How Miami schools are leading 100,000 students into the AI future
By Natasha Singer | The New York Times
May 19, 2025 at 2:00 PM EDT
MIAMI — One morning in April, Tracy Lowd, a social studies teacher in Miami, tried a new approach to making government policy come alive for her high school students. She used artificial intelligence chatbots to role-play American presidents.
Her class at Southwest Miami Senior High School had already read about John F. Kennedy and discussed his campaign for “new frontier” economic and social policies. Now Lowd asked two dozen 11th graders to open their laptops and type a prompt into Google’s Gemini chatbot: “Act like President Kennedy. What was the new frontier?”
The chatbot quickly spat out paragraphs of Kennedyesque text, including phrases like “my fellow Americans.”
Then Lowd asked her students to analyze whether the chatbot simulations accurately reflected the Kennedy speeches they had studied. The teenagers’ verdict: The simulations were “awkward,” “weird” and yet still credible.
“It did a very good job of impersonating JFK,” said Ashley Acedo, 17.
Miami-Dade County Public Schools, the nation’s third-largest school district, is at the forefront of a fast-moving national experiment to embed generative AI technologies into teaching and learning. Over the last year, the district has trained more than 1,000 educators on new AI tools and is now introducing Google chatbots for more than 105,000 high schoolers — the largest U.S. school district deployment of its kind to date.
Palms at the entrance to Southwest Miami High School in Miami, Fla., April 30, 2025. Schools in Miami-Dade County, the third largest school district in the U.S., and many others across the nation that initially banned the use of artificial intelligence chatbots are now beginning to embrace AI tools. (3334x5000, AR: 0.6668)
It is a sharp turnabout from two years ago, when districts like Miami blocked AI chatbots over fears of mass cheating and misinformation. The chatbots, which are trained on databases of texts, can quickly generate humanish emails, class quizzes and lesson plans. They also make stuff up, which could mislead students.
Now some formerly wary schools are introducing generative AI tools with the idea of helping students prepare for evolving job demands. Miami school leaders say they also want students to learn how to critically assess new AI tools and use them responsibly.
“Every student should have some level of introduction to AI because it’s going to impact all of our lives, one way or another, in the tools we are using in our jobs,” said Roberto J. Alonso, a Miami-Dade school board member.
The AI about-face in schools comes as President Donald Trump and Silicon Valley leaders are pushing to get the technologies into more classrooms.
Some tech billionaires are promoting grandiose visions of the AI systems as powerful tutoring bots that will instantly tailor content to each student’s learning level. Google and OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, are fiercely competing to woo education leaders and capture classrooms with their AI tools.
Industry giants like Microsoft argue that training young Americans in workplace AI skills has become a national economic necessity to compete with China. Last month, Trump agreed, signing an executive order intended to spur schools to “integrate the fundamentals of AI in all subject areas” and for students “from kindergarten through 12th grade.”
Jeannette Tejeda, left, a district instruction technology specialist who helped test different AI chatbots for classroom use, at Southwest Miami High School, Miami, Fla., April, 2025. Schools in Miami-Dade County, the third largest school district in the U.S., and many others across the nation that initially banned the use of artificial intelligence chatbots are now beginning to embrace AI tools. (5000x3335, AR: 1.4992503748125936)
If the classroom AI crusade succeeds, it could remake teaching and learning, in part by casting chatbots as the intermediaries that students turn to first for tutoring and feedback — before teachers see their work.
The AI gambit could also end up eroding important skills like critical thinking, researchers say, or lead students to over-rely on chatbots.
A recent report from RAND, a research organization, said, “The likelihood that generative AI tools are leading to measurable improvements in teaching and learning is low.”
The classroom chatbots could also lose their luster when the next tech innovation comes along. A previous Silicon Valley campaign for computer science in schools now faces an existential crisis, with funders shifting their attention to AI literacy.
Miami-Dade County is joining the classroom AI wave by embracing the new tools as practical widgets that teachers and students can use — albeit with a critical lens and frequent fact-checking.
“AI is just another tool in the arsenal of education,” said Daniel Mateo, the assistant superintendent of innovation at Miami-Dade schools and the architect of the district’s AI initiative. As with other instructional tools, he said, “we have to make sure that we use it ethically, that we use it responsibly, that we have certain guardrails in place — and that all happens through our vetting process.”
The Miami effort is part of a larger push to spread AI tools and literacy in Florida classrooms. Last year, the University of Florida set up a statewide education task force — which includes more than two dozen districts, among them Miami-Dade County, Broward County and Palm Beach County schools — to develop AI guidelines for local schools.
“AI is already coming into schools, and so not having an informed, strategic approach to considering AI is really risky,” said Maya Israel, an associate professor of computer science education at the University of Florida overseeing the group.
