On Wednesday, Sep. 2, Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced that all artificial intelligence student-facing materials will be banned during the 2026-2027 school year. 

This ban will temporarily exist among elementary and middle school students for a year, to assess technology interactions. In New York City, this will impact 600,000 students within the largest school system.

Mamdani will not ban AI usage among high school students; however, students will complete AI literacy classes twice a year. AP news shared that the ban “will also launch pilot programs, allowing some high school students to use a handful of AI platforms under an educator’s supervision.”

Considering the recent discourse on TikTok, where public school teachers are revealing disparities in their students’ learning levels, this AI ban could positively impact retention and learning. Redirecting students to strictly rely on the curriculum being taught, rather than being force-fed information through chatbots without actual understanding, will vastly change the ways in which students digest information.

The need for this type of program was shown through a popular trend on TikTok where students were asked to read a sentence off an index card. These sentences contained higher-level vocabulary that students are expected to know, but did not. One of these sentences read, “She wore a silhouette of clothes that were extraordinary but somewhat gauche.” 

Many of the students struggled to pronounce words like  “silhouette” and “gauche,” while others could not explain the meaning of the sentence they had read. Creators, such as @whatthevek, continued to expose high school students’ illiteracy through similar videos. It is important to note that the same content also showed illiteracy within adults, especially with the high vocabulary sentences written on the index cards. 

Despite literacy trends exposing students and adults alike, the question arises as to whether these exposures are producing harmful rhetoric for bullying or encouraging students to improve their reading skills. 

Handling literacy crises over the internet can be a slippery slope, but enacting an AI ban is a crucial first-step to ensure that children are learning effectively. Mamdani may have produced the key to getting students on track without penalizing them.