Can Your District Actually Say No?

In this episode we explore whether school districts should be more willing to say no to new education technology, especially generative AI.We are joined by Claude for a conversation about the research paper Refusing Educational Technology: Artificial Intelligence, Inequity, and the Problem of Critical Optimism. The paper challenges a familiar stance in education: acknowledging the risks of new technology while assuming that, with the right guardrails, schools should ultimately find a way to adopt it.Topics covered:Why “critical optimism” may still tilt schools toward technology adoptionWhen saying no to an AI or EdTech product can be a legitimate district decisionThe difference between technology that supports teacher agency and technology that asks educators to step asideHow districts can define success, failure, and acceptable outcomes before launching a pilotWhy vendor usage data shouldn’t become the default measure of whether an implementation is workingHow districts can prevent optional tools from slowly becoming prescribed implementation modelsSource:https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.3102/0013189X261466234