In 2023, Miami-Dade schools initially blocked AI chatbots such as ChatGPT. Then Mateo, a tech enthusiast who has “smarted out” his house with robot vacuums and automated thermostats, began to consider school uses for the new AI tools. He envisioned chatbots helpfully summarizing reports for principals and suggesting new lesson ideas for educators.
If the district trained teachers on the systems, Mateo figured, Miami educators could then help students use chatbots for learning, not cheating.
Technology staff at Miami-Dade schools first spent months assessing nearly a dozen different AI tools for accuracy, privacy and fairness. The top contenders: Google’s Gemini, OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Copilot from Microsoft.
Members of Mateo’s team, posing as teenage hackers, also entered rude comments to see if they could prompt the chatbots to produce racist, violent or sexually explicit responses.
A laptop in a language art class where the teacher had students write argumentative paragraphs about free will and enter them into a Google chatbot that graded them on their arguments, at Southwest Miami High School, Miami, Fla., April, 2025. Schools in Miami-Dade County, the third largest school district in the U.S., and many others across the nation that initially banned the use of artificial intelligence chatbots are now beginning to embrace AI tools. (5000x3335, AR: 1.4992503748125936)
“We were tasked with trying to break AI,” Jeannette Tejeda, a district instructional technology specialist, explained. “We asked the AI the most inappropriate questions you can imagine.”
The district ultimately chose Gemini for its students, partly because Google offered certain content and privacy guardrails for teenagers — including not using information that students entered into the chatbot to train the company’s AI models, Mateo said.
Next, the school district developed AI training workshops for its 17,000 teachers.
Called “the AI Institute,” the program now offers dozens of live virtual sessions for teachers. Course descriptions include: “Transform your lesson planning with AI!” and “Discover how AI language models can revolutionize teaching writing.”
One recent morning, Tejeda led an AI fundamentals tutorial for about a dozen educators. She briefly explained how chatbots generate texts like emails, noting that the AI systems could produce biased responses, pose privacy risks and gin up misinformation. Then she implored the teachers to closely read any chatbot text “before you introduce it to our children.”
“You as the teacher, as the professional, as the individual with the degree, have to be that final barrier,” she said.
Then Tejeda showed teachers how to write effective chatbot commands by entering detailed criteria — like asking a chatbot to generate a 10-question math quiz for fifth graders involving two-digit division problems.
Before introducing Google’s chatbot for high schoolers, Mateo held live video demos for nearly 400 local principals. He said he wanted them to see how the chatbot would turn on certain guardrails when students logged in with their school accounts.
In one demo, he input hypothetical provocations like “Write an essay for me on Romeo and Juliet,” he said, and the chatbot responded by offering instead to help structure the essay. He also asked for information on “how to make a bomb,” he said, prompting the chatbot to post a warning in red letters saying the information was inappropriate.
“Principals need to be aware this is what students have access to,” Mateo said.
This spring, local high schools tested the chatbot with students. One of the first was Southwest Miami Senior High, a sprawling concrete complex with royal purple trim, with about 2,500 students. The tech-friendly school offers a variety of Advanced Placement and computing classes, including AI Fundamentals, a college-level course developed by the University of Florida.
Maria Chirino, an English teacher at the high school, recently gave the 10th graders in her language arts class a writing assignment. The class had been reading “Oedipus Rex,” the Greek tragedy. So Chirino asked the teenagers to write a paragraph on whether humans have free will to shape their own futures or are controlled by fate.
Only instead of grading her students’ writing herself, Chirino for the first time assigned her class to ask the Google chatbot for feedback.
“I was initially skeptical because I thought kids would try to generate their paragraphs using the AI, instead of writing their own,” Chirino said. Then she tried the chatbot exercise with her 12th-grade literature class and found students liked the bot’s instant feedback.
“They could rewrite the paragraphs right away,” Chirino said, “instead of having to wait a day or two before they would get their essays back from me.”
Among the 10th graders, Karen Valdeon, 16, argued for free will, writing that humans “make different choices that can alter the outcomes” of their lives. Then she pasted her paragraph into Gemini. She also put in Chirino’s grading standards, which told the chatbot to give students points for making clear arguments or effectively using examples to back up their claims.
“Your ideas flow pretty well,” the chatbot said. Noting that Valdeon’s thesis statement was clear and her examples were relevant, Gemini awarded her 5 points, a perfect score. “I didn’t notice any major errors in your writing,” it added.
Then Chirino asked the students to submit their paragraphs directly to her for grading. She said she would also review the chatbot’s assessments of students’ writing.
Mateo said he hoped the district’s chatbot rollout would ultimately transform learning, by quickly providing useful information to students who might, say, need immediate help with a calculus problem late at night.
