Two decades of working on school improvement — at High Tech High, at Chicago Public Schools, at the Gates Foundation, and now through her own consulting practice — have left Jennifer Husbands with a fairly direct view of why AI adoption in schools is going the way it's going. The technology isn't the problem. The problem is that the US invests less in teacher learning time than almost any peer system, and you cannot ask people to change their behavior in a setting that gives them no room to learn.

In this conversation she lays out what she's hearing from funders right now (humility, anxiety, and a quiet retrenchment from K-12 that she thinks is happening at the worst possible moment), why she believes the district is the only unit of change that actually scales, what role coaching and teacher-to-teacher networks have to play, and why she keeps coming back to the idea that AI is a tool, not a solution. Alex also opens the episode by walking her through a live vibe coding demo — a useful prelude to the broader conversation about how fast the underlying technology is now moving.

aiEDU: The AI Education Project

• aiEDU.org
• linkedin.com/company/aiedu/