Fernandez help sheet arms teachers to resist school AI push

A former 20-year English teacher has packaged her arguments against school AI adoption into a running Google Doc help sheet, aimed at K-12 educators being pressured to use, and have their students use, a widening slate of AI tools. The document is Anne Lutz Fernandez's teacher-facing companion to a longer essay in Rethinking Schools and a two-part Substack series, and it lays out the specific pro-AI claims she thinks teachers hear from administrators, plus how to talk back to each one.

The counter-arguments track her published work closely. On 'AI will save you time,' Fernandez cites research by Marshall, Moore and Pressley showing that learning management systems marketed as time-savers 'contributed to burnout,' and points to a study where software developers using AI tools took '19 percent more time' to complete work while believing they had saved time. On 'AI can personalize learning,' she leans on Allison Pugh's book The Last Human Job to argue that outsourcing what she calls connective labor to software depersonalizes care, and warns that affluent communities may end up with human teachers while disadvantaged areas get AI substitutes.

The ad hominem strand, 'you're avoiding AI out of fear,' gets special attention because of who it lands on. Fernandez names how the framing dismisses veteran teachers, teachers of color raising bias concerns, and women educators whose caution is coded as 'risk-averse' rather than thoughtful. Against the 'cutting-edge' pitch she cites a research finding that 'the more people learn about [AI], the less they want to use it.' Against the 'prepare students for the future' pitch she quotes edtech commentator Tom Mullaney asking 'Which future are we preparing students for?' and adds that teachers are 'not time travelers.'

Two AI experts in our Who's Who directory shared the help sheet's link, which is how it surfaced here, so it is circulating in the community that watches how districts talk about AI.

The Google Doc's own text was not directly accessible for this write-up, so the specific claims above are drawn from Fernandez's Rethinking Schools essay and Substack posts that the help sheet distills; the retrieved sources do not report district adoption numbers or measured rollout impact. What the sheet gives teacher-side stakeholders is a portable script, and for administrators pushing AI mandates, that script is now part of the pushback they should expect to walk into.