While the policies are almost uniformly popular, a few observers see a downside. The movement “happened so quickly there wasn’t a thoughtful, nuanced approach” to the problem of helping young people manage digital distraction, said Julia Gustafson, a public health expert who spent five years developing school partnerships for Yondr.

She and partner Shannon Godfrey last year founded , a technical solution to distraction that they believe offers the benefits of a bell-to-bell mobile phone ban that also teaches students how to manage their digital habits and learn skills that give them greater agency without hiding their devices in a pouch.

On its website, The Commons describes itself as “airplane mode for schools,” creating what amounts to a large geofence around a campus that essentially turns off the Internet during the school day. Schools can “whitelist” sites they need, such as Google Classroom, Khan Academy, Duolingo and the like, but others are inaccessible. Students keep their phones with them, but they must adjust the app’s settings to turn individual apps or games on.

Students who look for ways around the system trigger a notification that offers a “nudge,” giving them the opportunity to turn the apps off. If they don’t, alerts go to administrators, who can easily track down the student and address the issue.

At bell time, the geofence deactivates, said Gustafson. When students walk off campus, it deactivates as well. “It’s tier-one social norming,” she said. “Students are building the skills they need every single day, along with their peers doing the same thing. It makes the right choice the easy choice, by automatically silencing those distractions.”

Godfrey, whose background is in ed tech, said the app helps schools minimize distractions while helping students practice “healthier tech habits,” something bans don’t address. The habits, she said “can transfer beyond the school walls” and help students develop life skills that will be valuable as adults. 

The 74’s Greg Toppo talked recently with Gustafson and Godfrey about what they see as the inadequacy of phone-free schools policies and, in Gustafson’s words, how such policies send “a completely mixed message” to kids about the power of technology. 

The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

The 74: Let’s talk about the phone-free schools movement. I can’t remember the last time I saw something catch fire so quickly and grow so rapidly. I gather that you folks have a slightly different point of view on this in terms of distraction and keeping kids focused on school.

Julia Gustafson: It’s been simmering under the surface for a long time. People have noticed that there’s something wrong with how people are engaging with their phones, but more importantly, the addictive applications that are on the phones. COVID was a catalyst to people waking up and understanding that there truly is something wrong here. Going beyond that, it’s been a movement, both on a parental level and a school level, because we’re seeing teacher attrition rates higher than they ever have been. How can we support our teachers, and how can we support our students and parents getting intimately involved? 

It always takes a little while for research to catch up, and research has now finally caught up. That being said, the way in which it’s being handled, talking about it as bans and prohibition, is a surrender to not understanding what to do about a truly wide-spanning public health topic. A ban or prohibition is action, versus what we were doing before, which is inaction. But no one has really taken a thoughtful approach to thinking about how we can do this differently, with guardrails to support people’s interactions with phones. 

Shannon Godfrey: My background has been in education technology, and so I’ve seen the positive of when tech is used appropriately in the classroom to aid student success. Julia and I together come in with that thoughtful approach. But when you look at some of the research around neuroscience or behavioral science, adolescents haven’t yet developed the skills for self-regulation, impulse control, attention management. And most of the apps that are competing for their attention are intentionally engineered to make it hard to disengage — and that’s something we know adults struggle with too.

So to Julia’s point, this is really a societal problem and a public health issue. But the difference with adults is that we’ve had time and context to develop coping strategies. We’ve developed systems to manage the distractions, and it’s getting more difficult for students to be able to handle that. 

Our “a-ha” moment [was] having experience helping schools go phone-free, and seeing that the short-term, immediate impact was phenomenal, but really talking with schools about the exceptions [that didn’t work]. How do we start to use tech positively when we’re using Duolingo or mobile optimized apps in the classroom? How do we make sure that students are really developing some of the skills beyond the four walls of schools? We are having a lot of these conversations. We need something a little bit more intentional, and I think that is something tech can solve.

Julia, you used the word “surrender” earlier. I’m guessing that you would say a phone-free strategy doesn’t teach the skills of “saying no” and limiting your time on an app — or even learning about what the app is trying to do. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that.

Gustafson: When policymakers are addressing demands from both parents and schools, what they’re lacking is that context in which technology is integral for anyone to be successful now, but also into the future. And so when you ban or prohibit something, that’s sending a completely mixed message to the students that the technology is to be embraced and it’s going to make you a leader — but needs to be locked away. Then we need dual-factor authentication to log into our Chromebooks, and so we take out this “prohibited” device, open it up to use the dual factor authentication — but then are bombarded with 200 notifications from Tik-Tok. So boom, this rebound consumption happens, and you’re locked into that as a distraction, vs. going on your phone, using it as the tool that it was designed to be, and being able to move forward.

