Schools have rolled out AI tutors, monitoring software, screen-based curricula, and new surveillance tools at a pace most parents have not been able to keep up with. In the 2024-25 school year, 85% of teachers and 86% of students used AI in K-12 classrooms, according to the Center for Democracy & Technology. Yet only 45% of principals say their schools or districts have policies on AI use at all. Advocacy groups are starting to push back and calling for more transparent policies that center student safety and privacy. They are also pushing for slower, more deliberate adoption decisions. As all this is happening, the burden of asking falls, imperfectly, on parents.
Unfortunately, most parents do not have the time or technical background to evaluate every tool a district brings in. This makes asking questions to gain transparency even more important. Ultimately, a parent should not feel pressure to give consent until they feel informed. If something is unclear, parents are entitled to push back, demand evidence, and withhold consent until they have real answers, and that applies to every question here.
Here are five questions that can help every parent understand how and why technology is being used in their school:
1. Is This Helping My Child?
There are two layers to this question. The first is whether the tool does any good at all. Ask the school for the concrete benefits this provides to your child’s learning. And push to understand why this is the most important thing to fix or provide for our students now.
The second is whether this is the best way to do that well. Do we need a technology solution to this problem? Have lower-tech options been considered? And if a technology solution does make sense, have other technology options been considered besides the exact one being proposed? It helps to think broadly about categories of technology solutions, whether they be screen time, at-home device usage versus in-class device usage, or AI technology versus a phone app.
2. What Are the Risks, and How Are They Being Mitigated?
Here, we want to know whether schools have considered all possible ways this technology might harm your child or children at school. What exactly has been done to make sure that we are not missing any potential harms? Has the school accepted the vendor’s claims unchecked? Have we run pilot experiments? Have we spoken to other districts and schools that are actually using the tool?
Between July 2023 and December 2024, 82% of K-12 schools experienced a cybersecurity incident, and the 2025 PowerSchool breach alone exposed sensitive data on more than 60 million students. Ask what data the tool collects, where it is stored, who has access to it, and what happens to that data if the district stops using the tool or if your child changes schools.
Once those risks have been isolated, or even those we are not sure exist but that might be risks of the tool, we consider what mitigation strategies are being put in place. What are the safeguards for making sure that harm is reduced if we think it is worth the potential risk? And we want to know whether those safeguards are adequate. Do we have evidence that they will mitigate the harms?
There also needs to be a plan in place if we later discover harms we hadn’t considered, or if those safeguards don’t work. What is the school’s plan to offload the technology? How quickly can we pivot from it? How dependent will we be on it once we decide to adopt it?
3. Who Gets a Say?
What say do you have? Who gets to say how and when this technology is used? If your child does not feel comfortable or safe using it, or if you, as the parent, do not feel safe with them using it, do either of you have the right to opt out of its use?
Opt-out questions have layers. Can I opt out of specific parts? Can I opt out of the data collection in particular? Will I have a say in how much data my student needs to provide? And where are those lines drawn?
The same questions apply to teachers. Were educators truly consulted on whether they think this adoption is a good idea and whether it provides the benefits being claimed? Will teachers have further autonomy to opt out of using it themselves, so that educators who don’t have buy-in aren’t forced to use it with children?
4. Is This Fair to Every Student?
This question might mean parents have to look beyond their own child. Is the use of this technology furthering fairness in our schools, or working against it?
Are there biases that I should be aware of that might affect my child? How much of this is going to be used to supplement human decision-making and risk profiling of students? The school should have conducted a bias audit and implemented measures to ensure that the technology does not have disproportionate effects on different students.
Resource access matters, too. How are we going to make sure that resources are allocated? If there are things needed to make sure that this is provided sufficiently, whether it be Internet access at home or device usage, are those needs being met by the school? What is the plan to make sure that my child is not unfairly disadvantaged if I cannot meet those needs?
5. Will My Child Still Have Genuine Relationships at School?
The last question is whether your child will still have opportunities to form genuine relationships with their teacher and peers. We want to know exactly how much screen time will be used in the classroom. How much will this supplement distract from teacher-student one-to-one time? How much will this increase opportunities for students to work with each other directly rather than working alone in front of a screen?
Will the teacher still genuinely get to know your child through their work, actively engage with them, and form deep relationships with them?
Where to Start
None of these questions needs to be asked all at once, or perfectly. They can be sent in an email to the school, brought up at a board meeting, or raised at parent-teacher conferences. Ideally, the school can then share the same information with other parents to help ensure the entire community understands the decision-making process.
The point is not to be adversarial. Most teachers and administrators are working with limited time and information, and they often welcome parents who engage thoughtfully rather than reactively. The strongest schools are those where parents, teachers, and leadership are genuinely aligned on what technology is for and what it is not. That alignment sometimes requires someone asking the right questions. For now, that might just have to be you.
Priten Soundar-Shah is an educator, philosopher, CEO of Pedagogy Ventures, and Harvard-trained scholar in Education Policy and Management. His new book is Ethical Ed Tech: How Educators Can Lead on AI and Digital Safety in K-12.