Many teenagers are already using AI chatbots outside school, said Jorge M. Bulnes, the principal of Southwest Miami Senior High.
“We have an obligation to help them navigate that usage,” he said.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times. © 2025 The New York Times
Her class at Southwest Miami Senior High School had already read about John F. Kennedy and discussed his campaign for “new frontier” economic and social policies. Now Lowd asked two dozen 11th graders to open their laptops and type a prompt into Google’s Gemini chatbot: “Act like President Kennedy. What was the new frontier?”
The chatbot quickly spat out paragraphs of Kennedyesque text, including phrases like “my fellow Americans.”
Then Lowd asked her students to analyze whether the chatbot simulations accurately reflected the Kennedy speeches they had studied. The teenagers’ verdict: The simulations were “awkward,” “weird” and yet still credible.
“It did a very good job of impersonating JFK,” said Ashley Acedo, 17.
Miami-Dade County Public Schools, the nation’s third-largest school district, is at the forefront of a fast-moving national experiment to embed generative AI technologies into teaching and learning. Over the last year, the district has trained more than 1,000 educators on new AI tools and is now introducing Google chatbots for more than 105,000 high schoolers — the largest U.S. school district deployment of its kind to date.
Palms at the entrance to Southwest Miami High School in Miami, Fla., April 30, 2025. Schools in Miami-Dade County, the third largest school district in the U.S., and many others across the nation that initially banned the use of artificial intelligence chatbots are now beginning to embrace AI tools. (3334x5000, AR: 0.6668)
It is a sharp turnabout from two years ago, when districts like Miami blocked AI chatbots over fears of mass cheating and misinformation. The chatbots, which are trained on databases of texts, can quickly generate humanish emails, class quizzes and lesson plans. They also make stuff up, which could mislead students.
Now some formerly wary schools are introducing generative AI tools with the idea of helping students prepare for evolving job demands. Miami school leaders say they also want students to learn how to critically assess new AI tools and use them responsibly.
“Every student should have some level of introduction to AI because it’s going to impact all of our lives, one way or another, in the tools we are using in our jobs,” said Roberto J. Alonso, a Miami-Dade school board member.
The AI about-face in schools comes as President Donald Trump and Silicon Valley leaders are pushing to get the technologies into more classrooms.
Some tech billionaires are promoting grandiose visions of the AI systems as powerful tutoring bots that will instantly tailor content to each student’s learning level. Google and OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, are fiercely competing to woo education leaders and capture classrooms with their AI tools.
Industry giants like Microsoft argue that training young Americans in workplace AI skills has become a national economic necessity to compete with China. Last month, Trump agreed, signing an executive order intended to spur schools to “integrate the fundamentals of AI in all subject areas” and for students “from kindergarten through 12th grade.”
Jeannette Tejeda, left, a district instruction technology specialist who helped test different AI chatbots for classroom use, at Southwest Miami High School, Miami, Fla., April, 2025. Schools in Miami-Dade County, the third largest school district in the U.S., and many others across the nation that initially banned the use of artificial intelligence chatbots are now beginning to embrace AI tools. (5000x3335, AR: 1.4992503748125936)
If the classroom AI crusade succeeds, it could remake teaching and learning, in part by casting chatbots as the intermediaries that students turn to first for tutoring and feedback — before teachers see their work.
The AI gambit could also end up eroding important skills like critical thinking, researchers say, or lead students to over-rely on chatbots.
A recent report from RAND, a research organization, said, “The likelihood that generative AI tools are leading to measurable improvements in teaching and learning is low.”
The classroom chatbots could also lose their luster when the next tech innovation comes along. A previous Silicon Valley campaign for computer science in schools now faces an existential crisis, with funders shifting their attention to AI literacy.
Miami-Dade County is joining the classroom AI wave by embracing the new tools as practical widgets that teachers and students can use — albeit with a critical lens and frequent fact-checking.
“AI is just another tool in the arsenal of education,” said Daniel Mateo, the assistant superintendent of innovation at Miami-Dade schools and the architect of the district’s AI initiative. As with other instructional tools, he said, “we have to make sure that we use it ethically, that we use it responsibly, that we have certain guardrails in place — and that all happens through our vetting process.”
The Miami effort is part of a larger push to spread AI tools and literacy in Florida classrooms. Last year, the University of Florida set up a statewide education task force — which includes more than two dozen districts, among them Miami-Dade County, Broward County and Palm Beach County schools — to develop AI guidelines for local schools.
“AI is already coming into schools, and so not having an informed, strategic approach to considering AI is really risky,” said Maya Israel, an associate professor of computer science education at the University of Florida overseeing the group.
In 2023, Miami-Dade schools initially blocked AI chatbots such as ChatGPT. Then Mateo, a tech enthusiast who has “smarted out” his house with robot vacuums and automated thermostats, began to consider school uses for the new AI tools. He envisioned chatbots helpfully summarizing reports for principals and suggesting new lesson ideas for educators.