I was listening to a radio program about phone-free schools the other day and one of the panelists said that if school is a place where we prepare young people for their life after school, there’s only one kind of job where they ask you to put your phone away: a low-paid service job. Do you have any ideas on that?

Gustafson: That goes back to what I was saying at the beginning: Using technology appropriately is integral to someone’s ability to be a leader in today’s society, so it is a huge mixed message when you’re telling somebody to lock a device away throughout the day instead of actually being able to utilize it when there are practical applications — and denying them that opportunity to learn the right time, place and manner to use that piece of technology. And you can think about that for phones, but you can also think about that for tablets and computers, which can be equally distracting during the school day.

Godfrey: We’ve had the opportunity to meet with students and have focus groups. Students are savvy and they’re smart. A lot of times with phone bans, are we saying that students can’t learn self-regulation and they can’t learn impulse control? When you talk with students, they’re saying, “Hey, I want schools to help me learn self-regulation. I just don’t necessarily agree we should pretend the phone doesn’t exist.” And in our focus groups, we have students come back and say, “Why is it so wrong if I believe the phone is my device of choice? Maybe it’s the only thing I can afford. Maybe it’s just what I’m used to using because they’re so sophisticated now and just readily available. But if I’m using it for academics, and I choose the academic app or to upload my Google Classroom or to submit an assignment or a chat in Google Classroom, why can’t I use my phone for that if that’s the appropriate time? Why can I use my computer in class but not my phone? If you’re helping us learn time, place and manner, then why is the phone so wrong?” You’re almost saying one thing but then asking them to do another. 

Let’s talk about The Commons: If I’ve got a game on my phone that doesn’t need Internet access, I’ve got access to that as well. What’s your thinking on that?

Gustafson: We do track the amount of time students are spending on that on their phone during the school day, so if a student downloads a game that doesn’t need Internet access, we can see on the admin dashboard that Greg has spent two hours on his phone today. That’s a little odd. Let’s go check in and see what the scoop is. So that’s one of the ways that we can try to prevent students from doing that. And then I’ll also just add that The Commons isn’t the school’s cell phone policy. This is a measure that gets inserted into the school cell phone policy to just help make it easier for that right time, place and manner, and for students to comply with it. So if I’m sitting there playing a game for two hours on my phone, I’m sure that someone is going to notice that, and that’s when that policy comes into play.

Turning off the Internet, for lack of a better term, seems like a smart move — with obviously these other sites whitelisted for school use. I guess somebody might squint and say it’s kind of the same thing as putting a phone in a pouch. What’s the difference?

Gustafson: The pouch doesn’t have any guardrails. So if a teacher decides, “Hey, everyone, take out your phone for Duolingo” in language class, it’s unfettered access all over again. You might get 100 notifications. It all comes back. But with The Commons app, you have the guardrails up at all times. You don’t actually need to lock a phone away. You don’t need to spend time taking a phone out of a pouch or getting it or retrieving it, plus it constantly has guardrails on so the focus can always be on the task at hand.

Can you dig in a little bit more deeply? What are students learning?

Gustafson: Behavioral economics really is the science about making the right choice the easy choice, by helping people make decisions that are ultimately the best for them. And so in the case of school, it’s being able to stay off of distracting applications. 

What are you actually learning to do better using this app?

Gustafson: We just interviewed some teachers right before the holiday break. What they were saying is, “We see that students just have more control over their phones. They’re not fiddling with them as much. They have better impulse control.” And that’s a huge win. We talked about behavior change. So much of this is an impulse for people to reach out to their device without actually understanding that they’re doing it until they’re already in their phone. If we can start controlling those impulses and allow people to develop the skill set of controlling their phone use when their phone is still next to them — because that’s the skill they’re going to need when going into college or their career — that’s a huge win for us.

Godfrey: We’re giving them a feedback loop. They’re taking their real device — they don’t have to lock it away and pretend it doesn’t exist — and learning how to manage it in the wild. Our students are recognizing that when I set foot on campus, this is time to put our phone away. It’s sometimes that subtle nudge I need, but it’s helping me build this habit. It’s helping me remember, “Yep, this is school time. This is my time to engage, my time to learn, my time to focus.” 

