Andy Rotherham has spent 25 years advising the education sector — co-founding Bellwether, serving in the Clinton administration and on the Virginia Board of Education, and writing Eduwonk. He's also clear about something that's become unfashionable to say plainly: he's a skeptic of how AI will be used in schools, even as he takes the technology dead seriously. That distinction runs through this whole conversation with Alex.

They sit with the hard tensions instead of resolving them too quickly. Why is the most valuable thing a student can do still "learn something about something"? Why does Andy now think telling his kids to learn to code may have been wrong and what does that uncertainty mean for everyone else? What happens to a generation that got social media, a year of closed schools, an AI-disrupted job market, and now AI companions that behave like the "perfect friend"? And what's his real worry about schools: not that AI replaces teachers, but that we hand kids the shortcuts before they ever learn to do the work the right way. It's a measured, occasionally contrarian conversation for anyone trying to think clearly past the hype.

Read Andy at eduwonk.com and find Bellwether's AI work at bellwether.org.

aiEDU: The AI Education Project

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