01 / NYC’s AI guidance for schools uses a traffic light. The hardest questions are still yellow.

New York City released its preliminary AI guidance for public schools, three years after banning ChatGPT. The framework uses a traffic light system: green for approved uses like brainstorming lesson plans, red for prohibited uses, yellow for gray areas requiring significant oversight. Whether students can use personal AI accounts for homework is still unresolved. The city is seeking public feedback through May 8 before releasing a more comprehensive playbook in June.

The largest school system in the country just told a million families: we don’t have the answers yet, but here’s how we’re going to figure it out together. That’s more honest than most institutions have been willing to be. The question is whether the feedback process is real or performative. If it’s real, this becomes a model. If it’s a formality before a predetermined outcome, it becomes another reason parents don’t trust institutions with their kids’ AI exposure.

A traffic light is not a strategy. But it’s better than pretending the intersection doesn’t exist.

02 / More success, less effectiveness. A researcher in Morocco names the paradox.

A Moroccan education researcher published a piece called “AI, a Learning Machine: Are Students Still Learning?” arguing that AI is creating a visible paradox in education: students are producing better outputs while mobilizing fewer of their own cognitive abilities. AI is accessible, it promotes equal opportunities, it helps with homework and projects. And it may be reducing the very mental effort that learning requires.

This is the OECD finding showing up in a classroom in Morocco. Better outputs, weaker understanding. The pattern is global now. And the conclusion is the right one: adopting AI without pedagogical reflection is not a path forward. The tool isn’t the variable. The teaching is the variable. It was always the variable.

03 / The federal government just became a learning provider.

The U.S. Labor Department is launching a free AI literacy course for Americans who are uneasy about the technology. It’s framed as workforce preparation, but the implications for how we think about teaching adults to learn alongside AI are direct.

This signals that AI literacy is now considered public infrastructure, like roads or broadband. Not because the course will be transformative, but because the federal government deciding it needs to teach this tells you something about where we are.

Community colleges have been building this infrastructure for two years. We’ll see where this goes. I still believe that Institutions of Higher Education are the best prepared to upskill an entire nation.

04 / What if the most important thing education teaches is the thing AI can’t replicate?

The Dallas Federal Reserve published research showing AI automates codified knowledge (what you learn from textbooks) but complements tacit knowledge (what you learn from experience). Young workers in AI-exposed fields aren’t getting laid off. They’re not getting hired. The job-finding rate is collapsing for new graduates while wages rise for experienced workers.

Read that finding as an educator. If AI replicates what students learn in school but can’t replicate what they learn from doing the work, then the entire value proposition of education shifts. The degree isn’t the credential anymore. The capacity to develop judgment, to ask the right questions, to build the kind of knowledge that only comes from practice and reflection. That’s what we should be teaching toward. That’s what the Human Agency Stack is built around.

My french bulldogs seem to understand everything I say. They do not. This is also true of most AI tutoring products.

Todd McLees is the co-founder of humanskills.ai.