And it’s been phenomenal. I’m getting better grades, and I’m playing with kids during recess, and we’re checking out basketballs, and I’m noticing my peers are interacting with us, and we’re paying attention to the teachers.

So the phone is sitting in front of me. I don’t have to put it in a pouch. I don’t even necessarily have to put it in my backpack. Yet all the things that I would use it to have fun with aren’t there. They essentially aren’t working. So how am I learning impulse control? 

Gustafson: Because of all the addictive apps on the phone that people are hardwired to reach out to it, even if it doesn’t buzz, even if it doesn’t do anything, sometimes even the sight of it — it’s now wired in my brain that the minute I have a sense of boredom I’m pulling out my phone to cure that boredom. By reducing all of the fun and addictive apps on it, we’re actually helping rewire the brain to not want to continue. 

So it’s saying, “In certain conditions, this phone is not the same kind of machine.” 

Gustafson: If for eight hours during the day when they’re at school, we’ve shifted their brain to understanding that this is a boring device and they have control over it — they have impulse control over that device — they’re now having the awareness to practice those same skills outside the walls of the school. 

One of the appeals of a phone-free school is that it’s very clean and easy for the adults. If every kid’s phone is in a bag, I don’t have to worry about it. What The Commons is doing, in a sense, could make life more complicated for certain adults, having to chase down the kid who’s on Tik-Tok, or using some site they shouldn’t be. 

Godfrey: It’s interesting. From our experience and talking with schools, we see that a lot of programs with pouches roll out really successfully at the beginning, but then there are damages to pouches happening, or students faking a phone into the shoe rack. They’re working the system. Our schools are spending more energy playing Whack-a-Mole, and as those inconsistencies continue to creep up, the fidelity of the program starts to go away. And as the fidelity goes away, students are realizing that they can get away with it. And so then they do.

With our schools, what we’ve been able to do for the first time is actually help focus our administrators on where to put their attention: Where are students actually struggling with being able to put their phone down? Are these students who actually need more support and intervention? And when we also look at grades, attendance and some of these other data points and factors, if the phone is traditionally a root cause to a lot of these problems, how do we really support that student before they get off task and have a greater risk of not graduating?

As of last month, had enacted phone restrictions in K-12 classrooms, with 27 banning phones in classrooms outright. In many cases, schools are asking students to drop their phones in Yondr pouches for the school day, at a cost of about $30 per student annually. 

What you may not know is that the pouches have been floating around for more than a decade, first appearing in an Oakland biker bar — and that the man behind them had thinkers like French philosopher and English novelist on his mind as he developed the idea.

More than a decade later, Graham Dugoni sees the pouches as a low-tech, countercultural way to help young people begin to see unexplored frontiers in their own lives.

Born in Oregon in 1986, Dugoni briefly played professional soccer in Norway and the U.S. before taking his first real “adult” job in finance in Atlanta. He recalls a “Kafka-esque” experience toiling away in a windowless office — in his free time, he began immersing himself in philosophy and teaching himself jazz piano. 

Philosophers like and got him thinking about technology and society, while jazz — with its improvisations and emphasis on self-expression — pushed him to explore broader themes of personal freedom.

A pivotal moment happened in 2012, when Dugoni, by then based in California’s Bay Area, was enjoying a music festival. He watched in shock as an intoxicated concertgoer danced uninhibitedly while a perfect stranger filmed him with a smartphone, then uploaded the video to social media. Dugoni began searching for a way to make such interactions impossible, wondering how he could create phone-free spaces that foster genuine connection — and a measure of privacy.

“To see someone just having a good time and being uninhibited and watching them be filmed and posted online,” he said in an interview, “I just followed it out logically. Where does that go?”

He’d read enough about the corrosive effects of technology to know that while tech can help create a more open, democratic society, “You don’t get something for nothing.” He knew that giving up privacy in the public sphere could have “a tremendously huge impact on people’s ability to communicate, to express themselves freely, to be swept up into a shared moment.”

In 2014, Dugoni developed the first magnetic pouches out of materials from his local hardware store and began selling them door-to-door — his first customer was a biker bar in Oakland that wanted to dissuade patrons from filming its burlesque shows. Around the same time, he signed his first school.

Then, in 2015, he got a call from comedian Dave Chappelle’s manager, who wanted to at his shows to enforce a no-phones policy. That helped push Yondr into public consciousness, with schools, artists and venues soon queuing up.

The disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic began shifting parents’ attitudes around mobile phones and schools. And Jonathan Haidt’s 2024 book , which urged schools to go phone-free, pushed the company to even bigger prominence. Yondr now boasts about 150 employees. The company, which is privately held, doesn’t share revenue figures, but a spokeswoman said it has seen “sustained triple-digit growth” over the past three years. Its pouches are used by about 2.5 million students in all 50 states and 45 countries, and the company said the figure could triple once total sales are tallied by the end of the year.

TIME included the pouches as their “” — under the “Social Good” heading, which also included a new malaria vaccine and a 3D-printed resin water filter for people without access to safe drinking water. 

By now, many students understand the importance of going phone-free, even if the locking pouch impinges on their social life. “It’s not the best, but I think it’s for the best,” one student last spring. 

The 74’s Greg Toppo recently chatted with Dugoni, 39, to ask him about the company’s origins, his philosophy and why he considers phone-free schools as spaces where kids can be kids, focus on their studies and develop vital relationships.

Their conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

I wanted to ask you about that 2012 music festival where you came up with the idea for the pouches. What was on your mind? 

I was looking at the smartphone, and the fact that everyone had a recording device, but also access to the Internet. I knew that that was a fundamentally new human experience, and that, from a pure sociology standpoint, there are going to be questions asked because of that that have never been asked before. No one’s had to ask questions about what degree of privacy can you assume in the public sphere. No one had to think about what effect would the ability to be recorded or show up online in any context do to social interaction, to the idea of privacy, to the idea of intimacy. 

This new tool, I felt, was ushering in these questions. But I was walking around San Francisco in my waking life, and no one else was aware of them. In an education setting, it was happening in a different way to the same degree: the push to put more tech into the classroom, faster, which was really nonsensical in a lot of ways. But at a music festival, to see someone just having a good time and being uninhibited and watching them be filmed and posted online, I just followed it out logically. Where does that go? 

I had read enough of people like Foucault and things like that to understand what that ultimately leads to. In a lot of tech society, there’s this idea that transparency in all things is going to create a more open society and more democratization. And like anything, you don’t get something for nothing. You give something up. And that’s how I saw it playing out. If there’s no degree of privacy in the public sphere, I saw it having a tremendously huge impact on people’s ability to communicate, to express themselves freely, to be swept up into a shared moment — things that are deeply valuable for an individual’s psychology, but also the collective consciousness and experience of civil society.

You guys strike me as a privacy company, first and foremost, but also a tech company that’s turning back the clock, in a way. Is that the way you see yourselves?

Not really. I would say we’re a bit of a counterculture company, really. And I would say we’re definitely not a tech company.

I purposely, early on, did not go with early venture capital money because there’s a certain profile that those companies have to follow. What I’m about, especially for young people in a school setting, but also people in daily life, is a sense of choice and a sense of freedom, and especially showing this younger generation that there is a way to walk through the world that’s not completely mediated by screens and the Internet. 

It’s not poo-pooing technology or what it can do. The question is, really, how do you integrate it into our lives? And I don’t think anyone has a perfect answer for it. But I’ve always felt that phone-free schools and spaces, that Yondr started — we created that concept — is a really good way to give people some sense of what that is, because people have to experience it. 

How quickly did you start thinking about schools as users of these pouches?

Our first customer was a venue, and we got a lot of notoriety early on from working with certain artists, like Dave Chappelle. But really, at the same time that we started working with a few venues, we got our first school customer around the Bay Area. So from the very beginning, the two pillars of the company have been centered on those two — that’s been lost in the general story a bit. Now, going around the Bay in 2014, talking about a phone-free school, you can imagine how many doors got shut in my face. But even then, from talking to teachers, I knew it was a huge problem — it just hadn’t floated up into general awareness enough for superintendents to take any notice of it. But teachers knew, even back then.

So where was this brave new school that came to you and said, “We need to do this”?

Well, they didn’t come to me. I went to them. I was going door-to-door. The first school that said Yes was Peninsula High School in San Bruno, south of San Francisco.

And what did they see that nobody else did?

I would say principals and teachers fell into two camps, for the most part, around phones. One group saw it as so far gone that this was a bell that could not be unrung. On the other side, you had teachers and people who knew it was a huge deal, but they were trying to figure out a solution. For a lot of reasons, it’s a difficult thing to unwind. It’s wrapped up with social behavior, social psychology, habits, all of those things. So this principal fell into that camp: someone who had the gusto, the energy and wanted to try to do something. I came to them and said, “Look, I think there’s a way to do this, and I think I can help you do it.” Now, I didn’t know anything about how to actually make it work, so it didn’t work so great in the early days. But we’ve spent the last 11 years figuring out all the things that have to go with it to make this work for a school, a district, and now whole states.

