The Utah State Board of Education is partnering with Google to offer a version of its AI model to schools statewide.
That means the state’s school districts now have a choice: Do they adopt Gemini for Education as a tool for their students and staff? Or do they pass?
The state board is setting up some of the scaffolding, but leaving the decision to local districts and charter schools. Utah is a state that often talks about prizing local control in education.
Wherever individual districts land, Chris Agnew, who directs Stanford University’s AI Hub for Education, said the decision should be made deliberately. Schools across the country face similar choices. Since many districts have been using Google’s ecosystem for over a decade, he said, Gemini is the one he’s most often seen used in schools over other AI models.
“I periodically talk to districts [nationwide] and ask them if they've made that choice to toggle on or toggle off Gemini for their students, and they say, ‘I don't know,’” Agnew said. “I'd say that's actually the most concerning when it’s not an intentional decision.”
Agnew compared it to people downloading a new app on their phone. The app might ask permission to track you across other platforms, and it is up to the user to make an intentional decision. If you agree, you might gain functionality but give up some privacy, or vice versa.
Similarly, Agnew said the districts should be able to articulate why or why not they’re going to use Gemini next school year, and intentionally make cascading decisions from that starting point. Such as, what it would mean for how they assess students and their expectations for them.
“Schools should not be thinking of this like toggling on Google Gemini or toggling it off as a panacea, like it all ends there.”
For schools that opt in, Google will provide optional training sessions for educators. There will also be free Google Career Certificates and AI courses for students and educators.
“I want to make sure that our families out there know that this is an option, not a requirement,” said state board spokesperson Marie Denson.
Agnew said it isn’t simply about whether district leaders think “tech is good” or “tech is bad.” The choice has to be, he said, “in service of something larger.”
“They need to have it in support of the learning experiences that they want to create for kids that are then laddering up to the knowledge, skills and capacities that they want to build in kids.”
The first question, Agnew said, is what do districts want for their students? To answer that, Agnew highlighted the state board’s portrait of a graduate, which outlines characteristics it wants Utahns who’ve gone through the public K-12 education system to have. Agnew also highlighted the state’s recent addendum, portrait of an AI-infused learner.
The Utah state board signed a data privacy agreement with Google, which should be publicly available soon. It’ll apply to each school and district that decides to use Gemini for Education. Board spokesperson Denson said the primary goal was to have consistent student data privacy protections statewide instead of putting it on the shoulders of individual districts to work out such agreements.
With Gemini for Education, any data or conversations put into the system won’t be used to train AI models.
The Legislature passed a law earlier this year addressing technology in the classroom. It directed the state board to create policies and best practices around technology and AI use, among other things. That law also bans screen time in kindergarten through third grade, with a couple of exceptions. Denson said this recent work by the board around Gemini, creating privacy guardrails and optional training, is a piece of that framework established by lawmakers.
As districts decide how to proceed, Agnew said there are other questions to consider. If they decide to use this AI model, they also have to think about what is developmentally appropriate. On the extremes, Agnew said most people would agree it's not appropriate in preschool, but that graduating high school seniors should have some exposure to AI.
Regardless of whether schools adopt it, Agnew said he thinks they should be tackling AI literacy with their students.
The state board said in its press release that part of this launch will include a curriculum focused on AI literacy “to ensure students understand how to use these tools effectively and ethically.”
