Six questions to ask a school about any AI tool
Questions that get a specific answer rather than a reassuring one, and what a good answer to each actually sounds like.
Schools are being sold a lot of software this year. Most of the questions parents are given to ask are the wrong ones — "is it safe?" invites a yes, and "is it secure?" invites a paragraph about encryption that answers something narrower than what was asked.
These six get a specific answer or visibly fail to. Both outcomes are useful.
1. What does the company hold about my child?
Not "what do they do with it" — what do they hold. The answer should be a list you could write down, and a short one.
A good answer names the fields. A poor answer describes a policy.
Worth knowing: the strongest possible answer to this question is "nothing that identifies them", and it is achievable. A product can work from a class code, a year group and a record of which skills are coming along. Ours does, and we did not invent the approach.
2. Does anything my child types get sent to another company?
Almost every AI tool sends text to a model provider — that is what makes it an AI tool. The question is what is in the text when it arrives.
A good answer describes what is removed before it is sent, and where the removing happens. If the removing happens by sending the text somewhere to be analysed, the text has already left. That is worth asking about directly, because it is a common design and it does not sound wrong until you say it out loud.
Ask what happens when the removal fails. "It gets sent anyway" and "the request is refused" are very different products.
3. Can I see everything my child did?
The answer should be yes, and it should include what the tool said back to them.
A tool that will show you scores but not conversations is a tool that has decided which half of your child's experience you are entitled to.
4. What happens to the data when we leave?
Ask specifically whether deletion removes the rows or sets a flag. A "deleted" account that is recoverable by support next month was not deleted.
There is one legitimate exception: audit records that log that something happened without logging what. Those should survive deletion, and a company that explains why is a company that has thought about it.
5. Who has signed what?
In New York this is Education Law §2-d, and the school should have a data privacy agreement with the vendor. Ask whether one is signed rather than in progress.
A vendor cannot sign this on the school's behalf and no amount of good architecture substitutes for it. Any company telling you their technology makes the agreement unnecessary is telling you they have not read it.
6. What is it doing to keep my child using it?
Streaks, notifications, rewards for playing longer, a character who is sad when you leave.
None of these are automatically wrong — a streak that rewards coming back tomorrow is a reasonable way to build a habit. A mechanic that rewards staying tonight is a different thing wearing the same clothes. Ask which one it is, and ask what happens at the end of a session.
If you get a bad answer
It usually is not the school's fault. Teachers are handed software and a login, and the answers to most of these live with the vendor.
The useful move is to send the questions on rather than to escalate. A vendor that cannot answer question 2 in a sentence has an architecture problem, and the school will want to know that before the next renewal.