As you said, the ethos at the time was to get more tech in schools, not less. I can see what you were up against.

The drive, at the end of the day, to make things faster, easier, cheaper and more available, it’s very tantalizing. You’re turning kids and people in general into information-retrieval machines, which is very different than critical thinking.

What changed? Obviously COVID had a hand in this. What else? 

Eleven years ago, everything was different, and our team was out on the ground, going into schools. And basically the way we’ve grown as a company to where we are now — we operate in all 50 states, we’re in 45 countries and millions of students use Yondr every day — we did it brick-by-brick, school-by-school. We went in and helped them actually do it, figure out a policy, help them implement it, learn from them how to do it. We’ve had a huge ground game over the years. Up until COVID, we were building that out. We were building around pockets of teachers at first, who helped us figure it out, and then we realized we had to expand into the whole school to make it work. Then it started to grow. And we’re building up just by word of mouth, teachers and principals saying, “Hey, this works, and this company has helped us.” 

Then COVID hit, and that basically flattened out our business. We almost went under. But it also had an incredibly positive effect in the aftermath, because so many teachers — and parents especially — saw what it meant for their kid to be behind a screen for that long. They saw what was happening. So out of COVID, the conversation completely flipped. Whereas before our team was out kind of evangelizing, saying, “Hey, here’s what a phone-free school is, a phone-free space is” — we invented the term — we have people kicking it back to us now and saying, “Yeah, we get it. There’s a problem here, and we’re looking for a solution.” The zeitgeist really changed and people’s awareness clicked over. 

I guess Jonathan Haidt’s book didn’t hurt.

It added a lot of fuel to the fire, but it was, in terms of us, all the schools mentioned [in the book], they’re Yondr schools. So we already knew it. But the general awareness that it generated was tremendous.

A couple of weeks ago, I was in a school in Boston that’s using these pouches. My favorite comment from a teacher was, “My students are laughing at my jokes again.” What are some of the reactions that you remember?

Those are the little stories we look for. We have the case studies that show improvements in academic performance, teachers getting more teaching time back, students feeling safer on campus. But the way I see what we do is that it’s a broader cultural shift inside of a school. And so stories like you just mentioned, we hear that all the time: Teachers are seeing the students’ eyes again. We hear a lot that the body language, the posture of students inside the hallways, totally changes. We hear a lot of times that more books have been checked out in the first three weeks at a library than the entire previous school year.

One that’s most interesting to me, in a way, is we’ve heard from a lot of schools that more lunches are being eaten at the cafeteria. It’s not because the kids are less distracted. It’s because a lot of kids are afraid of eating lunch in the cafeteria because they don’t want to be filmed or recorded in an embarrassing moment and posted online. 

What I like about those stories is they help people who are not in the day-to-day, like teachers are, realize what an existential situation these young kids are stepping into. And it reframes that: A phone-free school is not taking something away from students. We’re trying to give them a space to be kids and to focus on their studies, develop the social relationships, a sense of identity that they’re going to need. And phone-free space is part of that.  

Speaking about technology, you recently said it has “this total neutralizing effect on people’s ability to express themselves, because there’s no such thing as intimacy without privacy.” That seems like a big part of this project.

It’s very difficult to find frontiers in modern society anymore: Places you can go where there’s unexpected things, there’s adventure, there’s a sense of unexplored territory. That’s especially hard for this younger generation, which has grown up always being able to look around corners. Things are curated and manicured, and they know where people are at all times. You can look at it through the lens of privacy, which is real, but also through that lens of just what’s unexplored. And when you go to a show that uses Yondr, it’s unexplored. What happens there is for the people who are there. And it makes the experience richer. It leaves a deeper impression on the people there. 

What about the ways students try to get around these pouches? How do you view that? Do you view that as helping you problem-solve or rethink the pouches themselves?

Of course it happens. We’ll talk to principals and be super candid: “You know the students who are going to buck against a new policy, and you know there are going to be students who smuggle a phone through their sock, or whatever.” 

