Inspired by: Justin Reich’s LinkedIn commentary on AI literacy (May 2026) and his essay “What Schools Still Don’t Know About AI,” EdTech Digest (June 2026).
A Phrase on Every Strategic Plan
Spend time in education circles this year, and one phrase follows you from conference keynote to district memo to state guidance document: AI literacy for students is a shared responsibility. The sentiment sounds unimpeachable. Students will graduate into a world saturated with artificial intelligence, so schools, families, and communities must all pitch in to prepare them. Who could object?
Justin Reich can, and his objection deserves every parent’s attention. Reich, an MIT professor who directs the Teaching Systems Lab, has spent the spring pressing on the slogan’s soft spot. A responsibility shared by everyone and resourced for no one tends to be taught by no one. In his words, the framing describes “a shared responsibility that nobody is actually resourced or incentivized to teach” — a recipe for a mandate that stays aspirational rather than actionable.
We Have Seen This Movie Before
Reich’s warning lands because education has already run this experiment. Two decades ago, “21st Century Skills” appeared in nearly every mission statement in America. Collaboration, creativity, critical thinking — all worthy, all endorsed, and almost none of it translated into taught, assessed curriculum. Reich sees AI literacy tracing the same arc, and he offers a detail that should stop policymakers cold: “Some (maybe most) proposed lesson ideas in AI policy guidance have never actually been taught in a classroom.”
His prescription is refreshingly concrete. Pair every piece of guidance with actual classroom materials. Recommend only approaches with evidence behind them. And when schools add new content, remove something else, because the school day is already full. “Subtraction is the solution, not efficiency,” he writes. Curriculum time is the scarcest resource in education, and AI literacy proposals almost never name what should come off the plate to make room.
The Sequence Problem
I find Reich persuasive because his argument matches what we watched happen with classroom technology over the past two decades. The United States spent roughly $30 billion on devices and software on the promise that access would produce achievement. The hardware arrived; the instructional strategy did not; scores fell. The device was never the problem. The assumption that the device was the strategy was the problem. Rushing AI literacy into schools without materials, evidence, or subtraction repeats that mistake at higher speed.
The deeper issue is sequence. Reich has raised sustained concerns about cognitive offloading — AI performing the very tasks students once did to develop their thinking. I have made a version of this argument in this space before: AI belongs in curriculum and instruction, but after students have built content knowledge, writing ability, and agency. Introduce it too early and you bypass learning rather than accelerate it. An AI literacy unit handed to a student who has never learned to plan an essay, audit a source, or manage a week of deadlines is a roof without a foundation.
What Families Can Do While Schools Sort This Out
Reich’s team at MIT published a guide last fall titled “A Guide to AI in Schools: Perspectives for the Perplexed,” built with input from more than a hundred educators. Its ethos is humility: collect evidence, involve teachers and families, and “race to answers that are right, not first.” Families can borrow that ethos tonight, because the foundations that make any literacy possible sit largely outside the school day.
Start with what no algorithm can install. A student who sleeps eight to ten hours, keeps a weekly plan, starts homework without a standoff, and can read a difficult page without reaching for a device will learn any AI tool quickly when the moment comes. The reverse does not hold. Technical skills go stale; NVIDIA’s Jensen Huang has observed that AI itself has closed much of the technology divide. What determines who thrives is older: deep interest in a domain, critical thinking, clear communication, and the confidence to adapt. Those capacities get built in the hours families control — the second eight hours of the day, between the dismissal bell and sleep.
The Bigger Picture
Nobody should read Reich as anti-AI, and I certainly do not. He is asking schools to do the unglamorous work that makes any innovation real: materials, evidence, trade-offs. While that work proceeds, the most valuable AI-readiness program available costs nothing and requires no legislation. Raise a reader with a plan, a rested brain, and a working curiosity about the world. Whatever the technology does next, that student will be ready to learn it — and ready to question it.
References
Reich, J. (2026, June 12). What schools still don’t know about AI. EdTech Digest.
Reich, J. (2026, May). Commentary on AI literacy [LinkedIn post].
MIT News. (2025, November 3). Helping K-12 schools navigate the complex world of AI.
MIT Teaching Systems Lab. (2025). A guide to AI in schools: Perspectives for the perplexed.
Reich, J. (2020). Failure to disrupt: Why technology alone can’t transform education. Harvard University Press.
Horvath, J. C. (2025). The Digital Delusion.
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. (2023). PISA 2022 Results: Learning in the Digital World. OECD Publishing.