The Gates Foundation is spending $400 million on AI in schools. Teachers warn it could 'end up widening' the divide it's meant to close
Fortune Sydney Lake
Gates is putting $400 million into AI tools for schools. Teachers say that could help, or widen the gap it’s meant to close.
Based on reporting by Fortune, Sydney Lake — read the original for the full story.
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The Gates Foundation is betting big on school AI. This week it said it will spend $1 billion on “equitable AI tools” for schools, health workers, farmers and others, and 40% of that money is going to education. That works out to $400 million aimed at AI tutoring and classroom personalization in the U.S. and abroad.
The timing is awkward. Schools are already wrestling with whether more technology actually helps students. New York City just announced what it called the country’s broadest pause on student-facing generative AI, blocking use for 2-K through 8th grade for a year and affecting nearly 600,000 students. The city says it wants time to study the impact. Gates, by contrast, is charging ahead.
The foundation says it knows the risks. Its own strategy warns that too many tools have been rolled out without proof they work, and a spokesperson said the plan is to test products in schools serving many low-income students, pair them with teacher training, and have independent researchers evaluate them before wider use. Bill Gates framed the effort as a response to a market problem: the people who need the tools most often have the least influence over what gets built.
Teachers aren’t exactly sold. Siobhan Casey, a principal at Crimson Global Academy’s Greenwich Campus, said AI can help with lesson planning and admin work, but only if adults still check the output and decide whether it fits the lesson. Amy McBride, who teaches at Pepin Academies in Florida, said giving schools AI without training or support doesn’t solve much. And Dora Palfi of Imagi warned that the schools meant to benefit may be the least able to absorb the gift, because many are still fighting basic literacy and numeracy problems.
There are some bright spots. McBride said AI gave students another way to ask questions and gave her more time to teach. But even supporters keep circling back to the same point: access to software is not the same thing as access to a good education. That’s the uncomfortable part of this bet.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is the classic edtech move: spend first, ask later, then call the pilot a success if the slide deck looks clean. Gates is right that markets ignore poorer schools, but dumping AI into classrooms before basics are fixed is how you get a shinier divide, not a smaller one. If the pitch needs this much teacher training, oversight and research to work, maybe the product is the problem.
Read more about this at: Fortune