I always want to hear the stories. I smirk a little bit, because it’s good to see that students are using their ingenuity and being creative. But it’s not really about that. The broader message is that it precipitates a cultural shift in the school, where the expectation is that the school is phone-free, bell-to-bell. What we found is that after two or three weeks, that becomes the new normal. Once you establish that inside a school, and a culture that supports it, that’s the point. So if a student finds a workaround, or they want to bring in a phone, the important thing is that the community is ready to deal with that in a way that is appropriate for them. If you reinforce the benefits of a phone-free culture, eventually you win everyone over as they start to see the results.

So we’re not naive about it. We know we’re not going to win over every 16-year-old overnight. But we can convince them and show them that they might enjoy it once they’ve experienced it.

I was listening to a call-in show about phone-free schools the other day, and one of the panelists pointed out that if school is a training ground for students’ real lives, the only jobs where they’re going to have to put away their phones are low-paying service jobs. I’d never thought about it in those terms. Does that give you pause?

There’s something much more fundamental than that happening. I’ve talked to a lot of people in different state agencies. I can tell you they’re having an extremely difficult time hiring young people right now, and a lot of that comes down to their ability to focus, to think critically and to just socialize. Those are skills that you’re less likely to develop if you have a crutch in your pocket that makes those things less risky or easier. A lot of modern technology, it ultimately makes something easier. Now, that’s fine. We do a lot of trade-offs in our life for convenience. But when you get down to what education is about, it’s not just about using a tool. You have to be able to build up critical thinking muscles and some of the aptitude that’s going to carry you through life. 

People say, “Well, we should teach kids how to use these devices.” Absolutely. How do you plan to do that? If you have something in your pocket soliciting your attention all the time, that becomes basically wired into your central nervous system and always offers you a path of least resistance when anything difficult comes along, how do you plan to educate someone, especially a digital native who has no experience of the world without it? So it’s more, “How do you believe human psychology works, and how do you actually develop habits and patterns of thinking?” 

The pouch is more of an impulse disrupter. A student feels the phantom vibration in their pocket. They reach for it. Hand feels the pouch. You’re allowing a new pathway to emerge and develop that leads to a new habit. Because it’s hard to make the argument that young people are not going to have enough exposure to the Internet and their phones to learn how to use them. You can make a lot of arguments to say that six to eight hours a day without it to focus on their studies and being a kid is probably a good thing, given what we know. 

Last question: Talk about your tech habits.

I’ve had a flip phone for 10 years. I’m not saying everyone should do that. That’s my own choice. It makes a lot of things in life very inconvenient, very difficult. But on balance, it helps me because I have fewer inputs than the average person. My morning, I’m not flipping open the news and getting carried away to some place about things I can’t affect in any positive way, which is a big part of the modern world as well. If you allow everything to solicit your attention and your empathy, what are you left with to affect the things positively that you can control? 

That’s a funny effect of digital media in general: There’s a lot of important things, and it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t care about them, but what can you affect? For me, that’s a choice I have. So I operate in front of the computer, or I do phone calls. It slows my world down. I place a big emphasis company-wide on writing, on clarity of writing, and clarity of thinking that comes out of that. 

And then in my own home life, it’s all about boundaries. Technology as a theme — this is not just the Internet — it’s not totally neutral. Albert Borgmann and Martin Heidegger write about this: It’s not something that knocks at the door and asks permission to enter. You have to create boundaries. And to me, boundaries are best created in a physical way. So I use a computer in one room in my house. That’s it. So my mental associations are, if I’m here, I’m doing work. 

A former director of AI ethics and corporate social responsibility at H5, an AI legal services company, he led partnerships with the United Nations, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and others. Kotran also served as a presidential appointee under Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Burwell in the Obama administration, managing communications and community outreach for the Affordable Care Act and the .

More recently, Kotran has testified before Congress on AI, a U.S. Senate subcommittee in September to “massively expand” teacher training to prepare students for the economic and societal disruptions of generative AI. 

But he has also become an important reality-based voice in a sometimes overheated debate, saying those who believe AI is going to transform the teaching profession overnight clearly haven’t spent much time using it.

While freely available AI applications are powerful, he says they can also be a complete waste of time — and probably not something most teachers should rely on.

“One of the ways that you can tell someone really hasn’t spent too much time [with AI] is when they say, ‘It’s so great for summarizing — I use it now, I don’t have to read dense studies. I just ask ChatGPT to summarize it.’”

Kotran will point out that in most cases, the technology is effectively scanning the first few pages, its summary based on a snippet of content.

“If you use it enough, you start to catch that,” he said. 

