That is not a gap, that is a dereliction. You cannot ask a profession to absorb a once-in-a-generation shift in how knowledge work happens and then hand them no map.
Third, teach students to think about consequences before they act, not after they get caught. As an AI speaker and author, I have watched companies spend millions on AI policies that no employee can quote and no manager will enforce. Schools are about to repeat that mistake at scale unless they treat AI as what it is — an ethics curriculum disguised as a productivity tool. I have argued at ChuckGallagher.com that every choice carries a consequence, and every consequence shapes the next choice. Students who learn that early have a chance. Students who learn the opposite are being set up to fail in a workplace that will eventually catch them.
The teachers in that Times piece are not asking for miracles. They are asking for backup. They deserve it, and so do their students.
Frequently Asked Questions
How widespread is AI use among students and teachers right now?
The Center for Democracy and Technology’s October 2025 report found that 85 percent of teachers and 86 percent of students used AI during the 2024-25 school year, the highest adoption rate of any sector tracked. A separate 2025 Microsoft education report put generative AI adoption at 86 percent of education organizations. The technology is not coming to classrooms — it is already there.
Does AI in the classroom actually hurt student learning?
The evidence is mixed and worth taking seriously on both sides. The same CDT report found 69 percent of teachers said AI improved their teaching methods, while 70 percent worried it was weakening students’ critical thinking and research skills. As Chuck Gallagher, business ethics keynote speaker, has argued, the harm is less about the tool itself and more about whether students are being taught to think first and prompt second.
Why are teachers bringing back blue books and oral exams?
Because those formats are the only ones a chatbot cannot complete on a student’s behalf. Reporting in The Wall Street Journal documented a sharp rise in blue book sales as professors moved high-stakes assessment back into the classroom. The shift is less about nostalgia and more about restoring the link between effort and grade.
What is the single biggest mistake schools are making with AI?
Treating it as a technology decision instead of an ethics decision. Fewer than half of teachers have received institutional training or guidance on AI use, according to the CDT report. When leadership refuses to set clear standards, individual teachers are forced to invent their own — and students learn that the rules depend on which classroom they happen to be sitting in.
How should leaders think about AI ethics in education going forward?
Start by naming the choices. Decide which AI uses are encouraged, which require disclosure, and which are prohibited, then enforce that policy consistently. Train teachers on both the tools and the ethical reasoning behind your rules. The goal is not to ban AI or surrender to it, but to graduate students who understand that integrity holds even when no one is watching.
Your Turn
I want to hear from the teachers, parents, and school leaders reading this. Has your school written a clear AI policy yet, or are you still flying blind? What would change if you treated this as the ethics conversation it actually is, instead of a tech rollout? Leave your thoughts in the comments below, and read the questions that follow if you want to take this further with your team.
Five Questions for Further Thought and Consideration
- If a student uses AI on an assignment and the teacher cannot prove it, does that change whether what the student did was wrong?
- What is the difference between a student using AI to brainstorm an essay and a student using AI to write the essay, and where should the line be drawn in your school?
- How would your district respond if a teacher refused to grade any work they suspected was AI-generated, and what does that response reveal about your real priorities?
- If 70 percent of teachers believe AI is weakening student critical thinking, why have most schools still not built ethics training into their AI rollouts?
- Twenty years from now, what kind of professionals will today’s high school students be — and what role will the habits they form now around AI play in that answer?
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