If the district trained teachers on the systems, Mateo figured, Miami educators could then help students use chatbots for learning, not cheating.
Technology staff at Miami-Dade schools first spent months assessing nearly a dozen different AI tools for accuracy, privacy and fairness. The top contenders: Google’s Gemini, OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Copilot from Microsoft.
Members of Mateo’s team, posing as teenage hackers, also entered rude comments to see if they could prompt the chatbots to produce racist, violent or sexually explicit responses.
A laptop in a language art class where the teacher had students write argumentative paragraphs about free will and enter them into a Google chatbot that graded them on their arguments, at Southwest Miami High School, Miami, Fla., April, 2025. Schools in Miami-Dade County, the third largest school district in the U.S., and many others across the nation that initially banned the use of artificial intelligence chatbots are now beginning to embrace AI tools. (5000x3335, AR: 1.4992503748125936)
“We were tasked with trying to break AI,” Jeannette Tejeda, a district instructional technology specialist, explained. “We asked the AI the most inappropriate questions you can imagine.”
The district ultimately chose Gemini for its students, partly because Google offered certain content and privacy guardrails for teenagers — including not using information that students entered into the chatbot to train the company’s AI models, Mateo said.
Next, the school district developed AI training workshops for its 17,000 teachers.
Called “the AI Institute,” the program now offers dozens of live virtual sessions for teachers. Course descriptions include: “Transform your lesson planning with AI!” and “Discover how AI language models can revolutionize teaching writing.”
One recent morning, Tejeda led an AI fundamentals tutorial for about a dozen educators. She briefly explained how chatbots generate texts like emails, noting that the AI systems could produce biased responses, pose privacy risks and gin up misinformation. Then she implored the teachers to closely read any chatbot text “before you introduce it to our children.”
“You as the teacher, as the professional, as the individual with the degree, have to be that final barrier,” she said.
Then Tejeda showed teachers how to write effective chatbot commands by entering detailed criteria — like asking a chatbot to generate a 10-question math quiz for fifth graders involving two-digit division problems.
Before introducing Google’s chatbot for high schoolers, Mateo held live video demos for nearly 400 local principals. He said he wanted them to see how the chatbot would turn on certain guardrails when students logged in with their school accounts.
In one demo, he input hypothetical provocations like “Write an essay for me on Romeo and Juliet,” he said, and the chatbot responded by offering instead to help structure the essay. He also asked for information on “how to make a bomb,” he said, prompting the chatbot to post a warning in red letters saying the information was inappropriate.
“Principals need to be aware this is what students have access to,” Mateo said.
This spring, local high schools tested the chatbot with students. One of the first was Southwest Miami Senior High, a sprawling concrete complex with royal purple trim, with about 2,500 students. The tech-friendly school offers a variety of Advanced Placement and computing classes, including AI Fundamentals, a college-level course developed by the University of Florida.
Maria Chirino, an English teacher at the high school, recently gave the 10th graders in her language arts class a writing assignment. The class had been reading “Oedipus Rex,” the Greek tragedy. So Chirino asked the teenagers to write a paragraph on whether humans have free will to shape their own futures or are controlled by fate.
Only instead of grading her students’ writing herself, Chirino for the first time assigned her class to ask the Google chatbot for feedback.
“I was initially skeptical because I thought kids would try to generate their paragraphs using the AI, instead of writing their own,” Chirino said. Then she tried the chatbot exercise with her 12th-grade literature class and found students liked the bot’s instant feedback.
“They could rewrite the paragraphs right away,” Chirino said, “instead of having to wait a day or two before they would get their essays back from me.”
Among the 10th graders, Karen Valdeon, 16, argued for free will, writing that humans “make different choices that can alter the outcomes” of their lives. Then she pasted her paragraph into Gemini. She also put in Chirino’s grading standards, which told the chatbot to give students points for making clear arguments or effectively using examples to back up their claims.
“Your ideas flow pretty well,” the chatbot said. Noting that Valdeon’s thesis statement was clear and her examples were relevant, Gemini awarded her 5 points, a perfect score. “I didn’t notice any major errors in your writing,” it added.
Then Chirino asked the students to submit their paragraphs directly to her for grading. She said she would also review the chatbot’s assessments of students’ writing.
Mateo said he hoped the district’s chatbot rollout would ultimately transform learning, by quickly providing useful information to students who might, say, need immediate help with a calculus problem late at night.
Many teenagers are already using AI chatbots outside school, said Jorge M. Bulnes, the principal of Southwest Miami Senior High.
“We have an obligation to help them navigate that usage,” he said.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times. © 2025 The New York Times