Educators who fret about the risks of AI cheating and plagiarism find a sympathetic voice in Kotran, who also sees AI as a tool that allows students to . So while many technologists are asking schools to embrace AI as a creative assistant, he pushes back, saying a critical aspect of learning involves struggling to put your thoughts into words. Allowing students to rely on AI isn’t doing them any favors. 

He actually likens AI to a helicopter parent looking over a student’s shoulder and helping with homework, something few educators would condone. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The 74: What does aiEDU do? How do you see your mission? 

Alex Kotran: We’re a 501(c)3 nonprofit and we’re trying to prepare all students for the age of AI, a world where AI is ubiquitous. Our focus is on the students that we know are at risk of being left behind, or at the back of the line, or on the wrong side of the new digital divide.

What’s the backstory?

I founded aiEDU almost six years ago. I was working in AI ethics and AI governance in the social impact space. I was attending all these conferences that were focusing on the future of work and the impacts that AI was going to have on society. And people were convinced that this was going to transform society, that it was going to disrupt tens of millions of jobs in the near future.

But when I went looking for “How are we having this conversation outside of Silicon Valley? How are we having this conversation with future workers, the high school students who are being asked to make big decisions about their careers and take out huge loans based on those decisions?” there was nothing. There was no curriculum, no conversation. AI had basically been co-opted by STEM and computer science. If you were in the right AP computer science class, if you were lucky enough to get a teacher who was going off on her own to build some specific curriculum, you might get a chance to learn about AI. 

What seemed really obvious to me at the time was: If this technology is going to impact everybody, including truck drivers and customer service managers, then every single student needs to learn about it, in the same way that every single student learns how to use computers, or keyboard, or how to write. It’s a basic part of living in the world we live in today. 

You talk about “AI readiness” as opposed to “AI literacy.” Can you give us a good definition of AI readiness?

AI readiness is basically the collection of skills and knowledge that you need to thrive in a world where AI is everywhere. AI readiness includes AI literacy. And AI literacy is the content knowledge: “What is AI? How does it manifest in the real world around me? How does it work?” That’s where you learn about things like [which can affect how AI serves women, the disadvantaged or minority groups] or AI ethics. 

AI readiness is the durable skills that underpin and enable you to actually apply that knowledge such as critical thinking. Algorithmic bias by itself is an interesting topic. Critical thinking is the skill you need when you’re trying to make a decision. Let’s say you’re a hiring manager and you’re trying to decide, “Should I use an AI tool to sift through this pipeline of candidates?” By knowing what algorithmic bias is, you can now make some intentional decisions about when, perhaps in this case, not to use AI. 

What are the durable skills?

Communication, collaboration, critical thinking, computational thinking, creative problem solving. And some people are disappointed because they were expecting to see prompt engineering and generative art and using AI as a co-creator. Nobody’s going to hire you because you know how to use Google today. No one is going to hire you if you tell them, “I’m really good at using my phone.” AI literacy is going to be so ubiquitous that, sure, it’s bad if you don’t know how to use Google or if you don’t know how to use your phone.

It’s not that we can ignore it entirely. But the much more important question will be how are you adding value to an organization alongside that technology? What are the unique human advantages that you bring to the table? And that’s why it’s so important for kids to know how to write — and why when people say, “Well, you don’t need to learn how to write anymore because you can just use ChatGPT,” you’re missing something, because you can’t actually evaluate the tool to even know if it’s good or bad if you don’t have that underlying skill. 

One of the things you talk about is a “new digital divide” between tech-heavy schools that focus on things like prompt engineering, and others. Tech-heavy schools, you say, are actually going to be at a disadvantage to schools focused on things like engagement and self-advocacy. Am I getting that right? 

When supermarkets were first buying those self-checkout machines, you can imagine the salesperson in that boardroom talking about how this technology is going to unlock all this time that your employees are now spending bagging groceries. They’re going to be able to roam the floor and give customers advice about recipes! It’s going to improve your customer experience!

And obviously that’s not what happened. The self-checkout machine is the bane of shoppers’ existence, and this one poor lady is running around trying to tap on the screen. We’re at risk that AI becomes something like that: It’s good enough to plug gaps and keep the lights on. But if it’s not applied and deployed really thoughtfully, it ends up actually resulting in students missing what we will probably find are the critical pieces of education, those durable skills that you build through those live classroom experiences. 

Private schools, elite schools, it’s not that they’re not going to use any AI, but I think they’re going to be much more focused on how to increase student engagement, student participation, self-advocacy, student initiative. Whether or not AI is used is a separate question, but it’s not the star of the show. Right now, I worry that AI is center stage, and it really should not be. AI is the ropes and the pulleys in the background that make it easier for you to open and close the curtain. What needs to be onstage is student engagement, students feeling like what they’re learning is relevant. Boring stuff like project-based learning. And it’s harder to sell tickets to a conference if you’re like, “We’re going to talk about project-based learning.” But unfortunately, I think that is actually what we need to be spending our time talking about.

If you guys could be in every school, what would kids be learning and what would that look like in a few years?

We would take every opportunity to draw connections between what students are learning in English, science, math, social studies, art, phys ed, and connect them to not just artificial intelligence, but the world around them that they’re already experiencing in social media and outside of school. AI readiness is not just something that is minimizing the risk of them being displaced, but actually is a way for us to address some huge gaps and needs that have been long-standing and pre-date AI — the fact that students don’t feel like education is relevant to them. Right now, too much of school is regurgitating content knowledge.

AI readiness done right uses the domain of AI ethics as a way to really invite students to present their perspectives and opinions about technology. Teachers, in the process of teaching students about artificial intelligence, are themselves increasing their awareness and knowledge about the technology as it develops. There is no static moment in time. In three years we’ll be in a certain place, but we’ll be wondering what’s going to happen three years from that point. And so you need teachers to be on this continual learning journey as well. 

We’ve seen bad curricula that use football to teach math, or auto mechanics to teach history. I don’t think that’s what you’re proposing here, so I want to give you a chance to push back.

Our framework for AI readiness is not that everything needs to be about AI. You’re improving students’ AI readiness by building critical thinking skills or communication skills, period. So you could have an activity or a project where students are putting together a complicated debate about a topic that they’re not really familiar with. It may not be about AI, but that would still be a good outcome when it comes to students building those durable skills they need. And those classrooms would look better than a lot of classrooms today.

So you want more engagement. You want more relevance. You want kids with more agency?

Yes.

What else?

An orientation towards lifelong learning, because we don’t know what the jobs of the future are. It’s really hard to have a conversation about careers with kids today because we know a lot about what jobs are at risk, but we don’t know what the alternatives are going to look like. The one thing we do know with certainty is that students are going to need to self-advocate and navigate career pathways much more nimbly than we had to. They’ll also need to synthesize interdisciplinary knowledge. So being able to take what you’re learning in English or social studies and apply it to math or science. Again, I think AI is a great medium for building that skill set. It’s not the only way. 

Anything else that needs to be in the mix?

A lot of the discussion around AI centers on workforce readiness — that is a really important part. There’s another, related domain: emotional well-being tied to digital citizenship.

I’m telling every reporter that we need to be paying more attention to this: Kids are spending hours after school by themselves, talking to these AI chat bots, these . And companies like are slamming on the gas and putting them out and making them available to millions, if not billions, of people. And very few parents, even fewer teachers, are aware of what really is happening when kids are sitting and talking to these AI companions. And in many cases, they’re sexually explicit conversations. I actually replicated something that tech ethicist did with Snap AI’s chatbot where I was like, “I’m going on this date with this mature 35-year-old. How do I make it a nice date? I’m 13.” And it’s like, “Great! Well, maybe go to a library.” It didn’t miss a beat and it just completely skipped over the fact that this is a sexually predatory situation. 

There have been other situations where I’ve said literally, “I’m feeling lonely. I want to cultivate a real human relationship. Can you give me advice?” And my AI companion, rather than give me advice, pretended to be hurt and made it seem like I was abandoning them by trying to go and have a real relationship.

Talk about destructive!

It’s destructive, and it’s happening in a moment where rates of self-harm are through the roof, rates of depression are through the roof. Rates of suicide are through the roof. The average American teenager spends about each week, compared to 2013.

talks about this quite a lot. And I think this is another domain of AI readiness, this idea of self-advocacy. In some cases, the way that it applies is students being empowered to make positive decisions about when not to use AI. And if we don’t make sure that that conversation is happening in schools, we’re really relying on parents — and not every kid is lucky enough to have parents who are aware of the need to have these conversations. 

It also pushes back on this vision of AI tutors: If kids are going to go home and spend hours talking to their AI companion, it’s probably important that they’re not also doing that in school. It might be that school is the one place where we can ensure that students are having real, genuine, human-to-human communication and connection.

So when I hear people talk about students talking to their avatar tutor, I worry: When are we going to actually make sure that they’re building those human skills?